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Comment by redhal | Hacker News Reader

I find it a little shady to wait for people to get to half the course before requiring to buy it.

It is effectively a free trial of the course, which seems fine as long as it is disclosed upfront that the rest of the content is paid.

Edit: after actually using the site I see your point, the only indicator is the small text "free preview" which I probably wouldn't have noticed without first having read the Show HN post.

Hi! Do you think there's any way we can make it clearer what's going on? I put "free preview" at the top, but perhaps it can be easily missed.

I also didn't notice the "Free Preview" on the progress bar until reading about it in this thread.

As distasteful as it may be, an actual heading or otherwise strongly formatted text note near the top should suffice for most people.

It looks like you cut the preview from 46% of this chapter to just 22% of the chapter... I went back to look for a quote from about 41% of the way through to explain to another commenter why the style is so effective and ran into the paywall earlier than I had my first time through. Just FYI, the content before 22% isn't strong enough to sell the preview. It has to get to the questions where you're asking for intuitive guesses on the real mathematical expressions to make it clear how valuable this is.

Honestly, you should just be giving away this whole chapter. If you did then I could forward it to colleagues, let them learn this one concept and suggest they get the rest of the info.

As it is I really can't do that. It'd be like giving a friend a flyer that was shoved under my door.

Hey, thanks for the feedback (and your kind words!). I've moved the paywall back to (roughly) where it was. It's a challenge to find the right balance between showing off the content, but also leaving enough to encourage people to buy the course! All ideas appreciated for tweaks and alternative payment models :)

Indeed, especially at an eye popping $30 an hour or so for content.

Hi, it's actually $29 for the entire course, of which this post is just one chapter. Was there some content that suggested it was $29 for just this chapter? I need to fix that if so!

Ah, that's a surprise. It went from 0 to 46% then it popped a "buy me" dialog, I had assumed it was $29 the 47-100%. I only took 10-20 minutes and seemed pretty pricey for another 10-20 minutes. Maybe add a "$29 for this course/N chapters" or "$29 for a course and show the syllabus".

Thanks for the reply! I can see now that it's not super clear. I might assume the same thing at first sight. I'll see what I can do to clarify it.

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