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Comment by derickbailey | Hacker News Reader

It is a risk buying from someone that you don't know. At one point, no one knew who PeepCode was either. Geoffrey grew his brand and became well known.

As for the price - PeeCode sells all their recent videos at $12 each, for ~1hr of content. So, $14 seemed reasonable to me (also based on the price I've paid at Tekpub, DestroyAllSoftware and other screencasting sites) considering the length of the content that I've produced.

But, you may be right. Maybe I should drop it since I am an unknown person in the screencasting world.

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I'm not a customer of coding tutorial videos, I don't know either you or PeepCode. As an outsider looking into this market, I'd like to offer my totally unqualified opinion as follows: Upwards of $10 is too high. Yeah, you'll probably sell a few, but I believe the sweet spot for those kind of purchases is around the price equivalent to a cup of coffee in a decent coffee shop. It should be low enough that people don't have to think about the price-to-risk ratio, it's something they buy on impulse just to see someone do stuff with code. I believe you'll probably get way more exposure and, ultimately, sales from being low cost.

Also, consider putting up some short but useful videos (not teasers) for free, so people get to know your style and trust your expertise. Charge for the longer, premium content.

Re: short videos - great idea.

I've got a few 5 or 10 minute videos on getting started with Test-Driven JavaScript using the Jasmine framework. I can give those away and then have a much longer episode on really diving deep into Jasmine. Hopefully I'll be able to get this done soon.

I think this is the way to go. Offer folks one or two shorter examples of your work for free, and they will be more comfortable with purchasing your longer works.

If the free examples are solid, then they will be linked to and shared. This will help establish your name and expertise in the subject matter, and will bring many more eyeballs to your site, which will hopefully convert into sales.

Sounds great! Good luck with your business. Post an update sometime, I'm be curious how it'll turn out.

I agree with this guy and I think one of the reasons for this is that a lot of the people that buy into this will do so casually: as (a) a one-off at a low price. They also (b) may not be willing to sit for an hour watching.

Agreed with making some teaser videos -- perhaps the first 15-30 minutes of the video they are interested in. Then bring up a call-to-action and measure your conversions.

Due to the possibility of people watching this at lunchtimes at work it might also be a good idea to (1) create some way for people to bookmark where they watched up to, and (2) make the site look as work-like as possible.

I wouldn't first lower the price, but rather add more information on the page about why I should trust you as a coach (who are you, what is your background etc).

My 0,02€!

that's a great idea

I'll add that Peter Cooper sells 3 hours at $24 (only with a temporary discount, see http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3177303), as another pricing point.

I am still experimenting with price but my starting price point $16 was where most sales were made. However, I do have a large audience and you tend to sell the most copies up front.. :)

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