🏨

Free, or very expensive

Similarly, you can price it for free or you can price it for dear, but never price it for cheap.

— Patrick McKenzie

  • Taco Tuesday: why don’t we charge money?
    • (aka: when to be generous)
    • Network effects: Taco Tuesday gets better with more people, and new people; we want to lower the friction
      • (though: space in the house is limited; diminishing returns)
    • Charging leads to incentives for growth, or focus on size (?), or reduction of costs
    • Charging adds an obligation for support?
    • Culture / “weirdness points” — charging and negotiating pricing for things that are uncommon, is hard
    • You can make trades between immediate monetization and longterm growth. When you give a thing away for free (or otherwise underprice it), people have a better experience, are more willing to promote it word-of-mouth
  • Which things are free, which things to charge for?
    • For patio11: internet blog posts are free (though with an optional donation subscription); consulting hours weeks are billed
    • Information: marginal cost of production is 0, so much more easy to give out
      • Advice, short engagements tend to be free
  • On the flip side: very few people get used to pricing things and selling things
    • So charging for things might be a good muscle to develop
    • The thing that most people sell: their own time. Cf salary negotiations
      • Sometimes for money, sometimes for equity
    • Personal journey of income over time
    • Personal journey of sales over time: $500/mo on One Word, to Manifold, to Manifest, to Manifund
  • Things to try and assess value of:
  • Game idea: pilot a character through various “trades”, based on their value in life