4 ms·

Ask HN: How does free compete with paid?

• noodle 17y ago
  freemium. say "hey, our free version is just as good as those guys' paid version. plus, if you want even better stuff, you can pay $X/mo and get some even more super awesome features that those guys don't even have at all! here's a coupon."
  • ericwaller 17y ago
    Especially if your application is business related. Just having a paid version might help convince customers that you're a reliable company.
  • ecaron 17y ago
    Where would you say "Hey, we're better"? Mentioning it on the service's site isn't that useful since the visitor is already there.
    • noodle 17y ago
      adwords is a good start.
• Chocobean 17y ago
  depends on what kind of bussiness you're running though... If it has anything to do with "exclusivity" or "privilege" or "be the first to do blah", you must charge. You can give "special" customers a free or heavily discounted pass, but you must make it seem like it's only them getting something exclusive for an exclusive price. Think country club or night club style business.
• ecaron 17y ago
  The business is a job search website. Although the discussion certainly doesn't need to be limited/oriented towards that niche.
• swombat 17y ago
  This begs the question... why aren't you charging a monthly fee? Too much money sloshing around in your bank account?
  • ecaron 17y ago
    We're not charging a fee because we're firmly against charging jobseekers (who are usually unemployed). We're able to finance ourselves through the CPC methods.
    • ajdecon 17y ago
      OK, so you won't charge jobseekers. Does your service have a flipside where you allow employers to search resumes, or do any sort of matching between jobs and seekers? Are you charging the employers at all? And if not, why not? A free service is good for individuals looking for a job, but charging companies looking for excellent employees will actually make you look more credible.
      • ecaron 17y ago
        Since the service doesn't have jobs on it, it just points to josb (like Google, ignoring their cache), there are no resume services offered. For people wanting resume hosting, we point them to http://emurse.com http://emurse.com The service charges employers for sponsored listings, like Google's AdWords. Another paid service is for more frequent indexing, and another is for direct access to customized company-specific job feeds, which is useful to recruiters, affiliates & competitors.
• chanux 17y ago
  Hey let's do some campaign to promote yours, if it's really good.
  • chanux 17y ago
    Hmm... I knew this would be a down vote magnet. Anyway I was trying to help the FREE service.
• chanux 17y ago
  The site he mention is http://linkup.com http://linkup.com . HNers please suggest how to promote the FREE service. I have no connection with this service but like to see things free as long as it's possible. (No offense with making money with technology but if someone is happy & able to offer a free service it's cool I guess.)
  • swombat 17y ago
    How about starting a blog about how to find jobs in this market? That'd no doubt be highly diggable and gather hits from all over the place. Then page rank goes up. then hits come in.
    • ecaron 17y ago
      We've got a Twitter account, and a Facebook friend's page. I've leaned against doing a blog for two reasons: 1) There are many other experts in this field who praise us & eclipse my knowledge (like http://jobsearch.about.com/ http://jobsearch.about.com/) 2) Other job search engine blogs have been miserable failures, based on number of comments & attention they've failed to attract (like http://blog.indeed.com/ http://blog.indeed.com/, http://blog.simplyhired.com/ http://blog.simplyhired.com/, http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog/ http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog/ and http://monster.typepad.com/ http://monster.typepad.com/)
      • swombat 17y ago
        It's good to see that you've done your research, but I wouldn't discard the blogging route just because of those examples (so long as you have a good writer on your team). Looking at the examples you gave, and tearing them down one by one: http://blog.indeed.com/ http://blog.indeed.com/ - fairly basic design, and all the articles seem to be about themselves. http://blog.simplyhired.com/ http://blog.simplyhired.com/ - again, mostly self-serving and/or random articles... "2009 Simply Hired Nugget Bowl"?? Who cares. http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog - better content, but terrible design. It's painful to even look at, let alone read. http://monster.typepad.com/ http://monster.typepad.com/ - better content again, but mostly ultra-short articles. None of those are blogs that anyone sensible would read regularly, because they mostly regurgitate fairly boring or self-serving points without any new, useful ideas, and they're badly designed. By "doing a blog" I don't mean doing a blog about you or about your business. I mean doing a blog about the topic that your business is related to, and making a genuine effort to write thoughtful articles that will influence the industry positively and/or be of interest to your target market. I'd like to give our blog (http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/ http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/) as an example, but it's a little bit shambolic at the moment. Yet even so, the "thought leadership" articles we posted there generate some good hits and have generated some very good leads for us. Importantly, they've also massively upped our pagerank (because we run it on the same domain rather than a subdomain), which means, for example, that woobius comes up on the first page of results already for, for example, "construction collaboration". So there's multiple benefits to creating a good blog. Of course, creating a good blog is hard, but if you can, imho, it's worth it. Whether you can is a function of whether you have interesting ideas about your industry (you probably do) and whether you have a good writer on your team who can write those in a clear, blog-friendly shape.