Comment by bravoyankee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bravoyankee | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It's probably over $100 this year that I spent on copywriting books, and almost that the year before.

I will pay for information if it will help me, but the examples I've given is very basic information that's been written about for free so many hundreds of times, I'm surprised anyone would buy those ebooks.

They are ripping off the very startup community they say they are helping.

I think there's a pricing bubble going on with startups. Many monthly subscription rates are too high, especially when there are so many choices available to the consumer, and at a time when the budgets and attention span of buyers is so limited.

There seems to be no imagination in pricing, only to charge more and more. It's bad advice and I'll bet its mortally wounding a lot of young startups and impressionable kids that are trying to make a go of it.

Again, it's a con game and it's trying to gouge and profit off the start up community they say they are helping. It's shameful, but its only time before the herd snaps out of it and realizes what is happening.

There's a difference between free information and compiled free information with a bit of extra. You pay for the premium of having it all put together and not having to spend the time to go find it all. Why buy a programming book? There's lots of tutorials on the internet. Still, many people buy books.

If I were completely new to a topic, like copywriting, I would probably look for a book on the topic, rather than blogs. That's because I'd spend more time trying to find free material that's good (there's a lot of free crap out there), than to buy a pre-compiled book from a reputable source.

I agree with you that the materials have to justify their price. I've purchased a $99 information product before that was total crap, and the exact same content on the same person's website, just reformatted. In that case there's no justification, no added value. I don't know what books you're talking about to determine if they're actually any good or not, but to charge for what's normally "free" information there has to be added value.

Maybe there is a rash of startups with inflated pricing without any added value. However, as soon as the first competitor comes in that truly adds value for the same price (or less), then everyone will jump to it.

I'm not going to link to these ebooks because it doesn't deserve more attention, but it was front page HN only a day or so ago.

I will say this though: certain opinion leaders on HN are taking advantage of the readers and the prevalent herd mentality that prevails here.

RE: "I will pay for information if it will help me, but the examples I've given is basic information that's been written about for free so many hundreds of times"

I suspect your google-fu is stronger than most. Many people don't have the skills or time to do this. Should I spend 2 or 3 days searching and building a marketing strategy that works in 2012 by filtering through all the stuff written over the last 4 years and half of it is out of date or should I pay $99 dollars to get it in my inbox in PDF form. For many the $99 makes sense.

They are certainly not ripping off the startup community! If you even value your time as a startup founder at $100, it's cheaper just to by the dumb book.

Most startups doing subscriptions are doing b2b or b2h (business 2 hacker examples: github, seomoz, etc) business. Businesses and to a much lesser extent hacker don't care about the cost, but look at the value provided.

RE: "There seems to be no imagination in pricing, only to charge more and more. It's bad advice and I'll bet its mortally wounding a lot of young startups and impressionable kids..."

This is absolutely absurd! This is like saying "There seems to be no imagination in cars today, only to get better gas milage more and more". Of course, that's the point of a business is to charge so much your customers complain, but still pay you none the less. You're capturing the most value possible, while they still enjoy a net gain.

I'd argue even if this is bad advice for a majority of people, it's still good to get it out there that it is possible. Once we know it's possible, much like the 4 minute mile, we can achieve it. When it's locked away and only a choosen few know it is possible that is the real danger to impressionable kids.

I don't have special google-fu abilities. I just notice there's a glut of ebooks and courses out there that are rehashes of older content - and they are priced way too high. They are priced so high that those who need the information most cant afford it.

Stop drinking the Jonestown kool-aid that's been going around my friend. Your time isn't so valuable that you can't spend 15-20 minutes doing a diligent search online.

The ebooks I mentioned in the previous post were college textbook stuff. As basic as the stuff gets. You would need to be already under the influence of the kool-aid getting passed around here to think that's an honest price. It's not.

My point is this: the people trying to sell you stuff here are not your friend.

By being on this site you most definitely do have special google-fu abilities. The vast majority of people do not know that the top search result in yellow is an add and that you can do "exact match" searches.

If you can find 40-pages of well documented information and condense it down into clear, actionable information that you can then form a plan from in 15-20 minutes you are a much better man than I am.

For those of us that lack that particular skill set, these are screamingly good deal even at $99. For even more of us who don't personally pay for this, but put it on the company credit card, our company should fire us for wasting company time by trying to do it ourselves and not spend the $39.

Clearly, we disagree, but all I'm saying is that there are a lot of people for which these are a screamingly good deal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com