december 2010 – Page 22 – Lykle de Vries

Go Ahead, Raise Your Business’s Prices

Amplify’d from www.inc.com

We had the audacity to charge $9.99 for a piece of software. And we make no apologies for doing so.

That’s when we started thinking about price. We’re a rare company in the Web-based software business — we actually charge for things. We think free is a business cancer. Offering some stuff for free is fine as long as you have something else to sell. But “we’ll give it all away for free and figure out how to make money later” isn’t much of a business model in our minds. We provide our software like a restaurant provides its food, a cabby provides transportation, and a clothing store offers a shirt — in exchange for money.

At 37signals, we don’t want lots of customers. We want lots of the right customers. Our goal is to maximize profits, not market share. We also want to maximize happiness — for the customers and for ourselves.

What about $1.99? Or $2.99? We could have gone there, but we wanted to use price as a tool to reduce customer demand for Draft, not increase it. That’s right: We wanted fewer customers to buy Draft.

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10 Success Strategies for DIY Musicians, Managers & Promoters by Bob Baker

Amplify’d from www.musicthinktank.com

Use this direct link to the PDF file to open and print it. (If you want to access it later, be sure to save the file to your hard drive or favorite ebook reader.)

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Jack White takes matters into his own hands and gets a mouthfull

Third Man, his label, bypasses the middle men on eBay, but pisses of hardcore fans while doing it.

Amplify’d from www.antiquiet.com

The simple nature behind all the profiteering on eBay is that people pay as much as they can for a record they want. As Jack said, “nobody told them to buy it with a gun to their head.” The records are expensive because the fans make them expensive. When a fan tried to argue that people with “more money than sense” were to blame, Jack retorted: “Or are they just paying what the going rate is?” White explained: ”We sell a Wanda Jackson split record for 10 bucks, the eBay flipper turns around and sells it for 300. If 300 is what it’s worth, then why doesn’t Third Man Records sell it for 300? If we sell them for more, the artist gets more, the flipper gets nothing. We’re not in the business of making flippers a living. We’re in the business of giving fans what they want.”

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