I have a 3-week old startup I founded with my cousins. Our model is travelers pay $10 to have 30-minute conversations with locals around the world before taking a vacation. Should we not charge customers right now?
We have over 200 locals signed up and about a dozen clients, some are paying and some aren’t. In our model we incentivize the local by paying them for their time – this is a cut of the $10.
I don't get it is anyone paying $10 right now? If you take a cut of $10 what is the "charge"?
Charge!
Since you won't get much in terms of repeat business, you'll have to figure out how to get tons of new customers in a reliable way. It won't matter one bit if those 12 customers you have now pay or not. It won't prove anything, nor will it bring in a meaningful amount of revenue.
Where are you going to get 10.000 new customers every month? Because that's what you need to turn this into a viable business. If you figure it out everything else will be easy. If you can't find a way to scale nothing else matters because failure will then be guaranteed.
Ouch, but true lol
Sounds like LocalFu, except more expensive.