if its one of those sites that will charge you to see who viewed your pro, or who sent you message, its gonna immediately flop.
Yep. That was my point.
If "Upgraded Membership" means most of the best features of the platform aren't available to free users, it'll flop very quickly.
I saw this on the Indiegogo fundraising page:
You will receive all the above, plus you will be listed as a "Founder" on the app. You will also be allowed to participate in all of the think tanks that will be held on the app, for free.
That's for people who contributed $500 to the campaign. So, it's clear that monetization is happening from the jump. Certain features will not be free.
Facebook was burning something like $3,000-5,000 per month in those early days for storage and hosting costs. Tariq is not a developer, so he's already invested at least $100,000 in development costs if he's rolling out a nice platform.
Does he have the patience to provide a "free" service and continue to drop money into it while the user base builds up? Not to mention he'll have to continue to have either in-house or outsourced development support.
For something like this to really succeed, you have to drop a few rounds of capital into it.