That last paragraph has some merit. Plenty of folks need some help, guidance, or oppertunities in some form or another, but all the largest providers of such help have a perverse incentive to keep people dating longer—it’s the only way they retain customers. To the extent someone tries to run such a business on recurring charges, customer retention will inevitably become a KPI and of course you get what you measure… Obvious fix to that is flat fee, pay only if successful pricing model (or similar). At minimum, we need to stop incentivising these services to be as terrible as they can get away with at what is obstensively their main function.
It seems the same incentives exist to a lesser degree with self help books, especially at the publisher level. If the problem actually gets fixed the customer no longer needs self help books.
That last paragraph has some merit. Plenty of folks need some help, guidance, or oppertunities in some form or another, but all the largest providers of such help have a perverse incentive to keep people dating longer—it’s the only way they retain customers. To the extent someone tries to run such a business on recurring charges, customer retention will inevitably become a KPI and of course you get what you measure… Obvious fix to that is flat fee, pay only if successful pricing model (or similar). At minimum, we need to stop incentivising these services to be as terrible as they can get away with at what is obstensively their main function.
It seems the same incentives exist to a lesser degree with self help books, especially at the publisher level. If the problem actually gets fixed the customer no longer needs self help books.