Sales Funnel

I was reading a blog post. Found a picture near the bottom and thought it was part of the post. No. It was an advertisement. The girl with the big jugs caught my eye. I clicked through.

I saw a promotion for T-shirts. Nothing new. A girl with a big chest filling out a shirt has been used before. At first I thought the promotion was a buy three, get three shirts free one. Nope. Upon closer inspection, it was buy three, get six free.

Now I am one for a good deal. This was starting to sound like a good deal. I read the fine print. The only catch was that any upcharges would be applied to all the free shirts as well. Fair enough. Then I started trying to pick some shirts. The site was slow. Every options I chose took a while. Not good if I plan to buy 9 shirts.

I wanted a larger size. Upcharge. I wanted a color other than white. Upcharge. The deal was getting less and less attractive as I went along. The price was rising. And it was going to take forever to wait for the site to respond to all the options I needed to make. Sale lost. Too bad.

The Proposition

I found quite the interesting offer over on Hacker News. Dude put out a call for developers with ideas. He would put up $5k to pay for the developer to code up their idea. When done, dude would spend an additional $3k to promote the product. In the end, dude and developer would split the proceeds 50-50.

There was some comment backlash that 50% sounded a bit steep for $8k. However this was for ideas that were sitting around unfinished. Also the dude was offering expertise in marketing, and putting up all the cash. I actually kind of liked the idea.

The only caveat is that he dude required that he approve the initial idea. It has to be good enough for him to invest the $9k. That sounds fair enough to me. I wonder if he would back my latest game idea. I could probably code up an MVP in a month or two. There is only one way to find out.

The Goal of Free

I found this site that provides a daily list of free Kindle books. These aren't some lemons that nobody wants. They seem like good books. The reviews show 4 or 5 stars (out of 5) for most of them. I wondered why the authors were allowing the books to be distributed for free.

I have been reading a bunch of these books recently. And I am getting some ideas on wht is going on. Sometimes the free book is the first one in a series of books. I suspect the authoer is trying to get me hooked so I buy the rest of the series. Other authors are brand new. I bet they are just trying to prove how good an author they are. Then I might purchase some of their other titles.

Another technique might be getting buzz about a book. If you can get enough downloads, driven by a free price, your book could rise up in popularity. Then the price could be changed from free, allowing the author to profit.

Perhaps there might be some authors who just want to give their works away. Does not make much business sense. But hey. Not everything needs to be done to turn a buck I guess.