Grapevine is a free app. How do they run their startup?

Pardon me for being so naive here. I want to understand this new type of startup trend.

What’s the source of motivation for their employees to stick to their jobs?
How do apps like these think of monetizing? There is no ad, no paid feature per say.
Grapevine has probably built some kind of a platform. But how is this different from platforms like twitter, facebook or any other social media platform?
How much money do you think has been invested into building apps like this?
The DAU of this app based on my wild guess must be around 5K. I may be completely wrong here.
What according to you is the current valuation of grapevine?
Saumil Tripathi, the founder of grapevine is ex-google employee as per his LinkedIn profile. There is no mention of any other any other startup he owns.
Grapevine has a team of 10 employees (as per Saumil’s post a few weeks back) How do these guys make money?

I’m awestruck by the guys working in grapevine. Building an app of this quality with no monetization in sight!

Pounce on this thread with your thoughts guys!

17mo ago

Find out if you are being paid fairly.Download Grapevine

WobblyNoodle

InMobi17mo

Grapevine is still very new to the scene. There are apps like Blind which have been active for 5+ years a have started monetizing recently.

They are still in the 0-1 phase where bringing traffic to the app is topmost priority.

For monetization, apart from ads, they might start a job portal section (taking cut from companies) since they have a good pool of working folks who can apply to these jobs.

Also, they can add a section for adding salaries, something like levels.fyi and provide folks with salary negotiation help (take a cut if it's successful). Providing data to third parties can be another stream of revenue.

I guess I know some of the grapevine co-founders (but they don't know me :P).
Pretty sure they are gonna make something epic !

SleepyBanana

Stealth17mo

I know Blind and yes it’s quite popular in the US. Though, I haven’t been using it lately, thanks to lack of india specific posts.
While Grapevine has a lot of similarities with Blind, one thing I like the most about this app is its minimalistic approach. Blind throws a lot of suggestions and ads which grapevine might start doing in future.

Hood on the other hand is completely filled with cringe and pointless confessions. Doesn’t look like an app for professionals.

Amidst all, I always wonder if this is how startup model works. Blame me on my lack of knowledge about startup industry.

GoofyDonut

Stealth17mo

Make money? Looks like you’re very, very new to startup landscape. 😅

SleepyBanana

Stealth17mo

The reason why I started with the disclaimer of being naive. 😀

SquishyBanana

Freelancer17mo

Engagement
Monetization ( through paid job posting)
Sell to LinkedIn/some big tech.
Profit?

SleepyBanana

Stealth17mo

How much money do you think these guys would be burning now?

SquishyBanana

Freelancer17mo

10 employees + Some marketing + server cost+ misc cost.. burn should be around 6-10lakhs/month.. And DAU would be much higher than 5K i think.. around 10-20K i believe. . Most users are passive..

SwirlyNoodle

Stealth17mo

Start with a niche and add users
Focus on increasing engagement (Time spent per user, page views per user)
Broaden the theme and more people join in
Get networking effect, more users, more time spent, more users and so on
Now, starts monetization via ads or subscription or paid features
Hope FB, Google, Microsoft buy you out or become one of them

SleepyBanana

Stealth17mo

There’s a long way to go. I’m wondering what is the motivation behind the team building this app trying to make it great one day at a time.

SwirlyNoodle

Stealth17mo

Money, fame, do something different

FloatingPancake

Grapevine17mo

They can aim for profit through jobs and ads if they want in a year or two. But if there’s no investor pressure to do so, they can continue to build cool stuff and enrich the platform and worry about profits later.