

The Long Game - hfz
http://www.noeltock.com/startup-snippets/the-long-game/

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keiferski
My only concern is that his pricing at $5-10 will affect him _in the long
game_ by making a lower price acceptable (and expected). In other words, if I
bought your first book at $10 and thought it was awesome, why should I buy
your next book at $30? Is it really worth 300% more? Unless the pricing ramps
up extremely slowly (2nd book is $13, 3rd book is $16, etc.) it might be a
difficult sell.

Better to offer a fair price from the start, IMO. That isn't $5, nor is it
$100.

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JDGM
What is the purpose of this post? I read these styles of submission on Hacker
News often, with the jargon, and the charts, and the definitions. I usually
leave them feeling that the author has tried to persuade _themself_ something,
not me. In this case it seems justification for the pricing he chose. What is
worrying is how post-hoc this all is. He casually dropped the phrase "long
game" and worked backwards to a fully-formed rationale. Scary.

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nakedrobot2
Hehehe, we get this a lot. Customers ask us to license images (we are a
photography platform). They ask us for a special price (or free!) because "it
will be good publicity for us". Begging us to play the long game...

Take your publicity and stuff it, buddy! We already got enough of that! Now we
need to feed our kids! :-) Our game was long and now we'll play it shorter,
thank you!

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patio11
eBook pricing advice aside (long story short: _probably_ too low if that is
your first product), I'd recommend everybody internalize the advice of "The
current thing I am working on is not the last event in my career, and I should
probably purposely work on this with the eventual goal on building upon it
later."

This is true regardless of whether your main career goals are running a
business, working for funded startups, or just getting a stable job at BigCo,
by the way.

~~~
pcl
In my experience, this is particularly true when it comes to hiring. Whenever
I'm interviewing (on either side of the table), a question in the forefront of
my mind is "do I think I'll want to work with this person for the rest of my
career?" I probably won't be at my current company for the rest of my career
(which says nothing about my employer and a lot about me), but I do expect
that I'll work with the members of the same group of people again and again,
one way or another.

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eykanal
Not sure I agree with his definition. Did you go to college? You invested in
the long game. Did you earn an advanced post-bac degree? Same. Did you spend a
few months to learn a new technology? Same. Have you put some time into
creating a product, hoping someone would buy it? That is the very definition
of the long game.

Writing a book _is_ playing the long game. Pricing is simply strategy. To me,
it just looks like he's choosing his strategy for how to play the long game,
but either way it's the same thing.

