If you have a paid newsletter, would you consider offering a discount (AppSumo style) in exchange for more subscribers?
Two reasons why I don't subscribe to more paid newsletters:
- Cost
- Finding good ones that might interest me
If there was a way to find good newsletters for my niche, and a way to subscribe in bulk for a reasonable discount, I would jump at it.
I'm trying to figure out why this doesn't exist (and by extension if I should try it out).
Seems tricky. I do think there's room for "appsumo for X", where X in this case is newsletters. Certainly, people are trying to solve newsletter discovery by way of directories and such.
But, creators may be divided on newsletter pricing in the same way that, say, SaaS builders are:
Users may complain of disciminatory pricing. If I subscribe at $19 only to find that you're offering it for $9 elsewhere, that's a bad experience for me and also for you, in terms of user dissatisfaction and support overhead.
Users at lower prices can also be... more difficult. They're likelier to ask for those discounts, or price reductions, or to make it retroactive via partial refunds; they're more likely to churn, more likely to complain, and more likely to create support obligations.
Lower pricing gives you less margin per user, which impacts your ability to build paid growth later.
I'm not a newsletter owner, but if I were I'd probably steer away from a deep discount.
Discounting may help builders discover true potential of their products. Although deep discounting may not be that useful for a product that already has an audience (like newsletters), some level of discounting might help to discover real revenue potential. For example, if the product is priced at $10 and selling X copies, and reducing the price to sell Y copies at 7 leads to more revenue, then it definitely makes sense.
I think your points here are valid. To get around the discriminatory pricing objection, I would argue that the same pricing is available to anyone who decides to subscribe via the service. They only get the discount if subscribing for multiple newsletters.
A better analogy would actually be Apple One for newsletters. Whereby you can either subscribe to each newsletter individually (say 5 newsletters at $15 each = $75 per month), or subscribe via this offering and it would be cheaper e.g. $65 or something.