Marketing Free Stuff

Dave Pollard at How To Save the World has posted his annual list of the ten big ideas in Business.

Number Nine applies directly to the More Space project:

9. Marketing: Two Kinds of Free Stuff: The ideas: (a) More and more businesses are finding the most successful model for new market penetration is to give a basic product or service away free, and to charge for extras that 'improve the user experience'; (b) Useful, insightful small ideas that solve a problem that's peripheral to what your product is all about can dramatically differentiate, add value to, and get people talking about your product, and generate additional revenues with almost no incremental cost to the company. Two-tier pricing isn't new, but when the lower tier price is zero (which is what file-sharing has led to) it can be alarming to the owner of the property. The answer isn't to sue the customers, or otherwise try to get blood out of a stone, but rather to use the free first-tier products to generate buzz for the second-tier products, so that not only do they cover the losses from the first tier, they attract a huge price margin. But you can't cheat: 'Limited time' freebies and those that don't even do the basic job will rightfully be seen as coercive and devious, and can backfire. The second kind of 'free' stuff is free to the producer, not the consumer. Seth Godin's new book Free Prize Inside explains how to do it, and he's even developed a tool, Edgecraft, to exploit it.

The Tier One is going to be all the material available online for free. The Tier Two is going to be the book. Books still provide a superior experience versus reading long passages online. Books are portable. They also don't require any technology to use them. The book we have planned will be one of those that you will want to page through and enjoy just for the design itself.