Love It
A Y Combinator company Popcuts, has recently launched on the premise that early buyers of a product should be rewarded if they buy when the product is new/unpopular and it eventually becomes popular.
This is one of the most innovative incentives I have seen in a while. They are using music as their initial product but there are any number of other things that this would make complete sense for.
For instance, event and conference producers are at the mercy of conference goers who prefer the convenience of registering the day before or the week before the event but need to make big investments (locking in the venue etc.) in the hope that people are just waiting to register the week before rather than not registering at all.
That’s why there is an early bird discount: To encourage people to show their intent as early as possible. Using the compounding model of rewards, being able to go free or at 30% of the cost if the conference is a sell out would be huge (you’d still pay the fee up front and take the risk).
By it’s very nature this would only work for undiscovered products. There would be no point in doing this for the NBA Finals or the new Madonna CD, but there is something here that is quite powerful in getting people to take a chance on untested things. Will be fascinated to see where it goes.
