Fragile Plan vs Robust Plan

by revorad • 13 years ago

91 15 13 years ago

SkyMarshal4• 13 years ago

Good article, but incomplete without a cost comparison. What's the overall cost/revenue difference b/t the fragile plan/s (which cost little but failed and made no revenue) and robust plan which succeeded but required 50+ freelancers.

sivers3• 13 years ago

Great point. I don't have the answer, but here's something to consider:

That brilliant journalist I hired, the person who was ready to take on the responsibility of writing 16 books in a year, needed $90k salary.

Finding people to answer some specific questions about their existing field of expertise has cost very very little. 48 researchers cost less than $60k.

SkyMarshal4• 13 years ago

That's interesting, I particularly liked the part where you realized coming up with the right questions was the way forward, and based on that info I suppose you could value your 200 questions at roughly $30k, since that's the extra bit journalist would have had to do otherwise.

On a side note, thanks for all your writings over the years, I've learned a ton and still use some of them for both personal reference and for referring friends & associates.

cookingrobot2• 13 years ago

The books look really interesting. Did you confirm demand before starting the project?

sivers3• 13 years ago

Nope. Doing this for my own self-education. It's really more of a hobby than a business. See http://sivers.org/eg

cookingrobot2• 13 years ago

That's great - nice hobby!

dreamfactory2• 13 years ago

$50 per book seems very high. I'd probably buy the whole set at $5 each.

SkyMarshal4• 13 years ago

Not for someone seriously considering investing their time, personal savings, and opportunity cost in doing a startup in one of these countries.

sivers3• 13 years ago

Yeah. Originally I was going to price them at $200 each.

("For the cost of one night in a Hong Kong hotel, this will save you weeks or even months of research.")

Definitely only of interest to someone really planning on setting up a business in one of these countries in the next year or so.

I often drop $39 on random Ruby, JavaScript, or web design ebooks.

That said, now that I've tried the $50 price point, I might try something much cheaper next year just to see what happens. If I do, then all the people who bought it at $50 this year will get it free next year.

sytelus• 13 years ago

I think the correct terminology here is "anti-fragile" inlight of Nasim Talib's new book.

Fragile = something that can't withstand randomness

Robust = something that can withstand randomness to a point

Anti-fragile = something which gets better when exposed to randomness

OP's plan here demonstrates anti-fragility, not just robustness. Overall great article about how to crowdsource pool of knowledge and turning it in to a business.

gtani• 13 years ago

Just noticed this yesterday, amongst lots of CAP theorem and lcokless data structures: http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/06/antifragility-from-...

mooreds• 13 years ago

I will be interested to see if there's editorial consistency between the books and between the years. That seems like it'd be a lot easier to achieve if there was one voice behind each book.

On the other hand, it's not like these guides are novels, so maybe it doesn't matter as much.

Fragile Plan vs Robust Plan

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