Career

Workable Drops Free, CEO Nikos Moraitakis Discusses it At Medium

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Workable apparently dropped their free membership, and their CEO Nikos Moraitakis explains why at Medium in a must-read essay.

Two things stood out for me:

Limiting design choices to things that can scale infinitely at near-zero cost is a recipe for making mediocre products.

He’s got a point.  When free is baked into your model you are automatically facing a series of constraints.  You can see this in most any model, but when your constraint is “limit what we charge” for that is one freakin’ huge constraint.

When someone tweets “this product sucks” readers can’t tell if this is coming from someone who got the good version of the product or the bad, unsupported one. Oh, and for every paid user you probably have 10 or 100 free ones. They will be louder, by sheer numbers alone.

He’s right.  Trust me.  Been there.  Also he notes people who get “free” are oddly hard to please.

Worth reading.  Think I need to interview this guy.

– Steven Savage

That Fanfic Line’s A-Blurring

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Now that the Silo series by Hugh Howey is ending, he’s opening it up to fanfic on Kindle Worlds.  This is even more interesting as he cultivated his audience online.

I’ve begun speculating, as have my fellow MuseHackers, on just where fanfic is going to go now that Amazon is monetizing it.  This of course gets even more intereting when you ask about social pressure to “fanficify” your work, or ways alternate works could be made.  I mean if you think about it one book could been written and spawn FAR more fanfic than its original contents.

– Steven Savag