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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

I admire the effort, but I don't think the mental effort required to create a Google Group is so high as to pay $10 for this service. Google Groups really aren't that hard; from a college kid's perspective, all students and teachers are already familiar with the ecosystem to the extent that even 60+ year old professors don't need to ask a student to help them after class just to set one up.

Frankly, it takes more effort for me to grab my credit card from my wallet and input the payment information than it does to set up a Google Group.

Still, best of luck to the 37signals team! I love the idea of one-off services like these.

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I posted a comment on their blog about this, not sure if it went through though (old IE version here at work...)

I think they WAY overstate the difficulty of setting up a Google Group. I just did it in 2-3 steps.... All of the "settings", "more settings" and "permissions" they describe all work JUST FINE as defaults.

Not only that, it is free....

They talk about filling out a Captcha as "difficult", but I have a hard time seeing how filling out credit card details is any easier

I personally don't think this would have got any attention if it wasn't out of the 37Signals shop.

As a P.S., did you notice how they display the Google Groups signup with form validation errors? ....

"I personally don't think this would have got any attention if it wasn't out of the 37Signals shop"

It likely wouldn't have, and wouldn't be viable for a 'regular' startup without an existing audience of people who've already bought web services and trust the brand.

Yes, there will be some non 37s customers who become customers because of this, but this will succeed financially primarily because of the already built-in audience.

It doesn't make this product less worth executing by 37s right? What's wrong about bootstraping your next product by previous one?

There is nothing wrong with Bootstrapping subsequent projects using your last one.

I just believe that there is so little value prop in this (if you are even moderately competent using Google) that I have a hard time seeing it succeed at $10 unless the 37s name pushes it up.

No. I mean that they're one of the few companies that could actually make this work, because of their existing position and network.

I didn't say there was anything wrong with it.

I imagine 37signals know what they are doing with the pricing here. It would be fascinating to hear how they did their customer and pricing research for this product.

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