Ben Thompson: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think it's subscription revenue. If it stays flat, you're in great shape. Yeah. Then also, I raised prices a couple of years ago, which is the only time I've raised prices. I still mildly regret it. It's funny, because everyone's like, always, your price is too low, you should raise prices. That's definitely the absolute easiest way to increase revenue. I think the easiest thing for me to do would be to just keep doing what I'm doing and just raise the price $1 a year every year. For sure, my revenue increase would very much outweigh my churn. Honestly, the biggest change that happened when I did raise prices was it didn't affect growth at all, except that I had a lot more people switch to annual subscriptions, because I like pre-announces like, hey, if you want to get a year at the old price, which is great, because I want people with annual subscriptions as we discussed at the beginning. I could do that. I think on the Internet in general, the markets are much larger than people think. I thought it was much larger than all the folks that are critical of my model thought, and it's been larger than I thought all along. I thought it would take five years to build or to launch my business. It took a year. I would rather explore the edges of that market, how big it is, as opposed to maximizing my revenue too soon. That's number one. Number two is, I do want to have an impact. I do want people to read. By definition, the larger your subscriber base, the more your marginal customer is not aware of you, and is not immersed in this space. Their willingness to pay is going to be lower. When you start raising prices, you're gonna hit a wall very fast as far as subscriber growth, by definition. That’s number two. The shift over the last couple years has been, well, is this it? I've reached my natural base or whatever it might be, which is, again, massively larger than I ever expected. I just wanted to pay the bills. Yeah, like tens of thousands of people that pay you to read your work, and millions of people that I'm sure come to your website and read the free product. There is a real market for this.…

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