DailyJim: Subscription heaven and the option to choose for how long we’ll pay

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. This is an episode for Tuesday, September 24th, 2024.

Oh, 24th, 2024. Today I want to talk about...

Controlling the number of payments we have on subscriptions. Subscriptions. I'll come up with a better title later. Let me just do the riffing because I'm tired. I've been programming all day or all evening. So the idea is that I think a lot of us are tired of paying these endless subscriptions to things. And there's a lot of different services that offer these things, a lot of different products. And as I was working on my website with this idea of crowd employment, as I was trying to fix up the site, I thought, you know what, when we hire people to do things, we employ people to do things, we don't employ them necessarily on an indefinite basis. We don't sign up and say, I am going to give you money forever. Now sometimes we do and sometimes we're actually happy to knowing that, yes, we can and cancel. But sometimes it's much easier when there's a time commitment. And I thought right now in the moment, actually thinking back to when I worked in consulting, that sometimes it wasn't about the money, it was actually about the time. And so trying to sell an eight month project to somebody can be really hard. Or a retainer agreement where the consultant is there indefinitely can be really hard, but selling a short project like a one-week project or you know one-month project or even one-day project.

Can sometimes be more digestible for people. And then maybe they want to come back and go for more. But really just breaking it down into a smaller time chunk. And if you think about how a lot of technology subscriptions work these days, whether it's an app or a website or something, this idea of SaaS, software as a service, most of them are either one-off, and very few are, or indefinite subscriptions. Subscriptions now with the indefinite ones sometimes you can pause them for a month or three months and then it restarts or you can cancel and then start again but i have not come across many of them that will give you the option of subscribing for one month three months one quarter, which is three months, six months, one year, two years, and stopping the payment after that time. Saying, I am only going to make, for example, if it's three months, I will make one payment each month for three months. That means three payments in total, and then afterwards I will stop being charged.

So, I don't think it's actually that technologically difficult to do. I I don't know why people haven't done it, but screw it. I figured it out. I put it on the website. I think it's working. So this will give you the option. This will give me the option to tell people, hey, if you think what I'm working on is valuable, you think I'm really good at doing it, contribute some money, pay some money, employ me to do it, and you don't have to do so indefinitely. If you want to employ me for three months, you want to employ me for six months, you want to employ me for one year, two years, one month, whatever you want to do. Sign up, contribute, let's go.

Because I think, one, I can feel a lot more comfortable in selling something like this and pitching something like this, and two, I think it may be a lot more comfortable for people to take an experiment, to take a risk, small risk, measured risk, and saying, okay, let's see what he might be able to do in three months. Somebody says, you know what, I'm going to give him $100 a month for three months. Let's see what he can do. Worst case scenario, I spend $300. It's not worst case scenario, I spend money indefinitely and then I feel guilty that I haven't canceled the subscription. And then I get stuck in this kind of forever debt. Um, so I think, yeah, I think a lot of times the fear of getting stuck in an ongoing, uh, subscription may not be so different than the fear of getting stuck in an ongoing relationship. Um, and how many of us they say are afraid of commitment, but I really think it's fear of this indefinite time period, this timeline.

So in general, maybe there are some services that lend themselves well to paying and wanting to pay forever. If you have a phone, perhaps the idea is I'm going to use the phone forever as long as I can, or Netflix. Actually, Netflix maybe is better for the month-to-month thing, choosing how long you want to use it. Um, but I think when it comes to services, especially employing or crowd employing somebody to do something, I think the time limit, uh, the, um, the time constraint and the time boundary or whatever we want to call it can has good potential to make people feel more comfortable to take the risk and also can give more sense of an urgency actually to the people who are working like listen this person signed up for three months let me go let's see what i can do in three months um if somebody signed up for six months like i appreciate that it can almost show a longer term commitment whether they even stick around for the six months or not somebody signs up and they say listen i'm going to sign up for 12 months i'm going to pay this amount uh let's say let's say it's a crazy number. Maybe they're like, I'm going to give you $500 a month for five months or for 12 months. Then it says to me, this person wants to stick around for 12 months. Doesn't mean they have to, they can always cancel. Or if you want to kind of like, they can always fire me if you want to look at it from the crowd employment perspective. Um, but, uh, but even choosing a number can show that it's not just, you know, they've given a little forethought into how long they might want to invest in this service.

Yeah, that's what I've been working on today. So tomorrow I'm going to hit the pavement, as they would say, and really just start reaching out to people and start practicing, pitching this idea to people. Because, listen, I want to start receiving money for the work that I do so that I can keep doing the work and I can do more of it. I mean, interspersed with me spending hours fixing up the website to get this business model working, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who was struggling with a relationship she was trying to break up or wanted to break up and I was like no why are you breaking up like you two love each other why are you both running away from love and you're just blaming him for running away from love, and so she was sending me notes on like oh I want to send him this message what do you think about it and going back and forth on almost a grammarly for love uh Cyrano de Bergerac anyone but uh, oh i don't think i'm that good but uh anyways so um i will sleep soon and talk to you all tomorrow.