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Comment by bdunn | Hacker News Reader

Based on the fact that your "premium" product offering comes out to about $2/month I can see why you think this is overpriced. For those of us charging real amounts of dollars for our products, spending $250 to get on the fast track to improving paid conversion rates is more than worth it.

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This has nothing to do if I can afford this or not. Imagine if you had to pay $250 every time somebody had some knowledge to tell you, would this be a great community that encouraged learning to build the best stuff we can build? Probably not.

I am sure that many of us has shared a ton of knowledge/code/whatever that has been far more worth than $250 (I know I have), but there is no need to sell this and monetize this, especially not here on HN.

I get the impression these "courses" are less textbook, than implementation forcing.

You do the SEO, gather 1000 email addresses, drip feed and ab test the list till ten people pony up. Then they are incentivised to actually put the common sense into action, follow up with Skype calls and hey presto ten people who have actually put into practise whT the rest just talk about. And make great sales references for the remaining. 9990.

Not trying to be disparaging here but this stuff is more coaching than book selling. You are paying to get someone to prod you not action.

I hope that patio11 forgives the comment but I doubt very much there will be ,uch in the course common sense and a bit of reading won't get you. But for 250 why not get patio11 to summarise it for you and push you into actually using it.

Who would pay kalzumeus just to tell them to do something they already know how to do?

Oh, right, http://www.appointmentreminder.org/

Almost all knowledge is now available for free. Just saying "could learn this for free" doesn't mean people will or should.

It's impossible to learn everything that could be useful. We have to prioritize.

In some cases, that means paying money for information we could get elsewhere.

At my consulting rate, I can buy this course in three hours (it's not technical consulting). Would I spend more than three hours of my time gathering all the information in this course? Most likely.

Therefore, I can actually save money by buying this course. And given that one additional sale of the product I'm using this for is worth the price of the course, it's information I am interested in.

I think we are agreeing - although I seem to be saying patio11 is a kick in the pants, and you saying he is an aggregator of knowledge. Either way yes, there is a price point to be found, 250 seems not unreasonable and I guess most importantly I would not worry patio11 is a shyster and so would be far more likely to buy than J.random course

Yeah, I agree it's a kick in the pants. I guess I'm saying that it's also more than merely a kick in the pants.

I kick in the pants, using a textbook tied to his foot?

I think analogy has been stretched past breaking point here.

Ok i'm going to have to launch something now just to try it out

Can you define "here on HN"? Are you suggesting that the submitter is a shill for patio11? Or that a community member can't sell anything? Or if it a product makes it onto the HN front page, the seller needs to remove the price?

Have you never read Patrick's blog or any of his comments here on HN before? He is always sharing things. He has even talked a lot about the content in this very thing he is selling now.

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