Want to meet people, try charging them for it?

https://notes.eatonphil.com/2025-06-28-want-to-meet-people-charge-them.html

by ArneVogel • 1 year ago

192 90 1 year ago

notes.eatonphil.com

It's a peculiar turn of events I must admit, but I don't think that having those viewership numbers and an easibly reachable email and not getting contacted is actually common.

daedrdev• 1 year ago

If you charge money successfully it signals you are legit enough to get others to pay.

volemo• 1 year ago

Also when I see a cool person, I think my stuff is not good enough to waste their time, but if they charge for it, then it’s a deal.

pyman• 1 year ago

Do people pay for knowledge or attention? Because let's be honest, most of the podcasts and books out there already contain more knowledge and wisdom than anyone needs to be successful in any profession.

KolibriFly5• 1 year ago

It's like a shortcut to perceived credibility

llm_nerd• 1 year ago

The corollary of this is that some people lie and claim that people are paying to shortcut to credibility or legitimacy.

And to be clear, I am not talking about this submission (which I didn't read, and from other comments is charity-driven regardless), but this industry is absolutely rife with Fake It Till You Make It people who claim they can barely contain the hordes clamouring to give them money and super high-paying consulting gigs. But then it's coupled with a beg that makes everything previously said look super questionable, yet somehow people buy it.

It's the supermodel girlfriend that lives in Canada.

poisonborz• 1 year ago

Title is a bit misleading, he became a popular academic/author and the proceedings are for charity. Once you are well known, you can charge for a lot of things, especially if it's for a good cause.

Cthulhu_• 1 year ago

The weird part is that when he was well known, nobody reached out to get the "lot of things". I think it's because a lot of free stuff comes with a catch - free internet for one month, catch is you're stuck on a year long contract. Free consult but the catch is you're in their systems now, agreed to something in the small print, and you now get cold calls to sell you stuff. Free social network but the catch is your data and personal photos are used for marketing and training AI.

But charge $100 and that's it, that's all the strings attached. Straightforward transaction.

cheschire• 1 year ago

That’s how it used to be but there’s a trend of more companies double dipping now and justifying it by saying they would charge MORE if they weren’t allowed to attach all those strings.

trainerxr50• 1 year ago

The title is ridiculously misleading when people are donating to charity.

lotsofpulp2• 1 year ago

It is sort of entertaining to see the gymnastics writers (or LLMs) do to get clicks.

landgenoot• 1 year ago

My experience with blogging and being easily reachable is that you mostly get people with very specific questions/problems. Not someone who is interested in meeting you.

amelius• 1 year ago

Maybe try video blogging about fitness or fashion and cosmetics.

thenthenthen3• 1 year ago

I just did a workshop at a small non profit. There were 3 people who came there to meet me to chat about other non related opportunities and projects. We charged a small amount, 5$. It was not advertised or told (not by me or leaked through the topic of the workshop) that I would be there, nor am I famous. They came specifically for me, not the workshop (but did participate in a good way). Not sure what to take away from this, other than that it was really nice!

Thorrez• 1 year ago

How did they know you would be there? Did you ask them how they knew?

thenthenthen3• 1 year ago

Oh good one! One through a friend of a friend of a friend. I will ask the others haha.

KolibriFly5• 1 year ago

Sometimes the "signal" we put out is way more visible to the right people than we think

wodenokoto• 1 year ago

This reminds me of video that went simi viral a decade or so back.

Not sure how much of it was staged, but the creators went to a public place and stood next to some “free hugs”-people and then put up a sign “Premium hugs $1” and apparently collected more hugs to the chargrin of the free-huggers.

HPsquared• 1 year ago

If it's free, people are suspicious and judge the cost to be something implicit, generally with a higher expected cost than $1. On the other hand if you make the cost explicit, people are more comfortable.

It ties in with the story in Freakonomics about the daycare that started to charge a small "fine" to discourage parents picking up the child late, with the effect that these incidents happened more often. Because the cost went from implicit (shame, etc) to explicit (it's only $10).

scott_w3• 1 year ago

I'd be careful of inferring too much from things like this, particularly given how much criticism Freakonomics has received. One example from Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11eTG4_iwqw&pp=ygUVZGVhdGggb...

If it's free, people are suspicious and judge the cost to be something implicit, generally with a higher expected cost than $1. On the other hand if you make the cost explicit, people are more comfortable.

To address your point explicitly, if someone believes the cost of a hug is higher than $1 ("higher than expected cost"), then offering one for $1 should trigger a similar suspicion in your head.

