Background
I posted an earlier, slightly incoherent ,version of this on the Shipaton livestream discord during the Paddle web payment event, without anyone having time to answer.
These ideas may be interesting for anyone debating complex business models and associated payments.
Martial arts domain
My app is for clubs and instructors for martial arts (I’m deeply into kung fu and tai chi) & I’m pushing to get it wrapped well enough for Shipaton (unsurprisingly).
It will be international from day one and needs to be cross-platform because of SE Asian Android dominance.
Whilst initially pitching the idea very much at clubs with members attending in-person, there’s a lot of scope for them to profit more from online sales.
Definitions
The proposed monetisation model is around teachers and students. Teachers may be associated with a club but, at least for now, “teacher” as a proxy for the club works to, uhh, simplify this.
I’m using the term “course” in a very broad sense - it may encompass a single martial arts form, a regular online coaching program or other business models.
Trivially, teachers might be paying subs to unlock extra features for course creation and admin.
The teachers also have the option to get remitted earnings from student payments for the app. We would take care of the percentages and mechanism for this outside of any concerns below. I’m aware that international tax stuff could make for a container-load of worms at scale here.
- a student may be paying multiple teachers,,
- a teacher may have many courses running, with mixes of students in there,
- a teacher may repeat the same course many times with different students,
- a student may take the same course again and pay for it
- (ideally) a teacher can grant free or discounted access to a given student for a course, but this may be irrelevant to all models below, as just a separate permissioning feature.
Where it gets tricky is considering giving flexibility to how teachers set payment levels and thus how that maps to IAP across App and Play store.
Teaching Models in increasing complexity
Simple fixed subs model proportionally remitted
Students pay us a simple fixed subscription to have access to extra features. We remit some portion of that to teachers based on the proportion of student activity on their charged courses.
There’s a temptation to allow teachers to set prices here and sum those up across the app, to work out the proportions remitted. That has a minor weak potential for proportions getting out of whack if a given student is doing courses from multiple teachers but a small, fixed range of levels here would probably make this a trivial issue.
The big downside is a massive cap on income for us and teachers. Enthusiasts pay no more.
Tokenised Consumables to pay for each course
Courses would be categorised into a fixed number of pricing levels. For each level, we have a single consumable and students have to buy that token and then, in the app, choose to apply it to the course.
We can have a considerable range of prices for these consumables, to give teachers flexibility.
One downside is possible embarrassment for the teachers where students see the global price ranges, unless there is some way to limit the offerings based on a local user profile?
If we cannot limit the offerings, students could end up accidentally buying an unusable token.
Virtual Currency Consumables to pay for courses
Teachers set a “gold price” for a course and students pay it using the currency.
Purchasing currency is via IAP consumables in different bundles.
Perceptions - gold price consumables with notably better deals at higher levels is common in games. However, unlike a lot of games, we expect a fairly flat relationship between spending and time. So seeming to push people to buy big bags of gold they take a long time to use, just for better rates, might cause a backlash.
This may not necessarily involve the new RC virtual currency feature, at least at the start. I think that using it or not might not need to be visible to the user, as it’s an implementation detail? (not wanting to sound critical, didn’t say mere implementation detail ;-).
Other Paid Offerings
Without going into too much detail, but in case people get excited by ideas that don’t seem to fit the above, we’re considering a bunch of different things for later (exerting huge Shipaton discipline). Most of these better fit having a virtual currency to pay for them.
Skinning
As in most video games, people being able to create and sell skins including uniforms, for possible 3D rendered models.
Training Cohorts
Managing people training together outside of the teacher/student relationship above.
Re-publishing/Sharing rights
Added features for republishing renders of moves in a way I don’t want to discuss more yet.
