Pay to Play (Times Are Definitely Changing)
Pay to Play (Times Are Definitely Changing)
by Bradley Joyce
Posted on 01/14/2009
The guys over at Venture Hacks are getting ready to release their first book, Pitching Hacks. They posted a request on their site looking for book 'beta testers', to use the software analogy. The catch? You gotta buy the book.
Now, this is a book after all so buying it is not all strange, nor is the whole concept of a "beta book." However, I think we'll start seeing this more and more from companies releasing new products, along the lines of the advice I offered in my post on making money with your web startup.
As Squeejee gets close to launching our beta of TickStart, we've been kicking this very issue around. We'll be opting for a free beta, but I suspect people will be doing this less as the need for immediate revenue grows.
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Nivi, thanks for stopping by and commenting! Interesting reasoning behind charging for the test book. Personally, at least as far as web apps go, I'm a proponent of doing a solid private alpha where you perhaps bring in some close friends to assist with testing, and then going straight to an open public release where you're charging your customers, skipping "beta" altogether. Charging your customers sooner, I believe, will motivate you to move faster with fixes/enhancements etc. and get you the customers who REALLY want to use your product and will most likely provide you valuable feedback.
The motivation behind charging people to test the book was: 1. We wanted to test our checkout process, so we need to make people pay. 2. We want as many people as possible to read the book and give us feedback before we launch it. 3. We don't want to cannibalize our revenues too much by making it free for testers. These constraints led to this solution: testers pay but we gave them a substantial discount code. It really wasn't about bringing in early revenue. But I do think there is something interesting about charging testers. If your organization is built around learning from feedback, then everyone is a "tester".
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