Tea bags on strings make steeping time really controllable.
There are pack-your-own tea bag systems too here in the UK but I think most people would rather just have something good/familiar rather than blend their own weird tea.
I just finished reading Dark Star — an entertaining scifi noir epic poem set on a planet with a dead sun. It isn't going to tell you about the practicalities of this type of thing but it is a good yarn.
I interviewed someone who had a failed startup. He couldn't tell me what he would do differently if he was to do it all over again. It didn't fill me with confidence that he's learned anything during the experience.
Make sure you can answer that question when you start interviewing.
Our entire cash outlay, pre-revenue, not including founders time, was about £1,000. We bought a VM, a domain name, a copy of Flash to build an little interactive game our domain required and paid some admin fees on content we acquired.
We made up our first logo, 10 minutes in Photoshop—it was as ugly as sin but it didn't matter.
We lived with a VM because there was going to be no load on our servers until we had traffic.
The really expensive bit was the time me and my co-founder put in. To a degree, if you don't factor lifestyle (and you should), we're still recouping that.
On finding a business partner: do some sort of tangible work with them before you start on a larger project, make sure you've got some seriously deep social validation of them and be sure you have a complimentary skill set. Oh, and liking them helps.
My business partner and I were able to spend all our time arguing about the product rather than whose contribution was bigger.
I think that "be a payment provider" is a much easier thing to think than it is to do.
While it may be easy to build the customer side of the equation you've got to build a vast network of merchants willing to accept payment and that's hard work. Especially if you're trying to convince them to re-price in Facebook Credits?
Sure, you could charge 1% but people have added credits to their Facebook account at some point and it probably cost you more than 1% to allow them to do that. How do people buy credits right now? All those cost Facebook more than 1%, right? I buy $100 of credits, it costs F8 a couple of bucks, I then spend $100 of credits and they recoup $1 of it in merchant fees? Doesn't sound like a good business model.
Beyond the need to create a financial model that makes sense and then go out to find merchants and convince them there's a massive risk of merchant fraud.
Fraudulent merchant X signs up for a F8 Merchant Account. Fraudulent customers A, B, C buy something with stolen credit cards for $100 each. Everyone disappears after merchant X receives settlement. F8 is out of pocket to the tune of the original $300, another $300 in reversals to their bank and then $30-$60 of chargeback fees. If that happens enough then F8 might even have its merchant account revoked... though they're probably big enough to avoid that.
It's an excellent money laundering channel too and there's a lot of financial regulation to navigate around that.
I know that this stuff can be overcome but it is hard to do and would be a major piece of work. This type of thing nearly sank PayPal back in the day.
I'd add that everyone knows about paying for a subscription to a magazine and everyone knows about paying for advertising so you won't have to teach people about the value (or not) of those two things.
Alternatively just copy the Hacker Monthly business model, apply it to your content. It seems to work and it would be easy to copy.
You're overcomplicating things. Pick the simplest idea to implement and then test it by offering it to the market. See if it works, go from there. And just do one thing to start with.