Value proposition

People pay for value.

Even when you give that value away for free.

Paradoxically, the more value you give away for free, the more likely people are to pay for the value you provide.

Case in point: I got hired at a video game company back in 2000 when I was casting around between entrepreneurial endeavours.

I arrived at the interview and got offered a good job within 30 minutes without having to jump through any silly hoops.

Many of the software developers at the company were not going to entertain even interviewing me (hastily thrown together C.V. due to “reasons”) until one of them realised that the software they used to compile their game and load it on to the development machines was written by me, and given away for free, on my website.

And the documentation they used in their day-to-day work to understand the video game console they were writing software for was written by me, and given away for free, on my website.

Many months later we were sat around chatting about doing extra-curricular work and giving it away for free to anybody that wanted it.

Several of them chimed in that they don’t see themselves doing that, it has no value, and what would motivate me to do anything like that.

“It got me this job.” I countered.