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Comment by mrspeaker | Hacker News Reader

Woah... what's with the venom? The original article made a fair point: a coffee is more than the sum of its beans. Maybe it seems foreign to you because you don't drink coffee, but it's certainly true for me - buying a coffee is something I look forward to. Much more than I look forward to trying dozens of online services that provide some minor convenience to my life.

I bet the author enjoys writing too: so creating that blog post might cost more than a latte - but the experience of thinking, writing, editing and posting something online provides value to the author. Seems like a reasonable thing to do then!

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The venom is because this is literally nothing but a childish contrarian argument being made because someone can't follow their own logic to conclusion. He can't see the clear point they're making of saying that you think the 2 pounds isn't shit to pay for the experience of coffee, so why not risk a similarly insignificant amount of money on a product that might have a similarly religious experience on you.

If you don't think you'd HAVE that experience, then once again: Your problem isn't with the line about coffee, IT IS WITH THE PRODUCT.

He's taking a whole lot of time and tossing it out the window because he's wanting to be passive aggressive toward a product he doesn't think is worth a damn, which is even more inane than vaguebooking.

Your perfectly reasonable point could be made without the weird aggression.

You're probably right. I'm just sick of childish arguments being treated as brilliant insights. Doesn't exactly help my case though, does it?

Most people aren't calling it a brilliant insight. Most people are just saying that it's a reasonable point.

When I'm selling my widget I might think that £2 is insignificant, and is the same as a cup of coffee, and billions of people buy coffee every day, so why don't people spend that insignificant amount of money on my widget? Well, emotionally, £2 is not insignificant.

To get someone to give me £2 I have to overcome some barriers. One way is to compare it to something that seems insignificant, such as a cup of coffee.

That might have worked so far, but at some point people are going to catch on and it's not going to be as effective and I'm going to have to find something else to try.

This article is an indication that people are starting to resist the coffee comparison.

But I do hope it doesn't become the new "you're not the customer you're the product", because that's overplayed.

You keep calling it childish. I have no idea what you mean by that. I think it's a pretty straightforward argument. You'll also see a lot of personal finance articles that will tell you to skip your morning coffee to save some money. I always think, well, my morning coffee is what money is for! This coffee thing is definitely part of the zeitgeist and it seems reasonable to address it.

I mean, the bar started at trying to make coffee-drinkers feel like cheapskates so they'll blow a dollar on an app.

This ain't exactly the maturity high-jump.

The guy is making a pretty simple point. It has nothing to do with "2 pounds isn't shit to pay for the experience of coffee" it is who are you to tell me what value i get from a 2 pound cup of coffee

It seems pretty clear to me that this is not about the product being offered, but about the idea that selling your product by belittling the rewards from a different transaction of similar monetary value is utterly worthless. The line about the coffee is absurd and doesn't add any value to the product being sold.

I don't really think the tone of your comments is helpful in making the case you are trying to put across btw.

What's weird about it though is that I've never seen these comparisons as belittling other products. They're merely using an easily-understandable point of comparison.

I guess I tend to read the subtext of it as:

You would spend $2 on just a cup of coffee. The entire concept is that a cup of coffee is a minor thing, you buy it practically without considering it's tangible benefit.

It's supposed to shock you into thinking Wow they are right I should spend money on product x since it is less than this thing I buy out of habit more than for its value

You can read it as a statement of "$2 is not very much money at all" - but then I have a problem with comparing unrelated products that simply happen to share a price point.

"You'd spend 20 bucks going to the cinema, why would you not spend the same amount on a garden fork?"

In the end the blogpost was suggesting that you cannot compare your product to a coffee, because you don't know how much I value that coffee beyond that I am willing to spend $2. This gives you no information about how I would value your service, because it is not a coffee based product being served to me with a smile.

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