Can you make money off of free…?
Profit from Free
Startup Life
Failing into Success
Failing may be the beginning of your success. It sounds odd, but in my life has been true.
Startup
Startup – Apple Sells with Consistency
People are more likely to buy what they already feel comfortable with…
Startup Life
Got Profit Center?
A “business” is about more than selling something…
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Yeah, interesting… I think what you’re getting a bit is the whole notion of ‘reciprocity’ which is the basis of content marketing and the like. Agree that it might work, but I wonder if it works for businesses that don’t revolve around personality driven content (e.g., you, Peterson, etc.)… Certainly hope it does though…
Why not advertise FN as a piece of art: what is going on in the mind of the artist (the entrepreneur) Possibly use ETCG community forum to drive people to FN? We value your content Jordan Peterson?? will look him up Free models that already exit: tele-evangelist?? public television?? the economics of altruism Socialism models? political candidate calls for contributions
Don’t opensource companies already do this to extent? You can download Ubuntu for free or you can pay them for the download. There are php, javascript, etc github projects that live off donations or external labour. Webpack and babel, despite being free, collected money to fix bugs (community from outside can even submit expense reimbersment request) and big companies donate large amounts just so the project can keep going. This gives corporate developers a sense of security that their tools will not disappear, and to influence bug fixes important to them.
open source is a bit different… they sell the consulting/ maintenance not the “product”… I took a class for MySQL back before they got bought by anyone. The instructor talked about their business model and basically how they worked was that they gave away the code with the idea that this would allow small companies to use it to build, and then when the small companies got BIG then they could charge for consulting and services. So a site like FailedNormal can use it for free, but once you get to the scale of Travelocity paying a few million for a service contract is an easy sell.