from Hacker News

Introducing Increment subscriptions

by rolivercoffee on 1/13/20, 3:41 PM with 56 comments

• by reaperducer on 1/13/20, 7:04 PM

  People have been saying "print is dead" for almost a century now, and somehow it hasn't happened.

  I read an article a couple of months ago which stated that magazine subscriptions are up, and so is printed catalog distribution and sales from those catalogs.

  Anecdotally, subscribing to Apple News only whetted my wife's appetite for the printed versions of the magazines she sees on her iPhone. She's since subscribed to the print versions of three of them.

  We were at the rodeo one day and one of the magazines had a booth. I mentioned to the people from the magazine that my wife subscribed to their publication because of Apple News, and they said they hear that a lot.

  Of course, I've also read that some publishers are not happy with the revenue cut they get from Apple News, so perhaps its not right for every publisher.

• by 101008 on 1/13/20, 6:03 PM

  Unrelated: I do a digital magazine too, people can download the PDF. I'd love to give the people to opportunity to buy a printed copy if they want to (and maybe do some profit on the side). I think that's a good SaaS idea: upload your magazine in PDF and let the startup do everything, from pritning to shipping, and get a cut on that.

• by mchusma on 1/14/20, 4:46 AM

  Please introduce core missing features to billing and payments first before print magazine subscriptions.

  The most obvious one to me: allow people to test their applications in production. Allow them to generate a temporary fake card number, expiration, and cv2 that Stipe can authorize as if it is real.

  Allow you to generate and expire it from the console and via the API.

  We had people on stripe's support team for 6 months tell us we can't test in production on real cards. We didn't want to, but we do have to test production check out flows, and currently the only way to do it is with real cards.

  Someone senior finally told us "of course everyone tests production, you have to. Just nobody likes it. "

  I would put out a call for at least 10 to 100 customer requested features first before a print magazine.

  I think it's been almost 5 years since stripe has introduced a feature we actually wanted. I'm not trying to be a troll, but this super obvious payment testing thing really bothers me because 100% of customers who build apps for payments should be using it. And it's not built.

• by spamizbad on 1/13/20, 4:41 PM

  I think more companies should create zines. But maybe not be so corporate about it.. like this... be more authentic. Very powerful culture building tool tho IMO.

• by tw1010 on 1/13/20, 6:33 PM

  Curious: Do people find value in reading increment? I've tried reading it a few times but have often found it to be too many words for too little deep insight. Would love to be convinced otherwise though.

• by GrayTextIsTruth on 1/13/20, 5:46 PM

  Can anyone speak to the quality of the articles? Thinking about subscribing using my company’s “education allowance”.

• by anant90 on 1/13/20, 6:31 PM

  I wonder how many great marketing opportunities/channels are written off because they seem to deviate from the values of focus or frugality? And inversely, how many distractions are hiding under the cover of unconventional marketing? I genuinely don't know.

• by brenden2 on 1/13/20, 5:37 PM

  Airbnb did something like this back when I worked there. Not sure what came of it. I do remember seeing some copies of it sitting on coffee tables throughout the office.

• by paxys on 1/13/20, 5:38 PM

  I have seen so many of these magazines floating around I assumed there was a subscription already.

• by vageli on 1/13/20, 4:46 PM

  Is it just me or is it somewhat humorous that the checkout uses Shopify and not stripe?

• by randall on 1/13/20, 5:40 PM

  Man I wish they had a Kindle edition. Would so subscribe.

• by marvindanig on 1/13/20, 4:34 PM

  Yucks, more dead-tree printing. So much for the 'cradle of innovation' from Silicon Valley, lol.