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Comment by jayliew | Hacker News Reader

Hi Phil, thanks for the comment.

Companies are definitely buying this faster than we can make them, and that remote-working use case seems to be #1. I hear ya on case-studies .. stay tuned! :)

- jay@doublerobotics.com

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Hi! This is the Market Economics Fairy! If people are buying your product faster than you can make it, it means your prices are currently set too low! There's no point in keeping the price low to stimulate demand when you can't yet increase your supply! Temporarily raise the price until you can gear up manufacturing! That way the people who need your product the most can get it right away! And you can invest more in manufacturing to satisfy more future customers! This will lead to a lovely Pareto optimal outcome with everyone living happily ever after!

(I write this with some reluctance, because this product sounds very cool and useful and yet the prices are probably set too high for the nonprofit I work for - but the more you charge now, the sooner you can scale your volume and lower your prices later, right?)

I dunno. Having seen the price, I've sent around an email to some folk at the office wondering aloud if we should get one. If the price had been twice as high, I wouldn't, and next time someone mentioned it, I'd have remembered it was too expensive ... even if the price had slipped back down due to market forces in the interim.

Is avoiding your reluctance to check the price next time worth $1,000 to them?

Maybe not. People are not that rational when it comes to the cost of something - we have an internal gauge of what is "fair", and violating that can be dangerous. Using an elastic price like this could kill their market before it's established. People are not rational - very few companies do this with their products, even ones that they can't keep on the shelves.

Understanding that if you're selling them faster than making them, generating new interest isn't your highest priority. That said, if that changes I think it'd be awesome to have some kind of loaner program. At our shop we'd be hesitant to plunk down the coin to buy one site unseen, but I could definitely see borrowing (or renting) one for a week or two to get a better understanding of what kind of value it creates for us first-hand.

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