I'm currently working on a project that I'd like to charge money for (a Substack newsletter for a particular niche). I'm struggling, however, to wrap my brain around charging money, and paywalling posts or parts of posts.
While I have experience using a Patreon for more voluntary donations, I feel like I'm kind of jumping into the deep end of the pool. Paywalling articles, or parts of articles, is now interrupting peoples' "full experience" in order to prompt them to pay to continue.
This means there's a risk no one will subscribe, and I'll have a somewhat worse product for that. However, I would like to earn income from the project, and I would like to avoid the awkwardness of enabling it later (in case the newsletter is successful); I think the latter would be more of an annoyance to people already invested than having subscriptions enabled from the start.
I was curious about HN's perspective, mostly because I imagine there's a lot of devs here that have gone from free projects/products to ones that either are trial-based, subscription-based, or one-time purchases.
How did you get over that awkwardness towards "being ballsy enough to ask to be paid"?
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Notes:
It's worth mentioning that I've freelanced before, so getting paid for my writing is not something I'm new to. It's more asking people to "invest in me" as a publication.
I am likely going to have paywalls come down after a week, or a time period of my choosing, which would keep the article from being "incomplete to everybody, forever."
I'll give you my experience in the freemium (not publishing) space.
I ran a website which was VERY popular with a niche community, and popular, though less popular with people outside of the niche.
A few large companies outside the niche paid for API access to the service, and a VERY few people in the niche community paid for premium service, often just because they wanted to support the project.
The project kept growing and growing within the niche. It basically captured all the market share. No matter what we did, implementing requested features, changing pricing, the freemium users almost never upgraded.
We considered removing freemium and forcing everyone to pay, but in discussions with the community, they would say "can't you get sponsors for the site"?
Then a large company said they wanted the tech, didn't want the niche community.
So, we made the announcement that we'd be shutting down the community. That's when lots of people started with the "oh, but I would have paid..." and still the "can't you sell advertising"?
I don't know how big your audience is, but with the volume of content, I that is available, and the challenge major publishers have in monetizing their diverse content, I think paying for publishing for most people is going to be a challenge.
But also, what are your expectations? How many paid subscriptions to do you expect to have?
I recently signed up for Benedict Evans newsletter, and was surprised that he had a "paid content" section.
I guess the point is that IF you have a following, and a niche, and a group of people who value your view (or your writing), then you only need 1000 true fans.
1 - https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/