I wasn’t going to write about MacHeist this year, but after a hail storm damaged nearly every roof in our neighborhood, I noticed something kind of obvious: there are a lot of business that make it up on volume.
This is the new MacHeist promise, right? Not just exposure, although that’s part of it, but selling so many tens of thousands of copies that the developers do very well regardless of their tiny underpriced cut of the profits per sale.
We don’t get hail in Austin very often. I took the Flip out and “filmed a little bit of it”:www.flickr.com/photos/ma… as golf-ball sized balls of ice blanketed the yard. Afterwards every roofing company in Texas descended on Austin offering steep discounts, in some cases even covering an insurance deductable of $2000 or more. Depending on who you ask, such practices may or may not be considered insurance fraud, but like MacHeist it does come with ethical considerations. The roofing companies knew that they could do so much business in the next 2 weeks that they will easily make up for reduced profits by the sheer volume of work.
There’s another kind of discount shared between roofing companies and MacHeist. Users promote the package they just purchased in exchange for further discounts. For MacHeist it’s spamming your Twitter followers (I get a free Delicious Library!). For roofers it’s spamming your neighbors with a yard sign (I get $250 off!).
I’ve learned a few things from all of this that I think will help me make “my own indie business”:www.riverfold.com stronger, or at least more consistent. I gladly give free licenses to reviewers, bloggers, and small Mac user groups. I also routinely do 10-20% off discounts that anyone who knows how to search Twitter or “RetailMeNot.com”:www.retailmenot.com can use.
But I’m just going to have a default “no thanks” answer for big promotions and mass giveaways. It’s consistent with what I believe about keeping prices fair to sustain a Mac business, and it takes the guess work out of which promotions harm the Mac ecosystem and which are a great deal for everyone.
