My life for the past two decades has been shaped in many ways by information I’ve come across on one single website.
I’ve made health decisions, career decisions, and even decisions about personal beliefs, all thanks to this one website, or rather, to resources I’ve found via this website.
That website is Google no just kiddding.
That website is Hacker News, a kind of precursor to Reddit, which, unlike Reddit, has managed to keep its quality by refusing to go after quantity.
Lately, for some reason, I’ve found myself not going on Hacker News as much as normal.
So this morning, right after correctly guessing the Wordle of the day (in five guesses, Which worldle informs me is “GREAT”), I purposefully went to see what’s new on Hacker News.
And as often happens, I was rewarded. Because one of the top posts on Hacker News today is a link to an article with the headline:
“The feds are coming for John Deere over the right to repair”
In a nutshell:
x1. Tractor maker John Deere has made its new computerized tractors largely unrepairable by customers. This means the tractor has to go back to the factory for repairs. This is nice for John Deere, but expensive for customers, both in terms of time and money.
x2. As a result, John Deere customers have been complaining… the market for used tractors has been booming as farmers seek an alternative to buying new John Deere tractors… and now, even the federal government is after John Deere, for possibly violating Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, about deceptive or unfair practices in commerce.
And yet, in spite all this, John Deere continues to refuse to make its tractors easily repairable by the buyer.
Which really begs the question, why?
Why be so stubborn, and work against what both the market and the very powerful federal government want you to do?
The only answer that comes to my limited mind is:
Because locking in customers in this way is good for John Deere.
In fact, if you look at the stock price of the company since the early 2010s, when customers first started complaining about John Deere’s unreparaiable tractors, the company’s stock price has been, not on a steady rise, but on what looks to my non-expert eyes like an exponential increase.
I bring this up because last year, I asked folks on my list what continuity or subscription offers they buy – the info product version of what John Deere is doing, locking in customers for more than a single purchase.
I got a bunch of responses to that email last year. But I did nothing with those responses, not until a couple days ago. That’s when I went back to the responses I got, summed them up, looked for patterns and exceptions. Some patterns:
x* Out of the 40 or so continuity or subscription offers my readers reported paying for, the majority were primarily personality-based, rather than primarily promise- or interest-based.
x* Out of those personality-based subscriptions, the majority were primarily paid newsletters of some sort, with the rest being paid communities or memberships built around a guru.
x* The prices for personality-based newsletters seem to depend largely on the format. Digital newsletters were priced lower (around $50-$70/month) while print newsletters were priced higher ($97-$199/month).
And then the exception, which caught my eye:
x* One digital newsletter — in fact, just an email sent once a month — bucked the price trend above by selling for $99 a month. In fact, this subscription is not even buyable in a one-month increment — the shortest subscription you can get is three months, with extra inducements also available for 6-month and 1-year subscriptions.
I found this interesting because this subscription seems to be working. Not only was I clued into it directly from readers who pay for it, but I remember hearing a friend mention subscribing to it since.
So let’s get to the deal:
I’d like to update my database of continuity or subscription offers that my readers susbcribe to.
After all, things may have changed in the past 12 months, since I last collected such data.
And so my offer for you today is, hit reply and tell me which subscription or continuity offers you pay for.
It could be a paid newsletter, community, membership, magazine, book-of-the-month club, whatever.
In return, I’ll reply and tell you which digital newsletter I had in mind above, the one delivered by email that bucks the pricing trend, and still seems to do well.
Plus, I will also tell you what one particular thing I thought was very clever and effective on the sales page for this offer, which I think helps this offer convert, even though it’s just a stupid email, which costs a whopping $99 a month.
Do we got a deal?