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>if you register for a trial, for example, you should be "paying" with your email to let the company start a marketing process. Sympathetic customer fallacy. F
by Sir_Substance 8y ago
>if you register for a trial, for example, you should be "paying" with your email to let the company start a marketing process.
Sympathetic customer fallacy. Figuring out how to get new paying customers through the door is not the problem of everyone who considers trying your product. Expectations that trial users should "pay" by taking on the burden of having to tell your marketing department to go away if they aren't interested enough to buy it on their own initiative is reality denial. Obviously people aren't going to do that, and spending effort trying to "disposable-email-proof" your trial system is a bottomless pit into which you will pour money for all eternity. People are actually paying money to the disposable email companies to have them actively combat you. You will never complete that project and you will never be able to stop spending on it.
Ideally your trial is persuasive enough to have a steady trickle of people decide to buy the full product, but not so generous they feel that they'll get the full experience by cycling disposable email addresses. Finding that balance is the responsibility of your business, no one else will change their behavior to do it for you. If you can't find it, maybe that's a sign that you've made a product that maps poorly to sustaining a business. One might call this the "bittorrent inc" strategic mistake.
Always remember to stay grounded in reality.
- Drdrdrq 8y agoThis is a fantastic summary, thank you! I use disposeable mails all the time, and any company that refuses to accept them either gets a bogus hotmail account or (more likely) loses a chance to show me what they've built. Otoh, if I want their messages I will leave an address willingly - not my main address of course, but an alias.
- matt4077 8y agoCalling something a “fallacy” is the fallacy fallacy: a mistaken believe in the authority of a made-up concept. In this case, certain norms of conduct in business do exist, and they do often serve all market participants, and businesses have every right, and often succeed, in enforcing them. I’m not sure about the specific example here, as I happen to live in a jurisdiction where it’s illegal to follow up on a trial subscription with endless marketing emails. But, as just one example, cancelling an appointment you can’t kept us not just “sympathetic”. It’s basic manners, it improves life for everyone (including you), and nobody would be surprised that not following the norm could get you banned.
- Sir_Substance 8y ago> In this case, certain norms of conduct in business do exist Rejected. You don't get to declare norms by fiat, sorry. >It’s basic manners, it improves life for everyone (including you), and nobody would be surprised that not following the norm could get you banned. Manners are for humans to humans. I don't feel the need to be polite to a trial subscription system. It's a piece of software, it won't feel bad if I don't respond to its mails later on.
- wpietri 8y ago100% agreed. One of the things that I think people have a hard time grasping is that for a lot of software, the marginal cost of a user is approximately zero. People get stuck in a scarcity mindset and get really upset at the notion of freeloaders getting away with something. This is in sharp contrast to the abundance mindset you see in most open-source software. How many people are Linux freeloaders or Mozilla freeloaders or Gnu freeloaders? Hundreds of millions, and once you count devices, maybe billions. But as long as those outfits can pay the bills, they don't care. The funny part to me is that so many people trapped in scarcity thinking only care about getting paid, not paying others. How many of those people trying to capture every dollar of generated value are using open-source tools in what they're selling without giving back? Most of them, I'm sure.