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Fake it until you make it. It's natural conclusion of Doing Things That Don't Scale: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html First 100 peop
by freehunter 9y ago
Fake it until you make it. It's natural conclusion of Doing Things That Don't Scale: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
First 100 people through the door get 15% off!
Beta testers get the full game half price!
And of course, authors do this on the NYT Best Seller list all the time... buy enough copies of your own book at enough book stores and you'll shoot right to the top: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Best_Seller_list#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Best_Seller...
- michaelmior 9y agoThe first two examples of discounts you cited are very different from just paying to directly inflate your ratings.
- freehunter 9y agoI'm trying to show a progression from "discounts" to "more discounts" to "we'll give it to you free just to get more 'sales'" That's why I called it a natural conclusion. The only difference between giving someone a coupon to entice them to buy something from you and buying it yourself is how much money you're losing in the short term. It's on the same spectrum, just at different ends.
- jakobegger 9y agoNo, this is not a spectrum. Offering a discount or giving copies away is marketing. Buying copies yourself and pretending someone else did is fraud.
- je42 9y agoThis only works ( and also for Appstores) if your expected LTV is high enough that the real users will bring in enough money to recoup the initial spent. If your book/game is crap, the it will fall again, you lost your money and your spot in the charts.