Your job is to decide at which moment you will shift from paying to spread the ideavirus, to charging the user and profiting from it. It s the money paradox the sooner you ask for money, the less you ll make. The single biggest mistake idea merchants make is that they ask for money too soon. Take the money and run is a clich for a reason. But this strategy introduces friction into the system.
Many marketers require people to pay the most when they know the least.
As they say,timing is everything. Not just for pricing, but also, I suspect, for when you bring your ideavirus into the market. My friend, Chris Meyer of the Centre for Business Innovation, had a good insight about this. He said that the one thing that distinguishes effective sneezing campaigns from ineffective ones is respect for the time, attention, and reputation of the next guy to catch the virus. The decision to clog our friend s email or whatever with the virus in question is nontrivial, because our reputation is at stake.