Pack Technologies

Messaging apps for niche communities of interest

The experience

Pack's messaging apps connect you with your hobby-, interest-, and profession-based communities. You and your friends get all the news that's fit to talk about. You ask questions of world-renown experts, and you get reliable answers. You promote your ideas and projects, and you follow others. For a small monthly fee, you become a member of an exclusive community of people who are just as passionate as you.

The business model

The job to be done is connecting extremely passionate people to hobby- and profession-based communities. These communities are valuable fundamentally because they aggregate and generate expertise and trust. The best way to monetize expertise and trust is, primarily, via a subscription-based business model and, secondarily, via e-commerce, on-demand consulting, etc. But communities have a chicken-and-egg problem that is aggravated with a subscription model. Pack is solving this problem by locating extremely well-known, highly trusted, and usually widely loved subject-matter experts at the center of each community. They are media-, marketing-, and communications-savvy people, and because they take the majority of the customer subscription dollars, they are ideally positioned and incentivized to solve the chicken-and-egg problem and grow the community aggressively.

The competition

Today, people use blogs, subreddits, message boards, facebook groups, other communities. The problem is that these use either an advertising-based model, a volunteerism-based model, or both. The advertising-based model distorts the product and fails to drive meaningful revenue anyhow. (That's why traditional news organizations have a painful history in this space.) And the volunteerism-based model almost always leads to an enormous underinvestment in the public goods necessary to sustain and grow a community. (That's why almost all message boards and facebook groups are either very small, shallow, or generally terrible.) Meantime, conferences have the obvious problem of being very short and prohibitively expensive.

Contact

Email josh@packtechinc.com to say hi.