Has BuyMeACoffee worked for anyone?
My product https://renderchallenge.com/ is basically a database of render challenges that I curate on a weekly basis. So far it has been minimal effort (<2 hours per week), but I want to invest more time into monetizing it soon.
I'm still in that early growth phase where I'm trying to build up an audience, but I've added a BuyMeACoffee link to the site to see if anyone finds enough value to consider donating.
I'm wondering if this is even worth my time, or should I focus on just offering this service for Free and maybe look into other monetization ideas like:
- Advertisement
- Promoted content
- Affiliate marketing
I don't want to cheapen my product, but I also don't want to spend too much time working for free on things.
What should I do?
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I don't get the questions.
You already implemented the bmc link on the footer. What's going to take your time further?
How do you cheapen a free product? Are you going to ask for donations in weekly mails?
I think it's fine to have a donation link, but I wouldn't expect to get much out of it. Once I released a free product on ko-fi, more than 100 downloads resulted with $1. I wasn't expecting it at all, I only wanted to measure the interests. So it was a nice surprise anyways.
I think you are in a good niche, advertisement and affiliates probably the best monetization strat atm. So I'd focus on growing the sub count. Numbers are too low to be able to monetize. Even 5% of your free subs decides to donate for $5 for example it's less than $20 in total.
Pointing folks to that BMC link and building it up with posts about my progress is what I mean by additional effort. I'm debating whether I should just leave it as is and focus my attention towards alternative monetization strategies.
I'm not planning on asking for donations in emails because I personally don't like it when people do that in emails that I subscribe to. However, I do eventually want to monetize some part of the site. I'm just not sure what that is yet.
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Thanks for the feedback btw!
I will keep the BMC link since it doesn't cost me anything to keep it up. If someone ends up donating that will be a bonus, but I think I should focus some cycles on some more customer research instead.
If I conduct some interviews/surveys with my current newsletter subscribers, I can get a better understanding of what problem I can solve for them within the same niche. The newsletter by itself doesn't seem like its enough of a "burning need" to justify anyone paying for it, unless there was something like exclusive content.
I didn't realize at first look, I thought you were generating challenges for people who wants to practice. Instead you are curating actual challenges with rewards and stuff.
That's actually already something to pay for. On top of my head I'm thinking that it could be turned into a community where people practice on a given brief. While you are trying to improve their visibility through various showcase sites. Creating buzz around their content, like a weekly hackathon or a gamejam.
"Host your own challenge" is a logical way to monetize as well. But without seeing any prior content, there is no reason for me to host a challenge via your service.
In any case I'd aim to grow the subscribers count. I think it's possible to create a paid discord server for those who wants to network. Those "hackathons" can be accessible for only the paying subs etc. That can be a good starting point for $$.
Like @Rusted said, it's already done. You don't have to do more with it unless you want to try to build it into an engagement format, but that's not really required.
I make ~$10-15 every two or three months on mine for my YouTube channel. Not a lot, but enough to keep a button there.
I received my first $5 donation last month!! Never expected to receive anything for my project via BuyMeACoffee, so it made my day 😊
If you’re looking for income, then you probably need a monetization strategy (one-time purchases, subscriptions, etc.). One option could be entrance fees which get split with the winning prize. Also depends on how long you want to spend in beta and how many users you are trying to grow towards.
Finally, you could call out the donation link once or share a word of thanks on your newsletter about someone who donated, just so your users know it exists
I have built my own buy me a coffee page https://jorcus.com/product/buy-me-a-coffee/
It took me many months or years to received some. U need to do something valuable and useful. It's not an effective way to monetize your business if your main income source is that. You should consider some subscription or one-time payment + random coffees.
Even though it only costs 2 dollars per coffee and it's not easy to get it because people are lazy to pull their credit card. I think if you want to give something free, it's something you don't expect to get return. Coffee is just for people who want to reward your efforts.
I'm creating a product and also thought of this donation option to create a little source of revenues.
So thank you to ask this question. Curious of the answers.