
Never have a limit on your income - pchristensen
http://sivers.org/nolimit
======
dmm
The author of this article is completely wrong.

Providing a "hands-on" product or service does not limit your income. If you
are a masseuse with a 10,000 person waiting list, your problem is very easy to
solve.

Raise your price.

That will simultaneously reduce your waiting list and increase your income.
The only limit on what you can make with a "hands-on" skill is the amount
people are willing to pay. The author needs a basic understanding of supply
and demand relationships.

~~~
cstejerean
you can't just keep raising your price forever. There is a balance where you
can make the most profit.

~~~
mattmaroon
You can raise it quite a bit when you have a waiting list of 10k people.

~~~
kirubakaran
And raising it beyond a reasonable amount (with people still wanting it) makes
you a purple cow. This makes the demand go up even higher.

------
aggieben
I get the point, but live performances by musicians are a pretty weak example.
A performer can only do one performance at a time like a masseuse, but unlike
a masseuse, a performer can service a very scalable number of people
simultaneously.

i.e., a performance musician is merely selling concert tickets rather than
CDs. Tickets are less scalable than CDs, but can be sold with a much higher
profit and don't need to be as scalable.

------
randrews
Hmm. For the pen example, isn't it true that the pen manufacturer has a limit
on their income? If they have a small shop that makes pens by hand, and you
order a million of them, how are they going to fulfill the order? For CDs,
same deal with the company that actually presses them, even if the musician
providing the content is already done.

If you sell a physical object, someone somewhere in the supply chain has a
limited income, even if it's not you.

~~~
pchristensen
And somewhere in the supply chain, there's the law of conservation of
attractive profits.

------
mattmaroon
This article is all around dumb. Whoever wrote it doesn't appear to understand
either the laws of supply and demand, or the music industry. Or he's just
denying to himself that his site, which is based on the CD industry, is about
to go the way of the cassette tape.

Concerts are highly scalable. The Rolling Stones sell out one arena after
another full of 50k+ people. Their "A Bigger Bang" tour grossed $558m in 147
concerts over about 2 years. That's far more than any artist ever made in 2
years off of CD sales.

And true, I guess they can't scale much beyond that, but any other musician
can scale all the way up to it and none have. But placing a limit of $558m on
your income seems fine to me.

------
dangoldin
Basically the same thing as what Taleb mentions in "The Black Swan"

Some careers are easily scalable and others aren't.

~~~
mattmaroon
That may be true, but lack of scalability doesn't necessarily impose a limit
on your profit. And touring is highly scalable.

------
ojbyrne
It doesn't really talk about competition. Since this is common sense, it's
inevitable that people will pile into whatever business you're talking about
until profits go to zero. If you're in a commodity business like, uh, pens,
you're going to be worrying about the lower limit on your income - wishing you
had one.

------
motoko
Better translation: Don't sell your time.

