So here’s an interesting offering from local doctor’s office in Japan:
“If your business lacks an on-site doctor, we’ll serve as a consultant over Line for $100 a month or $200 if you have more than 20 employees. Scope of service is advice not medical care; 24 hour response SLA”
Presumably absurdly high margin for the doctors, very easy to budget for businesses (and so cheap it is irrational not to have it), some actual utility to all parties.
A huge portion of medical practice is successfully diverting subclinical issues from the medical system and escalating important things appropriately. This lets them do both plus assist businesses with preventative strategizing.
(Also solves some complicated social issues, which should be less complicated but we work in the culture we have not the culture we wish we had. “Boss can I talk to the doc? I have been feeling just exhausted.” Doc: “You should take a day.” “Boss I need to take a day.”)
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If you’re a SaaS company who adds 10 customers a month you want an email for every churned customer to debrief them, and if you’re a writer/etc with hundreds of subscribers you *must treat them as statistics* or you will be Dunbarred into depression.
Goes for non-monetized emails, Twitter follows, etc too. Unsubscription is just the back button, not a judgement of moral worth. They didn’t want exactly your thing exactly now. No worries, it’s a big Internet.
BNPLs are a fascinating example of financial engineering in the purest sense of the word: they create high-yielding consumer loans seemingly out of thin air, without charging consumers for the service.
They are broadly more customer friendly than credit cards.
How can this be?
The answer is that BNPLs lean into a poorly understood feature of all payment methods: businesses are paying to move money around, sure, but they’re also paying for marketing impact, and if you can prove marketing impact high margin businesses will shovel money at you.
GameStop: We’re a struggling retailer in a segment beset by e-commerce, which due to our product being digitally deliverable is more of a threat to us than almost any retailer.
WSB: OMG we love your stock.
GameStop: And as you know we have no tech.
WSB: You will liberate us from Wall Street!
GameStop: You might also know that our customers think we’re legendarily lacking in taste or talent.
WSB: Let’s storm the barricades and string up the marketmakers!
GameStop: And as responsible professionals we’re a little bit puzzled.
A weakness of the American system of government is that it expects everyone to be Dangerous Professionals in being able to navigate their own government to access basic services, versus e.g. “Just go to the ward office and somebody there will clearly be able to handle it.”
There’s also an unwillingness, for a combination of resourcing, turf, political, and bureaucratic reasons, to curating efforts that originate outside one’s own fiefdom.
(Applicability to national vaccination initiatives left as exercise to the reader.)
"I like using Paypay because there's the feeling of striving for the higher cash back next month!" (30 transactions + 50,000 JPY spent = 1% next month, else 0.5%)
Me: "So you like that more than the 1% rewards card you have?"
"Yes!"
Not a comment on rationality or irrationality, just a comment on user behavior in payments. Here is Paypay discovering that gamification is worth +/- $30 at 100% margin to this user per year.
That makes them, oh, ~10X more effective at selling her video games than the entire Japanese gaming industry, which is sort of impressive when you think about it.
My friendly neighborhood cafe installed one of the battery rental stations (ChargeSpot) and says it’s the best thing ever.
Eliminates people asking for an outlet (which they don’t have) and since it finally prices the 31st minute at a table it encourages people to drink and go.
(The cafe will, naturally, let you stay and enjoy your coffee for a socially acceptable amount of time, and would not dream of having a countdown clock until a 180 yen charge hit your credit card, but if your battery pack did then well that is their business isn’t it.)
“Also sometimes people drop off a battery from 7/11 at our cafe and then stay for a coffee!”