You nailed it pretty well. You sure you weren't a SysOp?
My BBS actually made a profit but only because it didn't pay me a salary. It worked out that no matter how many phone lines I had, the subscription income would be double the phone bill. Trade Wars (and other games like it) were a big reason I was able to get subscriptions. Because I had 10 phone lines to the main board, busy signals were relatively rare. Non-subscribers got something like half an hour per day on the system, which isn't really enough if you're serious about your games. Since I had enough lines, people knew they could usually get in, and they were being served by their own non-multitasking 386/40, so everything moved fast by the standards of the time. The hardcore gamers were very good about subscribing.
And I think the same can be applied to the internet, except instead of gamers, we've got messagers. Who can be (and always have been) just as hardcore as the gamers. Give 'em good access, a speedy, clean, and reliable interface, and you've got something attractive to hardcore messagers.
I do my Investors Hub thing primarily as a labor of love, but since I'm dealing with a far larger universe than I could in the BBS days, and because this is what I want to do when I grow up, I'm profit-motivated and think that it's a realistic expectation. |
