

Picking a firm from Sortfolio to redesign Signal vs. Noise - prabodh
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2164-picking-a-firm-from-sortfolio-to-redesign-signal-vs-noise

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dugmartin
Refreshing to see a SvN comment list that wasn't a bunch of variations on "you
are awesome!". Requiring a tweet with text in front of the @ reply is just
encouraging Twitter follower spam. That is fine, but at least own up to it.

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icey
Summary: "Give us money and advertise our product for us and then we'll
_consider_ you for this project."

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Vindexus
Not really. If the terms were actually "Gives us $99 dollars and we'll
consider you" then you would be correct. However the terms are "Use our $99
service and we'll consider you." It's not the price to be considered, it's the
price of a Pro Sortfolio listing AND consideration for this project.

The "advertise our product" part is true, but I think that's just a good idea.

~~~
icey
I just dislike marketing disguised as magnanimity.

I don't really see much difference between "give us $99" and "we will only
consider people who pay us $99 a month".

Edit: Here's what Jason has to say about it in the comments:

 _It’s no different than entering a design in a design annual or contest. You
pay to be included, they publish a book, you get exposure. Thousands and
thousands of design firms do this every year. They pay to be included in a
promotional piece in the hopes that someone will see their work and consider
them for a project._

I also liked the person that pointed out that only 86 people have to sign up
or upgrade for 37signals to get their redesign for free.

~~~
jasonfried
Seeing that we have about 170 paying Sortfolio customers, we find it highly
unlikely that 86 would sign up because of one promotion.

This Pro-only rule was mostly done as a value-add for our existing Pro
customers. If new customers sign up that would be great, but even if no one
did that would be completely fine with us. We don't need to fund this redesign
with Sortfolio money.

~~~
icey
I loved "Getting Real" and I pre-ordered "Rework" as soon as I could. I like
making money too, so I see where you're coming from.

That being said, this feels misguided to me. I think you could have avoided
all of the hubbub by just asking for a Sortfolio link and a tweet. I'm sure
the product is good enough that you'd end up with some number of upgrades
anyways.

If you really wanted a "value-add" for your existing Pro customers, you would
have opened this up to them separately, especially since the big selling
points of pro subscriptions revolve around being able to separate yourself out
from the crowd with premium real-estate on the page and larger ads. If I were
a pro member, I would think this actually devalues my membership as it
encourages more people to compete with the premium page locations.

Nobody is insinuating you guys need any kind of financial help; if they
thought that was the case I don't think people would have said a peep about
it.

At the end of the day, you're still the guy that a lot of people get their
business ideas from; I'm sure you know what you're doing. At least it will be
easy for the rest of us to quantify the results with a simple Twitter search:
<http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23sortfoliosvn>

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iisbum
This is very shady. Sounds very much like VC's requiring a fee to hear a pitch
from a startup.

Yeah nobody has to enter if they don't want, but isn't that the same argument
people have used with spec work.

