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Comment by rekshaw | Hacker News Reader

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rekshaw

The article is interesting, but what intrigued me the most was the carefully coordinated marketing:

- Medium article to capture inbound and not make it look like an ad, but a "We want to share this discovery with you"

- Hacker News submission to get audience

- (probably) team upvote boost to trigger front page

- 50% off promotion ending in ~4 hours with the tagline "you'll never see this offer again".

Cost of advertising: $0. Nice job!

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Not to mention every comment dpower has made is on a post related to Hiri. Maybe HN should just explicitly allow and tag accounts made to promote a company. It makes sense that people who create products want to talk about them, and they can certainly have valuable advice or insights. That might give them a platform to share more without people feeling there's some hidden motive.

I'm a lurker, not a poster for the most part. And as you can see from our blog, we don't write that often. We don't really do content marketing. Any revenue we make as a result of this post certainly won't cover the time I've spent writing it. Hiri is a bit specialist.

Would be happy to tag the posts - think it's pretty clear this is a company blog though. Your point is well taken/made all the same.

I've come to associate those things with snake oil. They're right up there with "Free trial, but you need to put in a credit card." Sure, some legit services use those techniques, but they're a red flag that they might be a pain to deal with if you choose to back out.

A lot of legit services take a cc with trial sign up to separate the people who might pay from the people who would pay if it was the right solution. The right thing to do when taking a cc for a trial is to send reminder emails that they will be charged.. Which not enough do.

I see more and more startups using stripe, between that and the ability to do chargeback with that cc company, I worry less about it. The chargeback dispute is quite powerful.

> The right thing to do when taking a cc for a trial is to send reminder emails that they will be charged.. Which not enough do.

Not sure about that. Wouldn't the "right thing to do" be to not auto-renew the account? Suspend the account after the trial until the user logs in and confirms the renewal?

Those would also be good ideas.

The worst scenario is when the subscription begins and the user has forgotten the cancelation date. A link could be embedded in the email to say yes or no. It must be profitable not to do this for some.

> The right thing to do when taking a cc for a trial is to send reminder emails that they will be charged.. Which not enough do.

> Wouldn't the "right thing to do" be to not auto-renew the account?

I suspect we sometimes conflate "right" and "convenient". I am curious, don't most people (especially those with technical chops) just drop a calendar event as a reminder?

- (probably) team upvote boost to trigger front page Nope - the HN algo would murder us for this. Don't risk it.

- 50% off promotion ending in ~4 hours with the tagline "you'll never see this offer again". You'll see this if it's your first visit to the site, been that way for a while. But that's another article...

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