On October 2 I put a 151-page English playbook on Payhip as pay-what-you-want with a $0 minimum. Over the next two days: 14 download notifications, 9 orders, all at $0.
At 00:49 Seoul time on October 5, one order came in at $5, from Canada.
That's the first dollar this three-week overseas experiment has made. I wrote the postmortem of the first 72 hours ($0) four days ago, so this post is the other half: what one paid copy changed, and the pricing rule I set within hours of it.
What $5 told me that $0 couldn't
Fourteen people took it free. One paid. On its own that's a 7% ratio with a sample too small to mean much. But it answered the question I actually had: is the thing worth money to a stranger who found it on their own? Yes, to at least one, and $5 was the number they chose with $0 right next to it.
The free copies weren't wasted either. Thirteen of them left an email on the way out, and this morning each of them got one personal email with one question ("what did you hope the book would do, and did it?") and no pitch. Replies will decide what the next version covers.
The rule: the first ten buyers set the price
Pay-what-you-want with a $0 floor turns a product into a free download with a tip jar. So the floor is now $5, and it climbs in public steps:
- Minimum $5 now, pay what you want above it. The suggested price is $9.
- After every 10 paid copies, the minimum goes up one step. The next step is $9.
- The rule is written on the product page, and I'll report each step in the open, like the rest of this experiment.
I'd rather sell fewer copies at a price someone chose than count downloads that cost the reader nothing and tell me nothing.
Where the experiment stands
| Overseas revenue since October 1 | $5.00 |
| Spend | $41 (one ad, stopped) |
| Goal | $1,000 by October 31 |
| Days left | 26 |
Everything else from the last four days is on this account: a cartoon pipeline that turns a Markdown storyboard into a video, three unsolicited sample cartoons made from other people's READMEs, and an open-source trade audit with its NinjaTrader add-on. None of those has sold yet. The book, the oldest and simplest thing in the pile, is the one that did.
The playbook, pay what you want from $5: https://payhip.com/b/xmZvu
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