Should Apple be required to warn you that it'd be cheaper? Definitely not. But when you've taken the milk home the milk should be able to say "Hey, If you buy directly from us it's 30% cheaper!".
Right now Apple prohibits developers from being transparent about what the users choices are. I think it is wrong that developers are not allowed to explain the rules to its own users.
Apple should compete on the product itself, not technicalities and obfuscation. There should be pressures on Apple to lower prices for what it charges.
> This no longer exists. You need Twitter in perpetuity. If for some reason you’re banned from Twitter (often there’s no reason at all) there goes an entire career and audience you’ve built for years.
For a newsletter at least, this definitely isn't true.
For context, I'm the cofounder of SparkLoop — a referral platform specifically for newsletters.
We see thousands of newsletters growing 5-50% monthly with referrals (and more if they do other marketing stuff).
Except this doesn't work for Substack users, because Substack doesn't support tools like ours.
The problem isn't that "you can't grow a newsletter without Twitter" — it's that "you can't grow a Substack without Twitter".
Just choose a better email platform and the problem disappears.
> In the end what changed is that e-mail based marketing was on the decline, with other mediums taking over.
FWIW this is completely incorrect. Over the past 2 years other marketing channels have skyrocketed in cost (eg FB ads) and most brands/companies are now investing heavily into email marketing. It's a significant growth industry right now, more so than at any time since I've been involved with email marketing (since ~2010).
Interesting. I as a content consumer feel exactly the same way. I don't use FB/Instagram anymore and rely solely on email updates from bands, brands, museums, theatres and so on. I actually get some MC emails and always liked those since they are so easy to unsubscribe.
Same experience for us. While we moved away from Mailchimp recently for Pardot, email marketing is huge growth area for us since the start of the pandemic. I think it's a combination of people seeking new solutions to this new world we live in, and understanding that if each email we send has a genuine value for who we send it to, they are very receptive. It's the opposite of spam, as we're asked more and more to please keep our customers up to date with the latest trends.
Heh, I kinda noticed that. For a while there spam on my older mail accounts suddenly looked a lot more "quality" and was advertising well known brands.
At first I thought it was just phishers trying something new, but when I looked where the mails lead it turned out to be those actual brands.
If you're buying a large software license today — and I bet this holds true for at least some houses, cars, other "high-pressure sales situations" too — the vendor definitely won't think of the negotiation as adversarial.
In an unending game of the prisoner's dilemma, either you all win or you all lose.
I wouldn't use the term adversarial for this. Ideally in a house transaction, the main thing is that both parties want the deal to happen - the seller wants the money and the buyer wants the house. They very much have the same goal of getting the deal executed.
Now obviously all other things being equal, I'd rather pay less money (or charge more money)
But in most cases, neither the seller nor the buyer operating in good faith will really try to squeeze the other because losing a multi-hundred-thousand (or even million+) deal by being too anal about $1000 is in neither one's interest.
If a seller got very "adversarial" most buyers would say "fuck you, I'll keep looking."
Interesting article, however I'm surprised the author only went into the time it takes them to create content.
I run a bootstrapped product called [SparkLoop](https://sparkloop.app) which makes it easy for creators to add a referral program to their newsletter, and by far the biggest (and most annoying) time investment we hear newsletter creators complaining about is marketing, not content creation.
For most newsletter creators, marketing takes as much (if not more) time as content creation does!
Not only that, marketing is hard - even for marketers. Even so, if you commit (read: regular schedule) some time to it you'll likely be less overwhelmed / intimidated / discouraged.
Set a couple reasonable goals. Work towards those, and only those. There's no magic potion. No magic bullet. No magic nuttin'. That's marketing :)
That quote by Ronald Wright is actually paraphrasing part of a John Steinbeck book, where he's using it to describe people who wanted socialist governments, but were dissapointed that everyone ended up poor instead of a utopia where everyone has everything they need.
It's funny how it started out as a criticism of people who think that the government should have more control of how businesses operate, but has been paraphrased so many times that it's now used as a way to criticise people who want to minimize government involvement in business.
>To paraphrase a famous quote, in the USA the workers don't see themselves as workers, but as temporarily down-on-their-luck owners.
It's hilarious applying it here, given the situation described was reversed. Your position is that the worker who doesn't own the factory should dictate what the factory owner should pay because of a power imbalance.
Weird.
Perhaps the issue is having difficulty telling the difference between workers and factory owners in general.
To be fair, this isn't a very apt analogy.
A better one would be to liken Apple to a smart fridge...
- Is it ok for Apple to say "only products bought through our smart fridge's grocery app can be stored in this fridge" ? --> probably not
- Is it ok for Apple to take a cut when the consumer purchases through the smart fridge's app directly? --> IMO clearly yes
- Should Apple be required to warn you that it'd be cheaper to buy the same brand of milk from a grocery store 10min walk away? --> IMO clearly no