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February 27th, 2006
On Business Value
by Joshua Porter | 
3 Comments
Jason Fried on the business value in Web 2.0:
“It’s about value — something the new web set seems afraid to 1. create, and 2. charge for. I don’t know why people are afraid to charge for their services, but here are a few ideas: 1. they don’t think they’re good enough, 2. they are afraid to offend some people, 3. they think profit and idealism don’t mix, and 4. peer pressure (“come on, man, everyone’s doing the free”).”
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Malcolm’s Got a BlogABOUT
Bokardo is a blog about interface design for social web sites and applications. I write about recommendation systems, identity, ratings, privacy, comments, profiles, tags, reputation, sharing, as well as the social psychology underlying our motivation to use (or not use) these things. If this sounds interesting to you, grab my RSS Feed. If you want to know more about me, check out my about page.
Designing for the Social Web
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Comments ( 3 Responses so far )
1. PJ Hyett on February 27th, 2006 (Comment) #
37 Signals is in a much better position to charge for their software. In a situation where you are building a social app, you will seriously hinder growth if you charge for your service…until your user base is large enough. It really just depends on the service that you’re offering.
2. Josh on February 28th, 2006 (Comment) #
PJ, agreed to some extent. But doesn’t 37Signals offer free versions of their software? Their strategy is amazingly straight-forward, yet others don’t seem to try it out, instead opting for growth over charging money. Why not do both?
3. Student Organization Guy on August 5th, 2006 (Comment) #
I’m building an application that is free. I do think it’s way good enough to charge for and I’m not giving in to the web 2.0 peer pressure. It’s free because I believe my product is inevitable. It’s a mystery to me why no one has stolen the market on this one. Guy Kawasaki says the more inevitable your product/service is, the more you should strive to establish a standard, take the market, make less on each customer, and secure a strong beachhead. Maybe I’m a bit foolish to believe my product falls into that category, but only time will reprove me and I sure am having fun building it!