Last month I spoke at the second Singapore Facebook Developers Garage (organized by Entrepreneur 27 Singapore (e27) and the Singapore PHP Users Group) for a session: “Facebook Apps: Goldmine or Hype?”
It was certainly an interesting session, and if you know me, I certainly wouldn’t waste my time if it was “hype”…
More interestingly, I got a chance to meet up with a number of skilled PHP, Ruby-On-Rails and CakePHP programmers and a number of them are pretty skilled developers. Already a number of Singapore-developed applications are making their mark on the social networks, and it’ll be interesting to see what comes up next.
This past Wednesday I joined a number of Facebook Application developers and sponsors on a “Marketing and Monetization of Facebook Applications: Hype or Goldmine?” at the second Singapore Facebook Developers Garage organized by the Entrepreneur 27 Singapore and Singapore PHP users group.
The panelists included:
Bernard Leong (Thymos Capital partner, and session moderator)
Leonard Lin (TYLER Projects managing partner – developer of Facebook application BattleStations!)
Kien Lee (Senatus founder – an investment holding company which owns more than 100 Facebook applications)
Talking to a number of budding entrepreneur’s at last evening’s Singapore Facebook Developers Garage and hearing about their growing pains served as an impetus to get this post out. Some of you whom I met up with at Affiliate Summit would have heard parts of this, but here it is in more detail…
No matter whether you live in Las Vegas, or Vancouver, BC, New York city or Singapore, the questions are the same – How do you grow your business?
I’m going to outline 3 discrete stages that I see business go through, and I’m going to paint some generalizations here. (generalizations refer to 90-95% of the people in each of these categories out there. So hold off on the flames, especially if you’re part of the 5-10% of “distribution curve busters” out there)
If you’ve spoken to me or exchanged emails, you’ll know that I’m a pragmatist at heart. Having see the rise of the dotcoms and dot-crashes soon after, I’m certainly not in this application if the end result of facebook monetization is mere “hype”.
Talking to Jason Bailey, whom I’m helping to launch his $uperRewards FB monetization system, I’ve seen the applications and case studies of successful FB applications which are making $100,000 – $200,000 a month.
These applications are probably in the top 5% of Facebook applications that turn a profit and a huge profit at that…and the reality of any capitalist society is that you must benchmark yourself against benchmark yourself against the leaders, rather than the other 90% of Facebook developers who are merely scrambling to find two nickels to rub together…
A business must be able to generate positive cashflow and must be able to sustain a comfortable lifestyle for the application creators. Anything less and you’re running a charity.
Let’s break this down for a moment…
An “average” application might generate $10,000 to $15,000 a month, which could be fairly reasonable…until you break that $15,000 by 30 days, or $500 a day.
$15,000 a month or $500 a day, with an assumption of 50,000 daily active users means you are generating 1 cent per daily user…that’s pretty pathetic…
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Instead, if you want to go big with Facebook Applications, you need to define your goal and reverse engineer the process.
I think $100,000 per month is a decent benchmark. (as a starting point…)
In the final part of our interview, Jason Bailey (AKA Chickenhole) and I discussed how to maximize your application’s profit potential by incorporating some tips during the development, marketing and monetization phases.
We talked about the criteria a successful FB App MUST incorporate to ensure that it takes on a life of its own through viral distribution. We also talked about how you get started, especially if you don’t have any programming skills.
If you are already developing a Facebook Application, you will want to know about the free application hosting with programming functions. This is especially critical because successful Facebook applications could have 500,000 or more daily active users a day.
The developers group will also contain tips on application design and game mechanics and ideas for incorporating the $uperRewards application into your application and increase your monetization.
Current Facebook Application owners who have added $uperRewards have reported up to a 20 times increase in profit since adding the application.
As we are manually reviewing each application, it may take up to 48 hours to approve your application.