I have been selling the ningo.me idea for a while now, and as mentioned before, I have been observing friendly and random users as they discover ningo.me. I am learning the hard way how difficult it is to sell a complete innovation.
I will take the next few posts to discuss some of the tough points to get across.
No-one loves me!
The first one points at the core of the innovation and amazes me every time. The user says:
“No-one would ever pay me to send me email!”
This ubiquitous argument to me is strongly related not only to the custom that email has always been “free”, but to a deep-rooted issue with self-esteem. (I won’t even go into the argument that ningo.me does not hinder you from either setting the postage on an address to zero, or from continuing to use your normal free email addresses with those you don’t want to charge a fee – like your prospective customers, your friends, family, etc.)
Communications has a value
When I got to know the “free” communication channel “email”, I was delighted.
So many years did I have to organize envelopes, paper, write legibly or get my matrix printer to work, buy stamps at the rarely open and monopolistic post office, find out the complete postal address of the recipient, and finally hope and wait for the letter to arrive there.
Now, all I needed to know was the recipients email address. I’d type in my message, hit send, and the message was there immediately – for free.
It didn’t take long however until I realized that not only could I send email to others for free, but so could anyone else send me email for free! In came the spam stream at first. Spam filters improved dramatically over time. Today, I rarely get any spam anymore. However, I do get a lot of unsolicited, unmotivated, irrelevant, nosy, tedious, or unready emails.
How about you? Do you ever get such emails?
I tell you that with any postage on an email address – even if the sender had to pay 1 cent per message -, most of this would be gone. Immediately.
So for this first argument:
Yes: no-one with irrelevant messages for you would pay you to send you email.
Do you consider this a problem?
You are an expert
As for the issue with self-esteem: I am truly amazed at how little many people think of themselves. I have actually been in business with people where I would not have minded paying 5$, 10$, or even 20$ per email message to have the conversation with them that I was having. While they themselves at the same time gave me the above argument.
I believe a great majority of people walking this earth are experts at something important, and that others would value that and express this through an unintrusive “postage” on their email address.
You might know a lot about gardening, about maintaining large-scale databases, about baby-sitting, about vintage cars, about knitting (and be interesting to those who want to learn about any of these things); you might be a cool dude or a pretty girl (and be interesting to your future counterpart); you might be a consumer willing to share your preferences about shopping (and be interesting to a market research company); you might be a collector of art nouveau furniture (and be interesting to the respective antiques dealer). And by the way: all those who would be interested in you would most probably only pay for messages they target and personalize especially for you!
Why do so many completely ignore their own value? It might be related to the way some of us were born, the way some of us were brought up at school, the way we are constantly bombarded with advertisement, with the message that we are only good if we buy this, if we own this, if we get this degree, if we are young, if we are beautiful, etc.
What do you think?
So for this second argument:
Yes: If you are unaware of what you are worth, if you keep your gold to yourself and don’t even give others a chance to express their appreciation for your value through ningo.me – no-one would pay you to send you email!
Are you ready to challenge this point by giving it a try?
Paying makes me happy
Finally, I’d like to let you in on early findings of my own experience as a user of ningo.me: I have been in conversations with more than one user who asked for over 20$ per email – and it felt good! To me! The paying sender!
Here’s what happened: I am a heavy knowledge worker. I often get into situations where I would like to learn something new. Sometimes, I prefer to ask someone for advice instead of researching forever. Before ningo.me, I’d start to try to contact an expert and hope she or he would take the time to answer. I’d try to be witty, charming, or sell a cool idea – these are all things I might be good at, but they distract me and the recipient from the actual issue at hand. When I’d get the advice, I’d sometimes be left with a slightly uncomfortable feeling of maybe owing someone something and not ever being able to make it up.
With ningo.me, the whole experience is absolutely straight forward. The expert sets up an address and sets the terms. For example: “If you use this email address (which costs 10$ per message), I’ll invest 15 minutes to answer it”. The situation is absolutely clear. I know what I get, I can cut through all the polite verbiage, I will carefully consider and craft my questions, the recipient owes me an answer, and there will be no bad feelings ever – even after the tenth request for advice.
I look forward to hearing about your first-hand experience!