You did get me to click the 'upgrade' button, but the pricing is too high for me.
I did one search with 4 criteria, then added the two free columns, and at this point i had spent 750 of my 1000 free credits. The next tier being $49 with only 8000 credits, which means only 10 searches a month.
The search I did was super useful, and I would love to use the product, and reccomend it to my coworkers. But the pricing is what stops me.
Best of luck. I'll probably use it once a month if I can remember :)
DK is Autocorrelation says: The DK article is based on a false premise, we got to disregard it
"I cant let go..." says: Actually, given that we assume people are somewhat capable of self-assessment, which is reasonable, "DK is Autocorrelation" is the one based on a false premise, and we should disregard that one instead, and not DK.
I would ask people to spend 2 minutes with the website/product and then answer: 1) To what extent you understand what this product is? (scale 1-7) 2) To what extent do you understand how you could use the product? (scale 1-7) 3.1) How probable is it that you will start using the product? (scale 1-7) 3.2) Please explain why/why not? (open ended).
Having people understanding what the product is and does and how and why they should use it is the first gate you need to pass.
Thanks for instant reply. I was not clear in my description. I want to put across this feedback questions to users who have already signed up and logged into the system once.
I work with a startup that sells education games to elementary schools in Norway. We did a survey, where we sent out 600 forms to teachers and got 154 responses. At the end of the form we had an extremely short description of the concept and a check-box for “yes, I would like to try this product together with my students”. We got 94 signups from that.
There are a lot of great answers here already, however if you just do everything at once, you have no idea what works and not. Therefore, my advice is to take all of the great strategies mentioned here and write them down in “column A” in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Then write todays date in “column B”. Then choose one of the strategies in the list, preferably one you believe in. In the intersection between the date and the strategy write “Procedure: <exactly how you plan to proceed>, Measure: <exactly how you plan to measure the result, i.e. pageviews, signups etc.>, Result: <the results per metric>, Comments: <any comments that you think you’d like to remember when you read this in three months> ”. Then do exactly what you planned to do, measure the results and write them down in the designated field. Next day (or when the first strategy is done) pick a new strategy and repeat the process.
I work with a lot of startups, and one of the things we keep learning is that it is a lot harder to get customers than it is to build something. Therefore try to think of marketing as a puzzle, a challenge to be solved. The key is to keep experimenting, and measure everything until you find something that works, then keep experimenting and measuring.
This is a fun experiment, but in real life transactions create wealth. If a buyer doesn’t feel that the widget she's been offered at a certain price is worth more than the price then she won't buy it. Similarily, if the seller feels the widget is worth more than the price, he won't sell. Therefore, a transaction means wealth wads created since both parties' wealth has increased after the transaction.
I’m pointing this out because it is quite a common misunderstanding that a certain amount of wealth exists in the world, and that it is a zero sum game, where someone has to loose every time someone wins.
Economists call it "increasing utility". When, in a free market with perfect information, you part with your money in exchange of a good it is assumed to be because the good has higher utility for you than the money it costs. A transaction increases utility for the two parts concerned, otherwise it will not happen.
> A transaction increases utility for the two parts concerned, otherwise it will not happen.
But it happens all the time, through manifactured desire and the exploitation of people's addictions. People are not "rational actors" even though economic theory attempts to dictate it. In fact, most of consumerism seems to be built on getting people to buy things that in turn does not help them to create even more value.
You start off fine by saying that in the context of addictions and other mental aberrations, people are not likely to act in their long term best interests. But then you say this:
> In fact, most of consumerism seems to be built on getting people to buy things that in turn does not help them to create even more value.
In this context, "creating wealth" is not about accumulating resources to create 'even more value' a la Capital. It seems like you're confounding wealth and capital, and they're very different things here. Here we're talking about wealth as meaning economic welfare. Society has more economic welfare--Wealth--when economic exchange happens because resources are allocated in a way that increases utility for everyone.
Life wouldn't be worth living if we worked for the sole purpose of creating lasting capital, in order to build more capital. Consumerism is necessary, so
>In fact, most of consumerism seems to be built on getting people to buy things that in turn does not help them to create even more value.
isn't really a bad thing.
So your first idea and your second idea are only marginally related, and combining them probably hurts your argument overall.
> But it happens all the time, through manifactured desire and the exploitation of people's addictions.
That's not a free market with perfect information, which is the economics equivalent of assuming away friction in Freshman physics exercises.
> People are not "rational actors" even though economic theory attempts to dictate it.
Economic theory doesn't "attempt to dictate" that people are rational actor, it uses the rational actor as a useful simplification that is broadly useful in describing large scale effects, and also one for which it is easy to identify specific difference between the model and reality and their effects, as well.
Admittedly, lots of people -- either through ignorance or because it suits what they are trying to sell -- treat the rational actor model or its implications for an idealized market as descriptions of real (or proposed) conditions when this is inappropriate given readily verifiable differences between the conditions that apply in the market and the explicit assumptions of the rational actor model, but that's more political salesmanship than economic theory.
There's something very cognitively tempting about "People are not entirely rational actors, therefore people are entirely irrational actors", but it's not true. The rational actor model is incorrect; this is beyond dispute. However, it is still largely correct, and it remains more correct than many of the naive models that people rush to substitute in. The economists of the past did not use that model because they were stupid; they used it because it is the most accurate tractable approximation that was available to them.
Also, economics is quite radically value-neutral; if you come to enjoy using deodorant, even if you've never heard of it before it was advertised at you, you are still obtaining utility and value from purchasing deodorant. There's no morality in the "value" that is used in economics, no decision about whether a person "really" gets value out of an item or not. It is also a very cognitively tempting idea, that one can declare oneself the arbiter of what is "true value", but if you actually try to use it in the math the model completely fails to match reality. You may feel free to create your own such definition; I unashamedly have one myself, we all do, really. But it's not what economics use, because it doesn't produce useful results.
How do you distinguish "manufactured desire and the exploitation of people's addictions" and "genuine" or "natural" desires? Similarly, how do you distinguish "fake happiness where the person just thinks they're happy but isn't really happy" and "genuine" or "natural" happiness?
You expect to be better off after the exchange (which is precisely it happens). You can however regret your decision so ex ante and ex post have to be differentiated.
You can try to improve that model, but I would bet that you will get rising inequality as well, it will just be masked by the growth ad infinitum. And unlike in the Norvig's model, in your model the inequality will not be bounded.
Of course, in the real world, people need upkeep (which could be modeled as a fixed amount subtracting from their wealth over time). So not all transactions are net positive, because at some point you have no choice as to whether or not to buy food. Which would even exacerbate the effects of inequality for low income people.
