Highly recommend against it! Instead of 100 customers at $10 you're cannibalizing (let's say) to 80 customers at $10 + 40 at $5. So a +20% revenue "bump", but you lose all quality control of peoples perception of your product!
Prefer: 80 customers at $12, which is approximately revenue neutral, but increases your effective ROI / hourly wage... AND you keep the high quality, word-of-mouth advertising.
Basically, you'd prefer to have people walking around with _your_ printed and bound product with nice QR code on the back rather than some hackintosh, ink-jet + scissors on 19lb copy paper and saying: "i PaId moNeY FoR ThiS!!" ;-)
...as I'm in the "home printing and binding biz" (gbc-proclick, hand/kettle stitch, carl rolling paper slicer, hp-laserjet, all for personal/hobby use)... What's the equipment you had to end up getting? I'm sorely tempted to chase a (manual) hydraulic paper cutter, but absolutely can't justify the cost / space. Are you still on color laser or are you doing something else for printing? Jigs for slicing? What's the story?
Thanks for this thoughtful perspective! Honestly, you’ve brought up a key point about quality control that we haven’t fully considered, and I completely agree. The last thing we want is our product ending up being judged unfairly due to subpar, home-printed alternatives. We’ll definitely rethink this feature and make sure any future decisions keep quality at the core.
As for the equipment, we currently use:
- 450VS/520E Electric Paper Cutter
- BINDER K5 (Soft Binding Machine)
- Ricoh MPC3003 (Color Laser Printer)
Prefer: 80 customers at $12, which is approximately revenue neutral, but increases your effective ROI / hourly wage... AND you keep the high quality, word-of-mouth advertising.
Basically, you'd prefer to have people walking around with _your_ printed and bound product with nice QR code on the back rather than some hackintosh, ink-jet + scissors on 19lb copy paper and saying: "i PaId moNeY FoR ThiS!!" ;-)
...as I'm in the "home printing and binding biz" (gbc-proclick, hand/kettle stitch, carl rolling paper slicer, hp-laserjet, all for personal/hobby use)... What's the equipment you had to end up getting? I'm sorely tempted to chase a (manual) hydraulic paper cutter, but absolutely can't justify the cost / space. Are you still on color laser or are you doing something else for printing? Jigs for slicing? What's the story?