

Pay for your own dog food - nate
http://blog.inklingmarkets.com/2009/10/pay-for-your-own-dog-food.html

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tlb
Good idea. The pricing structure is part of the product. I did the halfway
version of this in a previous project: there was a special magic credit card
number which didn't actually get charged, but I got the emails every month
telling me what had been fake-charged so I felt that part of the customer
experience. Recommended.

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bemmu
People have wildly different notions about what they consider a reasonable
price for something. Before I started making social apps, I was selling import
books. I had people often paying $50 or more for something that in Japan might
have cost $5. Definitely would have missed that if I had just tried to imagine
what I would be willing to pay myself, only way I discovered the "real price"
was by auctioning items first.

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donw
It's also a good sanity check on your payments process -- if you don't get
charged, or you get charged too much, you'll know about it a lot sooner than
if you waited for customer complaints to roll in.

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sammcd
Idea works well for subscription type payments. I don't know if it works that
well for one-time software sales, though.

I'm making a mac application. Most likely I will be charging $50 for this
application. It looks like my current design budget is about $1,500. I feel
that if I find the product worth $1,500 someone might be willing to pay $50.

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eli
Doesn't seem like that would work if, say, I'm a startup trying to sell high-
volume VoIP service to large enterprises.

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joeythibault
Agreed. It really depends on your market/product. Though I will say that
finding a way to use your product (even if it is simply using your VoIP
service at low-volume) will unearth the bugs you might otherwise be missing
(but that your clients are definitely not).

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falsestprophet
It may be better to "pay" for your application by taking that money out of the
organization by donating, "losing", or burning it.

Only when the money actually disappears will you be able to have a good
feeling for how the price affects decision making.

edit: I think it would be better to burn the money than donate it to eliminate
the positive reinforcement donating would provide.

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cperciva
This is essentially how I set the pricing for Tarsnap -- I started out by
asking myself "how much would I like to pay to store my backups?"

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staunch
Nearly everyone does that, the problem is often that they're not entirely
honest with themselves. I know I've caught myself (and others) doing this:

Bob: "I'd totally pay $20/month right now for X"

Sally: "Your lucky day! Xyz.com has exactly that and it's only $15/mo!"

Bob: "Oh, um, uh, well I don't _really_ need it that bad _right now_ "

Actually taking out your personal credit card can be an enlightening
experience.

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LargeWu
This sounds a bit like the old trick of setting your alarm clock 15 minutes
fast to trick yourself into getting up earlier. It works at first, but
eventually you get used to just making the adjustment in your head and hitting
snooze a couple more times

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mbrubeck
If you own 100% of the business, then paying yourself for your own product is
just a trick. But if you have partners and investors, then it will cost you
(not the business) real money.

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InclinedPlane
Not doing this is one of the biggest problems with Microsoft's internal
dogfooding efforts, in my opinion. They dogfood just about every feature of
every product MS offers, but the one thing they never, ever dogfood is
licensing and pricing. Everyone just installs "Windows X Ultimate" or "Windows
Server X Enterprise Edition" or "Visual Studio X Team System" or "SQL Server X
Enterprise" as many times on as many machines supporting as many users as they
feel like, rather than being pressured by budgetary constraints to pick the
product that meets their needs best at a price they can afford.

The result is that most of the MS rank and file remain blithely ignorant of
the extremely high retail prices of these products and their convoluted
(sometimes almost punitive) licensing schemes. Given that licensing and
pricing is a critical aspect of software use and can easily make the
difference between user satisfaction and user desertion to a competitor's
product, I've always felt this oversight hurt Microsoft far more than they
imagine.

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prodigal_erik
When I worked there a few years back, the developer tools team was begging for
any feedback. The rest of the company would install Visual Studio Glacial Epic
Edition and maybe fire it up to edit the odd dialog template, but did as much
work as they could in vim or emacs and sometimes windbg (a much more powerful
standalone debugger from the same team). Even if you wanted to use it, you
were on your own getting it to compile your code, because the build system
everyone else used (a make clone with specific support for win32 binaries)
didn't interop at all with Visual Studio project files.

