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Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

This almost sounds fair; Time is money. You want to use my free time to sell me something? Then compensate me for using up that free time or get lost.

10p a minute is £6 an hour or $7.83 USD, slightly more than US minimum wage which I see as being a fair starting point.

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Time is indeed money. Most companies track customer acquisition cost in dollars and I've often wondered whether both parties - customers and companies - would like a more direct model.

Let's say an employee earns $50/hour. And a SaaS has identified that employee as being a decision maker on their service. And let's say my current CAC ie $10,000 and the lifetime value of the service is 25k. And let's say that the SaaS closes 1 out of every 5 people that sees the demo.

Wouldnt there be appetite for the SaaS to offer 5 potential decision makers $500 each to participate in a demo? And another $1000 to the DMs company? The CAC decreases by 25% and the spend goes to the people and companies most participating in the process as opposed to tools like Marketo, and spend, etc.

Anyway, I think the guy here has hit on something but not at a high enough price.

Most serious companies have ethical policies that would require disclosure of such a scheme (as in, if you are targeting me, and giving me a gift, I need to tell my boss) and others will flat out deny or disallow such gifts.

I think a disclosure would be part of it for sure.

Pretty sure that would be a conflict of interest

Wasnt this the premise of earn.com?

I suspect the better answer is to just lower costs for the same benefit - customers come to you attracted by the lower costs and you don't have the free-rider problem that it becomes profitable to generate time wasting corps to do a bunch of paid demos to make money at the cost of productivity to all involved.

Surprisingly this doesnt work that well and degrades the product. I've actually had success in RAISING the price to get more demos booked.

And that is how the yearly HR ethics video you are required to watch was born. Lol

One place I was at had a scenario where working on location with a client and they offered you a private chef. I told my manager there is no way I'm passing up a private chef.

LOL that’s awesome.

1 out of 5 people who see the demo without compensation buy the product. The only incentive they had to see the demo is that they were at least somewhat considering purchasing.

But if you start paying people, then a lot of people who have zero interest will participate just to pocket the money. Your close rate will go way way down.

If you think you have a really kick ass product that everybody will want when they see it though?

well probably you will alter your thinking based on feedback, but maybe not!

This is basically how advertising works. You're using most likely several, free, ad supported websites or apps. Instead of paying for the app you're using, you're compensating the developer with your attention on ads and the developer is then paid based on that. Instead of directly getting money for hearing pitches or being the subject of cold calls, you get to use free services.

that would be surely against any anti-birbing policy a company has.

at least do what doctor do and book them expensive vacation at exclusive venues where you coincidentally are pitching your company product.

> You want to use my free time to sell me something? Then compensate me for using up that free time or get lost.

If this isn't used widely, it's a diabolical strategy. "Hey can I give you $5 for some of your time, I have a product I really believe in and would like to tell you about it." It not only creates an expectation of reciprocity, but creates a sort of cognitive dissonance (salesmen are usually asking for money, not giving it) which is an event that is known to make people more susceptible to influence... there's probably so many reasons why this could be a viable strategy in some cases.

This is done for consumer surveys quite often. They will send you a $5 or $10 bill (cash) along with a, usually long, survey.

Nielsen, check your post, people, free unsolicited money!

This is how timeshares are sold. The testament to their success is that they offer much more than $5, typically show tickets or hotel stays.

Yeah, now that I think about it, almost everyone does this in some form or another. I would even argue that making your business look nice (like a well furnished bar, etc) has the same type of effect. You go in, it looks nice, and you feel good about being in nice surroundings. So you get that initial reward before the business engagement even begins. Just reflecting on my own experience, I feel like I have been colder to businesses that don't look nice. I didn't think it was related to reciprocity[1] until now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_(social_psychology...

IMHO inbound calls should have negative price for everybody by default. Phone network operators should raise prices for calling people and share part of this money with the recipient.

How does this work when a friend is calling you?

Whitelisting, and you can press a button to refund after the call.

No, there should be no option to refund. If there is it will become a moral obligation, many people will feel bad about not-refunding in whatever a case.

I mean when non-spammers but annoying people call.

It's about mass marketing spam, not people you know. People you know will call from a consistent phone number, and you can use time tested methods such as not answering instead of making them pay 0.10 to talk to you.

If they're a real friend and you're not an asshole you'll call them as often as they call you.

Most of my friends don't (and I love this!), they send me messages in Telegram and WhatsApp and we either discuss the matter this way or meet in person. If I felt like I am to call a friend I wouldn't mind to spend twice the rate and I would certainly love a half to go to the friend's account instead of just the phone company account.

Just ban spam calling.

This is not easy to define, so this does not seem like a realistic strategy.

Not all annoying and inane calls are spam.

I also don’t want my doctors office to call me to remind me of a reservation I already got reminded by SMS and email, and would have received a fax if they knew I could receive them.

I strongly agree inbound call should have way higher cost for the caller, except for very special cases like emergency services and administrations. I’ll pay to call my family, it’s important enough to me. I’m already paying for support and other service lines anyway.

On the other hand isn't it amazing that we live in a world where phone calls are so cheap almost everyone can afford to call their families?

To all the calculators here who are counting his riches:

>so to call him now costs 10p, from which he receives 7p.

10p/min sounds nice, but 7p * 60 minutes = 4.2GBP

The real trick is then tying it into the jolly roger and having it do all the hard work.

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