Fragile Plan vs Robust Plan | Hacker News Reader

Fragile Plan vs Robust Plan

sivers.org

91 pointsrevorad15 comments

I think the correct terminology here is "anti-fragile" inlight of Nasim Talib's new book.

Fragile = something that can't withstand randomness

Robust = something that can withstand randomness to a point

Anti-fragile = something which gets better when exposed to randomness

OP's plan here demonstrates anti-fragility, not just robustness. Overall great article about how to crowdsource pool of knowledge and turning it in to a business.

Just noticed this yesterday, amongst lots of CAP theorem and lcokless data structures: http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/06/antifragility-from-...

Good article, but incomplete without a cost comparison. What's the overall cost/revenue difference b/t the fragile plan/s (which cost little but failed and made no revenue) and robust plan which succeeded but required 50+ freelancers.

Great point. I don't have the answer, but here's something to consider:

That brilliant journalist I hired, the person who was ready to take on the responsibility of writing 16 books in a year, needed $90k salary.

Finding people to answer some specific questions about their existing field of expertise has cost very very little. 48 researchers cost less than $60k.

That's interesting, I particularly liked the part where you realized coming up with the right questions was the way forward, and based on that info I suppose you could value your 200 questions at roughly $30k, since that's the extra bit journalist would have had to do otherwise.

On a side note, thanks for all your writings over the years, I've learned a ton and still use some of them for both personal reference and for referring friends & associates.

I will be interested to see if there's editorial consistency between the books and between the years. That seems like it'd be a lot easier to achieve if there was one voice behind each book.

On the other hand, it's not like these guides are novels, so maybe it doesn't matter as much.

The books look really interesting. Did you confirm demand before starting the project?

Nope. Doing this for my own self-education. It's really more of a hobby than a business. See http://sivers.org/eg

That's great - nice hobby!

$50 per book seems very high. I'd probably buy the whole set at $5 each.

Not for someone seriously considering investing their time, personal savings, and opportunity cost in doing a startup in one of these countries.

Yeah. Originally I was going to price them at $200 each.

("For the cost of one night in a Hong Kong hotel, this will save you weeks or even months of research.")

Definitely only of interest to someone really planning on setting up a business in one of these countries in the next year or so.

I often drop $39 on random Ruby, JavaScript, or web design ebooks.

That said, now that I've tried the $50 price point, I might try something much cheaper next year just to see what happens. If I do, then all the people who bought it at $50 this year will get it free next year.

> I often drop $39 on random Ruby, JavaScript, or web design ebooks.

I'm sure you do, but unlike me, you're rich. I practically never buy any books, but I'm interested in buying your guides.

When I first saw the $50, I was a bit disappointed and felt like it was expensive, especially for an independently published PDF.

Then I realized that I do want one reasonably bad, and that each book is potentially highly valuable, so I guess the $50 price can be considered justified. It's just that I'd like to buy several, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable doing so at that price point.

Pricing anything is always a challenge. I suppose you have two audiences, people seriously considering setting up a funded startup in one of those countries, and general knowledge seekers (just about all hackers and HN regulars).

Another idea for this, since it sounds like this series might get yearly updates, is high-priced lifetime subscription 1-time fee, and a low-priced non-subscription cost for just this year's version.

Edit: On second thought, maybe not. Someone buying one of these to set up a startup probably won't have a multiyear need for them.

I guess my use case is probably an outlier, I'm thinking about living in one of these countries and checking out which options might work and where (which could be anything from freelancing to taking a corporate gig). But I'd unscientifically guess there could be a market in idle speculators, rather then people with a clear plan to do a startup in a specific country (who might already have gathered a lot of this info to have got to that point).

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