Comment by jermaustin1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jermaustin1 | Hacker News Reader

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From what I can gather on you page, you are offering a service that reads an article for a person then gives them a brief summary.

This landing page is too busy with the animated backgrounds as you scroll.

From my short look, I think you will have a hard time finding that person who has no time to read an article and instead wants to outsource that to you. You would do better if instead of having a human summarize the articles, utilize one of the many NLP Summarizers out there (they aren't great but they scale). More about that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_summarization

You can charge users for credits, then base how much an article costs on its length.

For a product like this it is always best to hide the true cost behind credits, then charge tiered prices for the credits.

Buy 100 credits for $7 or 1000 for $25, etc.

You will then want to explain WHY the person NEEDS this, and probably in autoplaying animated video with a professional voice over actor reading a script that is also close captioned in the video (test the autoplay though. some audiences convert like crazy on it, others bounce).

Then have 3 product offerings, NLP, Human Written and a Voice Mail type MP3 recording of the summary.

Most people will go for the NLP, but some will pay for written, and you can out source that to various crowd sourcing platforms for about $1. For the voice mail you will probably have to pay $1 for the summary then $3 for a person to read it.

Credits should be purchased on a subscription plan for a discount over the one-time purchases, and you should offer a few sample outputs and get testimonials from people.

That should get you started! If you have any other questions, let me know.

>For a product like this it is always best to hide the true cost behind credits, then charge tiered prices for the credits.

With due respect to jermaustin1, please, people, do not take this bit of advice. Using credits or other pseudo-currency is a standard dark pattern used by casinos and free-to-play games to extract more revenue from customers by obscuring the amount of cash that a user is paying for a given action. See, for example, http://evilbydesign.info/greed/money-to-tokens/.

It signals that a business is willing to take advantage of human cognitive blind-spots to get additional revenue rather than being purely focused on delivering good value for money.

For people who disagree with RandomOpinion, care to share why? I'm struggling to think of any valid reason for using credits.

It does allow you more flexibility with pricing. As an example, iStock sell photos that cost 1 credit or 3 credits depending on how fancy they are. But the credits cost a variable amount depending on whether you bought a few credits or hundreds. So they can offer a tiered a la carte pricing structure that also has bulk discounts. Hard to tick all those boxes without credits.

Multiple companies I've used simply offered me a bonus in $/€ when I made a larger deposit, say, paying 20€ gets you 20€ in your account, but 40€ gets you 44€ (bonus of 10%).

It's currency independent. Instead of having to provide a different price for each country/currency, you can just say it's a certain number of credits and simplify the look of your store for it. That's one reason why it's common in virtual stores in games (it is still a dark pattern and can be used to take advantage of people, I agree, but it also has its benefits).

Everyone around the world can discuss an item and be like 'it costs 50 tokens for blah' and do comparisons between items in the store based on simple token amounts, but actually be paying different costs (and see different amounts) for it with their own currency.

To use programmer terms, it adds a layer of abstraction on top of the service, with all the associated pros and cons that goes along with that.

Thanks for the suggestions. I want to try a human-powered summary first, and see results.

I agree that credits might work better, but I love transparency and therefore I'll also stick with money :)

For sure, and always do what works both for you and your customers. I know that credits have worked for me in the past when the pricing doesn't make much since in US$.

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