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Comment by jasonmcalacanis | Hacker News Reader

we did this via a multipart rush:

1. social media links from 40 or so team members (including my social footprint which is fairly large).

2. an email to 10,000 of our users with links to free products

3. a roadblock on Mahalo.com with a popup

4. getting featured in some "formerly paid now free" apps/websites. Which we didn't actually ask for... they just found the price drop and listed us.

What I can't figure out is how to make education free and pay for all this content (we make our own videos, hire and pay folks, etc). Kahn has donations, Lynda.com is $25 a month and DVDs and books are $35 each.

I'm banking on there being a model for $1.99 to $9.99 educational apps.

Thoughts? Are we doing it right?

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I have a failure of an app with 300 sales/$450 revenue in 8 months. I dropped it to free last weekend. It got picked up by AppAdvice and had 50,000 downloads in a week. It would have been more but Apple has a horrific bug when dropping from paid to free where some users are unable to download it.

My app is a Utility app that people seem to enjoy, but I don't think there is a paid market for it. People simply aren't willing to pay for such things. I'm in the middle of moving to a completely free setup with tips via IAP. No ads, no pay walls. Totally free. I have no idea if it'll work but I can't make less than I already am! It's currently waiting for review so hopefully in a couple of weeks I can do a writeup on the experience.

I wonder if you can ride the free push into solid reviews, feedback and a better product that folks will pay .99 for?

Clearly "usage" plays some sort of role in rank, so i think it's good to get a large base of users and then be paid. or something like that.

My thoughts:

- thanks for the free apps, I appreciate it

- I don't like "roadblocks". Why don't you change the design on mahalo.com to feature your message prominently?

- mahalo.com looks cheap, improve the design

- why are you blogging on Google Plus? Blog under your own domain. That way the page design could also inform me of your design values, plus that space around the blog post could be used to show me a preview and guide me to your main page.

Have you tried making half the content free, and the other half unlockable? The majority of the top grossing apps use in app purchases.

We're going to do that next. Right now we have "courses" which are inapp purchases, but not a portion of the "main course." That's what we will try next: first two chapters free, next five for $1.99.

In app is the way to go. It matches value creation to revenue reasonably well -- much better than blindly charging for the app or giving all the content away for free.

Also, be very defensive with the upgrade marketing copy so you don't get negative reviews.

P.S., I am glad that you are joining the club of quality educational content producers that charge for their products. There are plenty of us that make good livings doing it, and producing great pilates instruction will make millions of men's wives/girlfriends slightly hotter, and for that you deserve both admiration and compensation. Cheers.

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