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Right, coffee is a (mostly fungible) commodity product that requires an investment of ~3-5 minutes of drinking time and you're done. There's basically no oppor
by tednaleid 15y ago
Right, coffee is a (mostly fungible) commodity product that requires an investment of ~3-5 minutes of drinking time and you're done.
There's basically no opportunity cost to picking the "wrong" coffee. It won't take you longer to drink, will probably give you the same amount of caffeine and just won't taste quite as good as the "right" one.
Apps can require a significant time investment to learn/use them. There's also a potentially large opportunity cost to picking the wrong app. App store searching kind of blows, without some invested time, you can't even know which one is the "right" app for you to spend some time on. Though I also agree that 15-20 minutes is much more likely than hours of research.
The $2 isn't the point, it's the cost after the purchase that you're spending time to make sure it isn't wasted.
- kgen 15y agoI agree with the fact that it's not really about the $2 or even how many competitors there are -- it just happens to be that the apps are currently priced about the same as a coffee. My hypothesis is that the bigger question is really one of expectation -- whether the app accomplishes exactly what the user expects it to do (not what the app markets itself to do). The more complex the expected result (ie. coffee -> coffee hit, fart app -> laughs, conversion calculator -> converts stuff, your nifty social app -> ?) the more doubt people have in just throwing down money (regardless of how "small" the amount).