Adding value by going from Free to Pay What You Want…

I think a lot of people like free and take things that are free JUST because they are free.  Things that people have no interest in really, don’t care about and would never find useful once they hear they are free, they are taken by the handfuls. It does not matter if it was free poison we were giving away. Free to many mean "take more than you will need, even if you don't need me". But does free mean value or better put does free equal valuable?

A few years ago I was speaking with Christian Gossett fromThe Red Star comic book fame and he said to me, “Never give anything away for free. People don’t value it at free.” And I have to admit, in “some” cases that is true.  I have given away over ten thousand copies of free products at LPJ Design from Buff Sheet to Daily Spell Sheet to Chase Sheet to many others. Usually we get about a 0.10% of those who downloaded it thanked us for the free product or even take a second out to review it. Why? I think when they get it for free to them there is no real “value” attached to the product. But the second we add a price to it, even with it being Pay what you want we create what Chris Anderson, author of Free: How Today's Smartest Businesses Profit byGiving Something for Nothing calls “friction”, a resistance to the “deal” or sale.

So I started to think how could I maximize both points of view of Free with Pay What You Want? And I think I have come up with something that makes me happy from a customer and business prospective.  From now on when LPJ Design releases a new product that we consider giving away for free, we will make that product available for free for 7 days. After the initial 7 day release, we will convert that product to a Pay What You Want rate. The initial 7 days will determine who is our core fans base and is this product interesting. The following Pay What You Want period will determine is this product interesting AND is there value in this product. 

I have already tried this our recently with several LPJ Design Free products that are now Pay What You Want, to discover there have been a drop on the free downloads, but there have been people who paid us for what we were giving away for free because they found value in it. Best of all, people who paid what they wanted to really determined the real value of the product and that is VERY important to me. Talk to you later…