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Interesting that the "scholarship" (free) plan isn't mentioned on the homepage. It seems you have to try and steal the product before being offered the free pl

• wahsd 13y ago
  I think I would have laid on the guilt a little more. Something along the lines of... "Hi, buddy! We noticed that you created five dummy accounts in order to get access to our referral reward. Thank you for your interest. If $1.66 per month or $0.05 is too much money for you to afford at the moment and it would prevent you from having a roof over your head and feeding yourself but would still like to sell your music and make a living in pursuing your dreams of being paid for your art and work, then you should check out our scholarship account. We believe in our community and are you are a good person that would not like it if people didn't pay you for your work so we are confident you wouldn't do the same to us." Or is that too much?
  • gmjosack 13y ago
    I wouldn't even read that much text in this situation.
• ars 13y ago
  What if someone can afford it, but isn't willing to? To me that means the price is too high, so maybe also let them set their own price?
  • prawn 13y ago
    It's $20 for a chance to greatly simplify selling your music. If someone doesn't see value in that, leave them to submit everything manually IMO. Can't get dragged down by tightarses.
    • Kliment 13y ago
      I would suggest a free trial might as a way to demonstrate value. Obviously you can see the "great simplification" only after using it. What is the easier sell - $20 for a possibility (you called it chance) to simplify a pain point you have, or $20 for something you have already observed to simplify said pain point, and have spent time entering data into and possibly making money off of?
      • astolarz 13y ago
        The first song upload is free.
      • prawn 13y ago
        I think the service is already more than generous on that front: "How much will it cost me? You can upload one song for free." Add in testimonials, press and word of mouth and prospects can get an indication of how useful DistroKid is likely to be. When I said chance, I was allowing for lack of followthrough on the part of the artists. When there's a service that can get your material in front of purchasers so cheaply, a huge, huge portion of the responsibility to succeed then relies on you to create a saleable product and then drive some interest.
    • deleted 13y ago
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  • mooreds 13y ago
    If someone can afford a product, but isn't willing to, then they should look elsewhere for the value provided by the product, or live without it. That's embedded in the definition of a market--sellers get to choose the price, buyers get to choose whether or not to buy.
    • hnnnnng 13y ago
      only in a "free-"market. Also there is a concept of "fair price" for a reason. You can't charge insane prices everywhere, especially for essential items.
      • mooreds 13y ago
        Sure, I agree. Not all markets meet the concept of 'free'. But distrokid is competing in a market that is pretty close (helping musicians distribute music to services).
      • forrestthewoods 13y ago
        It's a good thing a service to help individuals sell their music on a variety of online services isn't essential.
        • dllthomas 13y ago
          It might be, if making music is the only real way you have to make money. Of course, in that case I would hope that you would use your proceeds to pay the service pretty quickly.
          • forrestthewoods 13y ago
            Essentials for Life: food, water, shelter, and cheap access to internet services created by other people.
            • deleted 13y ago
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  • rokhayakebe 13y ago
    I come from a "relatively" poor country with very poor musicians. A country where many national celebrities probably do not make the equivalent of what an engineer makes in San Francisco. However I am sure every last one of them can afford $19.99/year.
  • kyro 13y ago
    That doesn't mean the product is priced too high. It simply means that the value gained from the product is not perceived by a someone to be higher than the value of the currency amount being requested. That's how we make purchasing decisions. It's about perceived value and the trade-offs we make. Letting consumers set their own prices on products they subjectively perceive to be overpriced would run down prices as it'd be easier and easier to acquire goods, until everything ultimately became free. What about people who can afford but are unwilling to buy luxury items, like Louis Vuitton bags? Should they be able to set their own price?
    • ars 13y ago
      > Should they be able to set their own price? He's offering it for free (for some users). I was simply suggesting he also allow those users to pick a price and pay him something.
      • goldfeld 13y ago
        Free isn't cheaper than cheap. Framing it as "Scholarship" puts a very intentional spin that it's meant to support (or even invest in) people who need it most. Letting people set their prices would just decrease the service's perceived value (the Humble Bundles can allegedly have value way over their average payments, but I can't really see beyond around five dollars.)
  • forrestthewoods 13y ago
    +1 point for making the most entitled statement I've heard this week
    • rattray 13y ago
      that kind of sarcasm strikes me as needlessly acerbic. FWIW, his idea struck me as logical. I might be able to afford something that still doesn't make sense for me to buy, since I don't get eg; $20 of value from it. See econ101. But I'm not sure PWYW would be the solution here.
      • nemothekid 13y ago
        Setting your own price hardly works. Panera tried it for a while and while it was charitable, there were way more people who underpaid (that could actually pay) than people who would overpay. Now IIRC, they only do it once a year.
