Nick Kolenda

I think we are over the hard problem of consciousness, and the problem was only hard because we are emotional about it and think that it should be more special than it's humble information-processing origin suggests. We are biased when it comes to consciousness because we are right in the middle of it, it compels us to take it seriously, in fact it lies to us for practical reasons. In a way the entire subjective experience of having a self that makes a decision is an illusion, every subjective experience is. We feel cold, we see images, but it's all an information-processing machine convincing us that we feel it, that we see them. What actually happens is different, and we are not privy to it, but we are starting to understand it. For example the self itself doesn't make decisions, it's a report from all over the brain integrated into a coherent story, which is fed back to the memory and the rest of the brain. Our memory too is not what it feels like, for example we can't simply recall things, to do that we have to create a new memory with a new coherent story that integrates some of the original memory, reinterpreted. But your brain doesn't tell you this, it just makes you believe that you remember things. You often remember them wrong though. Humans are very unreliable witnesses for this reason. We have an entire bouquet of cognitive biases and heuristics, we don't even notice them. Our brain have to use shortcuts, but it lies about them. Turns out we are quite predictable…

1. What to charge for? Bandwidth? Storage? Other considerations?
Unless your service is predominantly driven by storage/bandwidth usage (eg: video), it makes sense to bundle these costs into the customer price.

2. How to collect payment? Is Stripe a good option? What else do I need on the backend?
(Assuming this is the US) You can go for Stripe or any other payment provider that gives you a good API for integrating with your programming language. This option eliminates the need for storing credit cards/account information securely (the payment provider is responsible for that and must be PCI DSS compliant).

3. How much to charge? Expenses + desired profit? Research competition.
Price discovery is a combination of art and science. Yes, you should price it to cover your costs + expectation of profit. When researching competition, look for feature set comparison and poll the target audience on which features they value the most (and which ones they wish were available i.e., unmet needs). If you are meeting some of those unmet needs, you should play around with price points to determine the perceived value of those features.

4. How to charge? Establishing tiers seems to be a common practice. Free, Personal, Business, Big, Gigantic. Does this simplify billing? Or is it more of a promotional thing, and establishing a single charge rate is simpler?
IMO, this helps with customer segmenting and price discovery.

5. What other questions am I not asking?

You may want to check…

This article references a number of different studies, but I really wanted to see some hard numbers with these concepts being used.

Show me that someone pointing at that newsletter button is 25% more effective than a photo of someone with their arms crossed. Or, show me that smiling asian male in a suit will out perform an attractive business woman in casual clothes.

Take some photos of the same person, in the same clothes, one with them pointing at the call to action, another with them looking at the call to action, another with them standing in a neutral pose, and another with arms crossed. Show me those numbers, and which increases sales.

Otherwise, I'm full of doubt.

http://www.nickkolenda.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/pointing4.jpg

That image freaks me out, it looks like an overly confident guy that is pretending he's well off, and it looks like he's about to give me some awful speech about the 10 secrets to success. I wouldn't want to donate to a kickstarter with that image, because I don't want that guy to get my money (even though it's a stock photo, I associate him with the project).

Then, I look at another example...

http://www.nickkolenda.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/stock-photo-conversions.jpg

The article says the asian male is probably best, because he's asian, and smiling more. I'd disagree again, I prefer A, the guy looks more down to earth in the casual clothes, and as a late twenties male, he looks very relatable. That's the kind of person I'd…

Just to throw in our experience (hardware product, UK market) we've tried facebook a few of times over the last 3 years.

The initial attempt was a massive fail, we wasted about £3K on facebook ads to generate about £300 in sales.

Following season we focussed on TV ads and generating lots of reviews from our existing happy customers. We then gave facebook another attempt at the end of the season and generated as much sales and traffic as all of the tv advertising for about £3k of facebook ads.

The primary difference was knowing who our customer is - which we learned from the TV ad customers, you can probably learn from your Kickstarter backers. For all of the TV generated sales we got reviews and sent out surveys to each customer. From this, we learned 1. What people loved about the product (which we could use is ad copy) and 2. Who they were and why they purchased.

This allowed us to create very targetted facebook ad campaigns and hence the improved ROI. Facebook is excellent at generating very cheap traffic but only when you get the audience dialed in.

Also, read anything written by Nick Kolenda (http://www.nickkolenda.com/) amazing stuff.

None of those points matter as this is not how it works, and you have few seconds to convince someone who visits your website without second chance as you have on HN. Potential clients will bounce of your website as I did without even question anything.

EDIT: To help out a bit check this resources:
- https://greatlandingpagecopy.com/
- https://www.nickkolenda.com/free-guides/
- https://marketingexamples.com/

Website design at this point doesn’t matter that much, yet words are important. Try incorporating copywriting changes and show actual product. That will help more than writing PR blog posts and post them over the internet. :)

Good luck!