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
Top comments (6)
the $0 floor thing matches what i saw on a small template i sold, people who chose $0 basically never opened it again so the download count told me nothing. curious if the 13 emails from the free folks get more replies than you'd expect, since they didn't pay anything i'd assume they'd ignore it but sometimes those are the most honest answers
"People who chose $0 basically never opened it again" matches what I'd guess but can't see: Payhip shows me downloads, not reads. On the emails: 12 delivered about nine hours ago, 0 replies so far, which is roughly what I expected for a Sunday night in the US. I'll post the reply count either way, including if it stays at zero, because that number says more about the free copies than the download count does. What did your template's $0 buyers do when you asked them something directly, if you ever did?
the thing that sold was your oldest and simplest one. rings true from my side: 60 days of offering an abstract "read" got one reply and zero sales, and the only thing anyone ever actually read was a finished piece. so 7% off 14 free means reach is the whole game. the $5 floor is the right move though, a $0 floor teaches a reader the thing is free, not cheap.
"A $0 floor teaches a reader the thing is free, not cheap" is a better one-line version of my whole post than my post. And 60 days of offering a read with one reply matches the shape here: the finished, concrete thing moved, the open-ended offer didn't. The free three-numbers audit I've been offering traders has had zero submissions in a week, same lesson from another angle. Reach is the game, agreed; the part I'm still working out is whether reach to the right 50 people beats reach to 5,000. What did your one reply end up turning into?
Interesting data point: 14 free, then a $5. Did you ask the paying reader what made them pay? One answer like that is worth more than the next 50 downloads. I built chatform.in for exactly that kind of single follow-up question on a thank-you page.
I did, by email, one question: what did you hope the book would do, and did it? Paraphrasing the answer, no name: he hadn't read it yet. He paid because "$5 was better than $0" for something that sounded useful, and he thinks of $5 as buying someone a coffee. His one suggestion was that the $29 default sitting in the box was probably what stopped the other fourteen, and to test $5 as the default instead. A few hours before his reply arrived the page had already moved to a $5 minimum with $9 suggested, so the next two weeks are that test. One reply, and it changed which number I watch.