As I near the six month anniversary of putting my first ever for-pay product on sale online, I’ve been thinking a bit lately about the idea of paying for information, services and software. Many of my nerdier acquaintances would rather give themselves knee surgery with a salad fork than pay $10 for a software application. I get the occasional email from a would-be customer asking how in the hell I could possibly fathom somebody paying me that much for a PDF. Me? I’m happy to pay for things like that and I’m going to tell you why. Since my rationale differs slightly when apologizing the payment for services versus knowledge, I’ll explain my position for each individually.
Paying for Services
I currently pay for the most expensive account that Github offers to regular folks. Now, I know my way around a server and could have definitely spent a weekend getting a git server setup somewhere, but being able to chump out a few dollars per month and know that not only did I not need to set the thing up myself, I also don’t need to worry about it being available - they have people they pay to do that. The one, two or three hours of time I would spend administering a git server each month is worth *way* more to me than what I pay Github to do it for me.
Could I run a (very) small freelance business using just email and Google Docs and without paying for Basecamp? Sure, but it would be a huge pain in the ass that I’m thrilled to pay a few bucks a month to avoid.
Do I really need to pay for Dropbox when I could get the basic functionality using cheap web hosting and some creative rsync+cron hackery? Maybe, but why on earth would I bother when I could get so much more for the price of a large, one-topping pizza?
Could I put together a functional task management system using pen, paper (not free, but practically) and Google Calendar instead of chumping out $140 for Omnifocus for OSX/iPhone/iPad? You bet your ass, but I’d rather pay to eliminate the friction.
I could go on, but the point is that, when I pay for services, I’m paying for less friction than the free alternative. Which, far as I’m concerned, means more time doing actual work than stumping around with subpar tools.
Paying for Knowledge
When somebody plunks down their beer money for a copy of my ebook, they aren’t paying for knowledge, really. They’re paying to avoid spending the time it would take to learn everything I know about Evernote. Frankly, everything in my ebook is available by either Googling or simply dinking around with the software for a (rather long) while. I may relay the information in an amusing fashion, but I didn’t invent it.
I’ve paid for several instructional courses dealing with online sales and marketing (since, after all, this is a business) as well as how to make better use of my text editor and how to suck less at this blogging thing. As I read through them, much of what I read seemed like common sense, but I was still happy to have paid for it since the alternative would have been my making a whole lot of mistakes or spending endless hours, again, searching Google and whatnot.
Noticing a common thread here?
Yup. Time.
That’s what I’m paying for. That’s what everybody who buys my ebook is paying for. That’s what I get when I pay for Github, Basecamp, Dropbox and Omnifocus.
Time spent using tools that could work better or for which there are better alternatives is time wasted. Time spent learning something that somebody already knows and has made available to you is time wasted.
Now, I realize this doesn’t make sense for everybody. If you’re just starting out and don’t have more spare time than spare cash, then you might find the expenditure of time to be a more feasible option. I did exactly that for a good while, but it’s important to realize that, as your business grows, the scale will eventually tip in the other direction because your time will become more valuable and it will make way more sense to spend $20 per month instead of 90 minutes.
I think the big hangup for a lot of folks is simply the spending of money. Even if it makes perfect sense to do it, they simply can’t stomach the idea of paying $2.97 per gallon of gas at the station next door when they can get it for $2.93 a mile up the road. It’s not just about the money your not spending — it’s even more about the time you *are* spending.
Are you getting enough value for your time spent?
Photo by 917press
[...] I pay for a service, it’s usually because I am deriving significant value from it. There are many tools I develop myself but some are so well done that I don’t want to waste [...]