Think about it, if a stranger offered you a free Porsche, you'd rightly be suspicious. Would you be less suspicious if they offered that same car for $500?

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

Free hugs? Yeah probably going to be churchy!

taneq• 1 year ago

One time my daughter fell (OK she did something silly and jumped) and hit her head on a metal pole at a science center (she's fine, it was just a couple of stitches). My wife took her to the hospital, and (mislead by the confusing signage) accidentally parked in the ambulance parking area directly out front. Later we collected the car and saw a parking ticket. On seeing that the fine was $40, I've immediately joked "oh, OK so premium parking is $40, nice."

Although, given this is in an area where streetside parking can be $20-$30 for a couple of hours...

wanderingstan• 1 year ago

Counter to Freakononics, my friend’s daycare in SF right now charges parents $2/minute for being late. So it seems to work for them. (Or it works because the cost is relatively high?)

Workaccount2• 1 year ago

I wish this model worked for the internet so we were stuck with the current shitty ad model. Charging money is the fastest way to tank engagement with your content.

em3rgent0rdr• 1 year ago

Similarly, people think FOSS software must not be as good as proprietary software because it's free.

ttb-2134• 1 year ago

Hahaha, so true. There's always good and excellent FOSS. Sticking to open source forever :)

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

I think the opposite!

tormeh• 1 year ago

Yeah. Knew a guy who used to say open source is for poor people.

dotBen• 1 year ago

The best way to get rid of junk is not to put it outside your house with “free” on it. It’s to put “$10” on it. Someone will steal it.

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

Ah no. Gumtree free means 10 messages in the next 30 minutes. 1c or higher = ghost town.

al_borland• 1 year ago

Not in my experience. I put a free item on Craigslist once and it was like a feeding frenzy. The first person who emailed me got it, but between their email and them getting to my house to pick it up, I got at least 40 other emails. It was very overwhelming.

Chris2048• 1 year ago

I'd personally pay to witness the chargrin

KolibriFly5• 1 year ago

Funny how slapping a price tag on something can instantly change how people perceive its value

bee_rider• 1 year ago

I get the whole “people are skeptical of free stuff” thing. But, I suspect in this case it is more that people are “in on the joke” for the premium hugs.

gametorch• 1 year ago

This is also known as "Lamborghini Economics"

Higher price => higher demand, seemingly paradoxically

m463• 1 year ago

Free hugs can be well funded by building biometric profiles.

hmmm.. but would private premium hugs attract unexpected customers/demographics?

Unit327• 1 year ago

This sounds like the same behaviour from introducing fines for overdue library books or being late picking up children from day-care. It goes from a social olbigation or question ("Do I want to bother the day-care people by arriving late?" / "Do I want to bother this blogger and ask for their time?") to a financial transaction.

lewantmontreal• 1 year ago

LLMs made things a lot easier but before them I wished there was a stackoverflow but paid, so you could pay someone for an answer if they happened to have specific information.

You could kind of emulate it by buying stackoverflow upvotes, then placing that as a bounty. Its not exactly money but it made it more comfortable (and successful) than hoping someone answers for free.

moffkalast• 1 year ago

SO bounties were kind of useless though weren't they? Timespans far too short for anyone with the right knowledge to notice besides professional bounty hunters, in the end you had to either give the sum to someone who didn't do the job or take the loss.

CharlieDigital• 1 year ago

Wasnt that how Experts Exchange worked?

BlackFly• 1 year ago

Author notes that there is still a standing offer to answer questions for free "if time allows" but doesn't get any inquiries. I believe this shows that it isn't due to fame or the payment making the author seem more legitimate.

Instead I think that the payment creates the expectation that the inquiry will be answered and when someone expects an answer they are more willing to inquire. When the consultation is free or "time permitting", then it might simply be refused but making the inquiry itself isn't zero cost for the individual and their mental calculus makes it not worth asking. The mental calculus is, "What is the person getting out of this interaction and why would they choose to answer me but not someone else?" When it is financial you can see that you are equal to everyone else and you see exactly what the consultant is getting out of it.

KolibriFly5• 1 year ago

When there's a clear transaction, people feel entitled (in a good way) to your time

guappa3• 1 year ago

Oh no don't worry. They feel entitled also when they're not paying.

Davidzheng• 1 year ago

This makes the most sense to me too

avipars• 1 year ago

There was a site called earn.com which charged to email notable people (VCs, etc). They got acquired by coinbase and the site has since shutdown.

jpalomaki• 1 year ago

It's a similar as described in Freakonomics book.

