I have a biz directory (yellow pages app) here in Haiti. About 40k listing views a month with only social advertising. My app dev is not geared towards really working the analytics. I want to relaunch in a new MVC app quickly. I feel like I can see all the moving parts but cant get it to click yet. I need to get these views monetized, get the app rebuilt a lot smaller (7.9M right now) for low quality networks with expensive data for end users, get analytics embedded, get app indexed, implement deep linking, generate a website for each biz that doesn't have one (which is most). The very first thing I need to do is get my data into a database with APIs then start adding the rest of it. That is how i see it right now. I'm a non-programmer though I am frantically learning. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Please feel free to reach out. Especially if you know something about Lean/MVC and Saas.
It's good that your app has some traction. I have a classifieds ad site too (targeting Canadian market). Initially I was wondering if I should use WordPress or created it using MVC I picked the MVC approach. The thing is when doing the MVC you have to implement most of the functionality yourself (or your dev) which is time consuming.
In hindsight I think I should've used WordPress and then bought some plugins to add to the missing functionality.
I'd say do the incremental improvement approach because the things you listed would take time & cost a lot.
By 7.9M do you mean 7.9MB ? The app can be 50MB in size but what is important is what the HTML it is generating.
About the monetization you can do some contextual ads and some affiliate links.
You have to be specific when talking to your dev what you mean by analytics. Say when a user does this I want this and that to happen. You can list some scenarios and how the reports should look like.
Good luck!
Slavi Marinov,
Orbisius