Free is never free for the other side: measure the cost you place on them, then cut it

Giving something away is not a zero-cost offer. The other side still has to read the message, think about whether it applies, weigh it against their list, find twenty minutes for the prompts and half an hour for a call, and fit a new thing into a team. A price can even help, because it says you are serious. Either way the attrition you place on them is the first thing to measure (time to first reply, who never replied, who started and stopped, what they asked that the message should have answered) and then the thing to cut, until the service costs you the least to provide and costs them the least to receive: no second tool, no account, no overhead on deployment. A commercial product is one people take when the only cost is their own attention.

Decided by. Nobody yet: a candidate for Dinis to read, comment on and decide (keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it).

Note. Dinis's headline line for this article in Gen ZX Developers. The memo was careful not to make it sound like a lecture, and the book should keep that.

Where it comes from

Price it, then give it away Free is not zero; What brutal means (newsroom)

What it answers in the 2018 book

Be a founder answered written, Life Patterns

Where it goes

Chapter Price it, then give it away, part Start the company (drafting); topic Be a founder (or a one-person service).

Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: The four moves after 'do they miss it': define it, price it, deliver it at a flat marginal cost, offer it free to the people who know you, Pay after the value: credit first, a meter, a balance that can go below zero, and no subscription by default, Below about five pounds the card fee is the price, so pence payments only work aggregated.

Node idea:free-is-never-free-for-the-other-side in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.