Hacker News Reader

Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

The video chat market though would be approximately a gazillion times larger than the professional video and film industry wouldn't it?

View on HN

I have no idea. There's a gazillion times more people doing video calls than make professional videos, but not all of them would be willing to pay for the software and those who are probably wouldn't pay very much. It's the age old question of whether or not it's better to sell something cheaply at high volumes or more expensively at lower volumes.

Good webcams are hard to find at the moment because people are very willing to spend money on their video calls.

> people are very willing to spend money on their video calls.

MORE people are willing to spend money on webcams than in the recent past. That is why there is a supply issue. This doesn’t necessarily mean a huge number of people are willing to spend money in it in general. Doubling a relatively small number doesn’t automatically make it a big number.

>the age old question of whether or not it's better to sell something cheaply at high volumes or more expensively at lower volumes.

Factor in the support you need to accommodate your customers and you have your answer :P

You can just ignore support entirely and then it costs nothing. It's what Google does.

Better yet, create a "Help Center," that has 1,900 articles that all have a link that says, "Need more help?" and then that link goes to another of the 1,900 articles that also has a link that says, "Need more help?" And that link goes to another article, which has a popup that reads: Call 1-800-ABCDEFG. Then they call that number and get an automated system that says, "Thank you for calling. How can I help you today? You can say things like, 'I need help,' and 'I need different help.'" And then they have to speak all the menu choices. And the 0 button doesn't take them to a representative, only back to the first prompt.

This is too much fun to brainstorm.

Pretty hard to compete with the free implementations in most video chat tools...

What about marketing to live streamers and youtubers

Reply on news.ycombinator.com