I never got these "for students" type of promotions. Everyone does it. Amazon, fogbugz, local pizza shops, and a ton of others I'm sure.
Maybe I shoudn't say "I don't get it", because I guess I do. The student label is pretty convenient and as everyone seems to understand it; "students are broke" because they have to pay for school and cannot work full time? Is that it?
A lot of people legitimately struggle to pay for things and are "broke". While it is true that being a student is a good thing, it does not entail that not being a student, (or maybe just specifically not being a student at a qualifying university that gives out .edu addresses or something) is a bad thing.
I guess my point is people struggle in all sorts of ways, and I would be happy to see a company say something more like "Free for people in need", "Pay what you can", or something like that. Ok so I'm not the best marketer but that would be nice in my book.
An open, honest, and truly unbiased form of helping out. =)
P.S. I guess I should put my money where my mouth is. I'll incorporate that into my side projects and hopefully I can refine it enough to share my results (and promotions) here with HN.
The answer (in general, though not in this particular case because the product is free) is price discrimination[0]. The basic idea is that by segmenting their customers roughly by ability to pay (students and seniors will on average pay less for your product than others) you can charge higher prices to everybody else. Otherwise, you would have to reduce your prices across the board in order to maximize profits.
Ah, but students aren't just poor -- they're a tricker state, one which I'd refer to as "probabilistically temporary poor." Consider that people who read Hacker News are probably intellectually curious and are probably more likely to be computer science majors. It's also pretty likely that these students are bright and will grab decent jobs after graduation. After having exprienced the quality of Hacker Monthly, they will probably wish to continue. While they would no longer get the student discount, they now longer need it since they have acquired decent jobs. Since digital distribution costs practically nothing, the only cost to the distributer is marginal, but with the benefit that the students will probably become paying members in the future.
Exactly this. I'll attempt to speak for my kin here, I'm currently a student and while interested in Hacker Monthly, I couldn't justify paying (subscribing?). I entered my details in the form and hopefully I am eligible. If the product is interesting and useful I would have no problems paying (either when I'm no longer a student or even before that). I'm sure there are others like me and this seems like a case of "get them hooked young and they will be customers for life".
Great explanation. The price discrimination of note here is third degree price discrimination. I think the most vivid example of this type that people here have seen is how Apple's product lineup is composed and the various pricing they offer to different types of customers.
Also, most startups that have incremental pricing on their products (eg: wufoo, heroku) do this as well.
The reasoning might be to get them used to your software/business/... to have them as customers later on when they will pay the full price.
For example Autodesk [1] allows students to get licenses for nearly all products for free but doesn't allow commercial use. Once they go into the business they have a few years of experience with Autodesk software and will probably stick to it.
This is the same for fogbugz (who also have a free startup edition - 2 ppl limit) and others.
Also, it's a good way to develop loyal customer for the future. If your target customers are college educated white collars, then tapping into that market early is a great way to establish top of mind awareness of your brand for the future.
One of the main benefits to discounting students rather than just anyone-who's-broke is that it's easy to prove that someone is really a student. It's not foolproof (some non-students can "prove" it, and not all students are broke), but it's the low hanging fruit.
I imagine the reasoning is also related to the potential future income of students - they may be poor now, but their degree will bring them higher earning potential down the road.
Basically: hook them while they're broke, collect the cash when they're less broke.
I've seen a number of groups that organised recreational sports events that offer discounts to people who are students or unwaged. That seems to be kinda of what you suggesting.
Thus why most students aren't eating dinner at a half-decent restaurant. Certainly $29 a year is affordable, but that's also nearly two months of a 20GB Heroku DB addon or a month and a half of an MediaTemple GridServe instance. At the moment every penny I make from work is being put straight into my own startup, and I'm sure it is the same for many other students that are reading HN.
From a commercial perspective, it's probably at least true that [most] students won't pay $29 a year for a magazine, affordable or not. Whether that matters depends on whether you think there's a benefit in them reading it free, or if it's fine if they just don't read it.
$29 is enough for a week's worth of meals from the nearby Chinese restaurant. When I have to choose between entertainment and food, I'm going with the latter; some other people will get the food and acquire the entertainment through "cheaper" means as well. One way to get loyal customers is to reward them immediately without asking for anything.
This type of promotion is a great idea if you run a service that businesspeople pay money for. Especially if said service is tons better than the entrenched Enterprise Thing in its niche.
Roughly 100% of the students you give free licenses to will one day be sitting in a room full of people wearing ties, trying to, for example, get WebEx to work at all so that they can get on with the big call. It's costing them $1000 per minute to have the Director of Finance messing with the computer, and if Bright Kid chimes in saying "why don't we just use this simple conference thing we used in school. It always just works", then you've more than paid for the free license you gave that kid all those years ago.
It costs you nothing to do. It gains you goodwill, marketing, future sales, and a ton of other side benefits. If you sell stuff to businesses, absolutely do this.
Universities in Germany and probably many other countries don’t have special e-mail addresses. I guess you will either have to verify manually (if there is indeed some kind of college or university behind the address) or just not accept those submissions.
That would help. Many German universities have rudimentary English versions, which makes things easier, too. I suppose it's enough to search the university's name and "email", though. I found some email adresses of my university that way, anyway. Thanks for doing this - I (and the other students, I bet) appreciate it a lot.
i've been working on an extended digital version of hackermonthly that i should mention here for all you HM subscribers.
it's a 100% digital interactive magazine (click through it!) that on a daily basis takes the 30 "most interesting" posts from hackernews and puts them all on a single "front page".
as a bonus i've included not just a few dozen comments but HUNDREDS of comments (for your reading pleasure). the "front page" subscription service costs only $.99 a month and gives you a daily "front page" in a digital, interactive, and browser-friendly format (ipad & kindle too!). i've also put together a "more page" subscription service that gives you access to not just the top 30 stories but ALL STORIES -- in 30 page increments.
if you act now, each additional 30-story "More" page can be accessed for the ridiculously low price of $.25/page.
but that's not all. if you're a student and respond to this post in the next 30 minutes, you'll get daily access to not just the "front page", not just a "more" page, but EVERY PAGE in the entire hackernoobs archive for just $1.99/month.
