How do I monetize my Website (100K visitors a month) and iPhone App (20K downloads)

Hi there! Best of luck as you complete your college degree. From experience I will try to give you some insight into the world of startups and mobile apps. First some things to consider: 1. You live in a world of social klout 2.Apps must (specially iOS) must be very well developed, otherwise the users themselves will filter you out. 3. Apps must be relevant if you want to succeed. You've have probably seen this, a lot of paid apps go for free for a while when their sales begin to stall or never actually make any pay back to the developers. Free is an easy way to get users and thus paid advertisements or in app purchases (if they are good enough to keep) Assuming you will have all 3... Let's move on to your question: Most investors won't entertain an idea alone, specially if you haven't any prior successful experience in running a startup or app development company. Some do however, consider depending on your social klout, learn about growth hacking and consider growing your social relevance before the completion of the app. As mention by Ryan Holiday, a blogger not too long ago got investment for a book from a simple screenshot of his followers' requests for the same topic... he decided to write a book and through his community market it. This was a no brainer for the publisher investor. With that said, an often unspoken rule of networking is that you don't ask for favors in your first intro. You don't do that in your personal life, you shouldn't do that in your professional. Make friends in the right place, build relationships with a backbone in honesty, mentorship and through time as they see you work and guide you they themselves begin to entertain the idea... In the future, when you ask, your chances are much better that way. Get yourself a team, find a developer to mentor you and help you improve as you learn. Most new entrepreneurs think that their product at launch is their "final-good enough for a while- product" and is not! Complete opposite, you must realize that your initial launch is nothing more than the 1st iteration of the many to come if you want your community of users to stick with you and share their experiences with others as you help them and improve their lives by listening to their suggestions and issues with your app. If you have a developer this will become easier in the long run as well as tell an investor that you are capable of being a leader, even if is of 1. Best of luck, give me a call if you wish to talk a bit more :)

If it's SaaS, you should be monetizing from day one. An MVP in SaaS is the minimal product that people will pay for, that's the starting point. You evolved the product from there. If it's a consumer app, that's a little more complicated. Often times, monetizing preemptively can stunt growth and kill the trajectory, due to lack of focus, user experience, etc. It's really a question of access to capital in this scenario.

Well, the biggest cost here wouldn't be in the app, but in the server infrastructure. As usual with connected apps, people often forget they have to be connected to servers. The app itself is just a view to what the servers provide, so it's not the major cost. 20K $ to 100K $ should be enough. On server stuff, I expect it to be a lot more, particularly if you aim for a wide audience (several million $). On a Whatsapp clone, I'd consider: - solutions for performing calls through servers, not that easy. Look at what Twilio provides. WebRTC is an upcoming protocol that will ease that (web & mobile). - solutions for API, IM and user accounts management. Look at StackMob or Parse which are MBaaS (Mobile Backend as a Service). Hope it helps!

Taskrabbit and oDesk. Though over time the most common requests are usually standardized into products to reduce complexity for the buyer. For most buyers the open ended nature of a bounty system is intimidating.

Freemium revenue for mobile apps was up 211 percent last year (2013), according to a report from mobile analytics company App Annie and IDC. 83 percent of the top thousand apps on each of the iOS app store and Google Play — monetize via freemium, an even bigger proportion of revenue generated by those top 2,000 apps arrives via freemium: 92 percent. Naturally, the key to success as an app developer who uses the freemium model is getting as large a percentage of your free users buying something as possible. That’s a significant challenge. You have to do what makes the most sense for your app and the users on it. You must create value for the user and make it compelling for them to spend money on whatever you plan on offering. In terms of viable it is tough to say because I don't know what your medical app does. 1. Look at the data from your app 2. Talk to your users about what they want 3. Look at what your competition is doing or others in a similar vertical