Using picodollars attracts exactly the customers I want.
You have absolutely no idea how many people have told me that they started using Tarsnap because of the picodollars.
You have absolutely no idea how many people have told me that they started using Tarsnap because of the picodollars.
I work for various hedge funds in NYC and none of my clients will ever take Tarsnap seriously based on your pricing. They equate pricing with quality.
As far as picodollars go, I figured that hedge funds would understand those perfectly -- after all, they're in the business of shaving microseconds off their order times so that they can extract a few extra microdollars per share, right?
I have a tremendous respect for you and I love your product. But you have to understand that hedge funds do not care about 'saving money' as much as they care about 'making money'. So yes, they will go to crazy lengths to shave microseconds off their order times but they will not try to save a penny while they are conducting their business.
From their perspective, when they see a product priced in picodollars their immediate reaction is that this is not a product for them. They want to use best in class product and they have learned over the years that the best in class product costs money, lots of it. So even though Tarsnap is best in class, they will ignore it because it is priced too low. For their back up service, they want to pay thousands of dollars and get a guarantee from the vendor that they will be their if shit hits the fan.
Then retire to somewhere arm and have umbrella drinks.
Maybe as an experiment Colin could spin a new website for the exact same tarsnap service, but renamed and repriced (10x?, 100x?) to suit the suits. I think that would be very interesting.
what's the catch with picodollars?
Based on my experience with corporate people, where I spent too many years, the 'picodollar' thing would be a turn off.
Do you intent your target customers to be hackers/tech people and not corporate?
Just curious re your marketing strategy.
I've had great success with hackers taking Tarsnap to their employers and saying "hey, we should use this". Picodollars don't cause any problems there; they say "it costs $0.30 / GB" and in the unlikely case that management actually looks at the Tarsnap website, it's just a technical thing and they trust their technical people.
The market I am excluding is corporate management seeing Tarsnap and deciding that they want to use it without understanding anything technical about it. I don't mind losing that market -- in fact, I'm happy to lose it, because I don't have the time necessary to provide hand-holding support to non-technical users.