Daycare was annoyed with parents picking up their kids late. They introduced a fee for this. As a result, late pick ups increased.

Something that was not considered to be socially acceptable, became more acceptable when you put a price tag for it.

verbify• 1 year ago

Clearly the fine wasn't high enough.

bell-cot3• 1 year ago

Was the actual goal to stop the behavior? Or to cover their staffing & overhead costs for the extra time?

guappa3• 1 year ago

What they should have done is call the cops and report abandoned children :)

pferde• 1 year ago

No, what they should have done is to increase the fine progressively for repeat offenders.

KolibriFly5• 1 year ago

There's something oddly liberating about making the implicit social cost explicit; it gives both parties a clear structure

rpastuszak• 1 year ago

OK, this is a very interesting post for me because in the past 5 years I've met 200+ people via my Say Hi page:

https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/say-hi/

and many of my speakers suggested that I should charge for the calls.

Many of my calls involve tech/product advice (often from people with a ton of experience in other areas, e.g. ex FAANG managers, already accomplished founders, designers). Many of the people who message me with concrete questions, asking for my expertise are often already well-off, established and happy to pay.

The thing is:

1. I often get calls from students or people struggling financially 2. I enjoy serendipitous interactions with beautifully weird people

I can probably solve 1. by adding two call lines. But I worry that adding a commercial aspect will prevent 2. from reaching out. I don't live in London any more, and most of my nerdy/artsy/techy/hacker friends live allover the world.

Ah, and:

3. I genuinely love speaking with people in this manner, and personally, I'm getting so much of my Say Hi calls. I just finished a call with a very clever engineer setting their first steps as a solo-founder. They're not "indie hackers", they're people with genuine curiosity, talent and will to help people. It feels amazing to be able to help someone like that, and even better -- to become infected with that enthusiasm!

I am very much aware that I'm rationalising this and perhaps even preventing myself from letting people pay for my work. Whether it's impostor syndrome or the fact that this is such a precious subject to me is a question that I'm trying to answer.

kimjune01• 1 year ago

you can simply make another page that is commercially oriented

swah• 1 year ago

A/B test it and let us know which group is more interesting...

gwbas1c• 1 year ago

I enjoy serendipitous interactions with beautifully weird people

Gosh, I wish I could articulate that into words when I was younger. I remember having a fun conversation with a batshit insane lady who walked into a porch party, and one of my friends thought that I actually thought she was sane.

4b11b42• 1 year ago

I'm also liable to think insane people might be sane

card_zero• 1 year ago

The symbolist doodle illustrating that is great. The freaked-out worm in the top hat is being followed by a black cloud of anxiety, and it wants to eat him for dinner. The other worm, in a bowler and dark glasses (probably indicating modesty and chill), is supplying support and a pat on the back.

noname120• 1 year ago

Paying ⇒ customer ⇒ expectations

11235813213455• 1 year ago

I also had this idea when wanting to sell my apartment directly (because real estate agency are a total ripoff), I thought about proposing a price 2k lower and charging 50 per visit, that way only really interested people would show off

mmarian2• 1 year ago

Hmm, interesting. I launched a blog a few months' back; one of the reasons was to talk to people about things I care about which, in my case, involves the struggles of launching a bootstrapped startup.

I put a link to my linkedin and a contact form, just for that. No one contacted me. But funnily enough, when I speak to people they often tell me they've read my blog. And I'd like to think that I'm pretty good at giving startup advice - mostly thanks to my failures and a podcast that I've been listening to.

Might end up trying this.

rorylaitila• 1 year ago

I've found the number of people that read my work vs interact is greater than 100 to 1. Similarly to you I get a lot of feedback IRL. Some people consider me 'prolific' within my small network, even though it feels like there is often no engagement at all. It's not easy to measure the true effect you have!

mmarian2• 1 year ago

Yep, it's what I tell myself to keep going ^_^

ericmcer• 1 year ago

I have been on the other end of this. I have a few Spanish tutors I pay ~$10 to chat with for 30m sessions. It is nice creating a dynamic where you can shamelessly talk about yourself without worry, because you are paying.

In the rest of life I usually am the captive audience (kids, wife, etc.) and put my own stuff on the back burner. The author is questioning why people would pay, but it is nice to curate a conversation that is intentionally one-sided, otherwise if you contact him the onus is on you to make it worth his time.

Want to meet people, try charging them for it?

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