    • ars 13y ago
      He's offering it for free (in certain cases). I was suggesting also let people pay him a small amount instead.
  • programminggeek 13y ago
    No, it means that some people are cheap and companies like Google have trained them that everything should be free and/or ad supported.
  • laureny 13y ago
    Perceived price certainly varies greatly depending on the buyer. A professional musician will not think twice about paying $50 for an awesome tab software, but to me, a hobbyist guitar player, paying more than $20 would be a stretch. This has nothing to do with the quality of the product. The Humble Bundle pricing model has shown that such an approach can be extraordinarily successful, but I'm not sure how well it can be extended to other software products.
    • jacalata 13y ago
      The market is not someone who plays guitar for fun, but someone who intends to sell their music for others to listen to. If you have ever looked into selling your music, then you should know that the costs of doing so are generally insane and this is a bargain. If you've never looked into it, then you probably aren't a serious consumer for the service anyway.
• jackweirdy 13y ago
  RE no homepage mention of it: I suspect there are those who would try to get it for free, regardless of how much it costs. It's probably more successful in converting those who wouldn't have paid in the first place - IE by reminding them that they've been "caught out". Having said that, no homepage mention may be turning away the honest users who might genuinely be unable to afford it. Only offering a discount to those who cheat the system seems to be rewarding deviousness. It feels more honest, to me at least, to "remind" people that there's a student/concessionary fee available, as opposed to revealing it.
  • alxndr 13y ago
    > Having said that, no homepage mention may be turning away the honest users who might genuinely be unable to afford it. That reminds me of Airbrake.io, whose lowest-cost pricing plan was higher than I wanted to spend on a toy site I made recently. On my phone I can't find the text on their site, but in small print on the pricing page it said something like "or, we have a developer plan, which is free for one site and one user." It was exactly what I was looking for, and I wish there were more ultra barebones plans available for otherwise-paid services.
  • caf 13y ago
    This - rewarding deviousness - troubled me about the system too. Perhaps, instead of explicitly mentioning the Scholarship accounts on the homepage, there could be text along lines of "Struggling to get by and can't afford it? Email us and we'll see what we can do."
    • tempestn 13y ago
      This sounds like a good option. It's along the lines of their original approach, and by adding the friction and personal contact of an email, much less likely to be abused.
    • ballard 13y ago
      TL;DR - this is a shrewd play for a number of reasons. You don't understand, it's just business. Furthermore, the conversion of requiring people to beg via email to explain they're broke is next to zero. People won't do it. They'll take the POLR: fake accounts. Kicking them out also won't help: they can attack the brand and also if they succeed, the service looks like the bad guys. Furthermore, it builds stats by having more accounts registered on the platform. Whether those fake accounts get killed off is up to the business owner. Is padding stats worth the liability and cost of junk accounts? We're still talking about DistroKid, so it just bought them free PR. The point is everyone can make more money by taking a calculated gamble on positive ROI giveaways. The unit cost of an app is often pennies. Any concern about mass defection of paid users to unpaid is unlikely if the service is good and shows trying to take the high road. And that adds goodwill valuation to the brand. These intangibles make the service of higher value than a formulaic subscription service that thinks short-term only. It's not quite the same as selling gym memberships. :) The meta is that when a service is small, keeping CAC low and getting as many users as possible while maintaining cool is hard. The churn between paid, unpaid and closed accounts is also a delicate dance to keep satisficing toward $. Sometimes giving accounts away in exchange for something non-monetary is a way go (real friends or not). And also, don't forget gangster marketing: http://youtu.be/t73Q3f4YjwQ http://youtu.be/t73Q3f4YjwQ
• bemmu 13y ago
  A company I used to work for made bible software. You could browse different bible versions side-by-side, collect verses etc., designed for people seriously into it (like priests composing their sermon). But some of these people would still copy the software instead of ordering the disk from us. We didn't really detect that, but the boss added a screen that just randomly pops up reminding the user that if you are running a copy now, remember that copying is WRONG. We would get repenting phone calls from users begging to be forgiven.
  • deleted 13y ago
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  • chm 13y ago
    My little finger tells me you would have received less calls if the company sold video games, or pornography, for example.
    • fijal 13y ago
      I for one would like to see a study that shows that people who read bible are more moral than people who don't read bible (or people who play video games). In my anecdotal evidence, there is no real correlation, but hey, science.
      • meric 13y ago
        The key I think is people reading the bible have their minds engaged in the thoughts of morality.
      • pseut 13y ago
        This was software aimed at people seriously studying the bible with a reminder that would come up when they're reflecting on their religion. And you think that's irrelevant? They've already pirated the software so it's not morality, it's guilt.
        • hobbes 13y ago
• mathattack 13y ago
  Very powerful way to get incremental revenue by reframing the question.