Six Sites

Its hard to believe it has been eight months since I left Blue Flavor, the company I co-founded, to reboot my own company Fling Media with my wife Cyndi. In that time I have done next to nothing with Leaflets, the product Garrett and I created while at Blue Flavor and we now own.

For eight months we’ve let the desktop site remain branded Blue Flavor (something we’ve only just now rectified), largely due to how busy Garrett and I have been. We had a new logo created, we moved web servers and we updated the branding of the core mobile product, but we haven’t exactly been jumping to invest a bunch of time into it.

In fact even while at Blue Flavor we didn’t touch the product for the better part of a year. We built it do be an example of mobile design and development to recruit new clients. More of a marketing tool than anything else. But its surprise success had us asking how we could turn it into a money making product. Something Garrett and I continue to debate.

The product was pretty damn successful due to the timing of its launch with the first iPhone. We had great numbers for a year, but with no plan to make money from it. Then once the iPhone 3G and the emphasis on the App Store launched, we saw the usage of Leaflets start to go down, casting doubt on the future of the mobile web on the iPhone and Leaflets.

So what’s next?

Garrett and I decided not to abandon the product. We both still believe that the mobile web is crucial to the future of the iPhone and other “Mobile 2.0” devices. Not to mention that our discussions and experiments with Leaflets 2.0 have led us to some really incredible new ideas, tools and resources that we’ve been using on other efforts. Its proven itself over and over again to be a great test bed of new ideas.

While that is all fine and good, in order to justify continued development of it, we have to find a way to have it bring in at least a little bit of cash, while remaining with keeping the core product free to users.

I have some ideas, but Garrett and I agree that before we pursue any sort of monetization, that the core product is in desperate need of an update. We need to bring the product up to the adopted conventions and new capabilities available since we launched it over a year and half ago.

But our biggest problem is finding the time. We’ve been trying to attack some of the other Six Sites products that we know we can monetize faster. Our only goal is to see enough cash flow from our products so the two of us can focus on products full time and not be distracted with client work.

Leaflets is something I think about and come back to a lot, as if it were my first love. We’ve talked about doing an open and iterative refactoring of code and redesign. But it probably won’t happen for at least another month, until after the holidays. We have some designs done, some new code written, but we are currently busting ass on Signal to try and get that out in the early part of next year.