$50 is also too low. Price according to the value you generate. You generate obvious value in three ways:
(1) Company operators waste tons of time coming up with names. SWAG the number of hours you think people typically take to settle on a name (it took us several days). Back that out to a dollar figure by dividing the typical yearly salary of a funded company operator by $2000 and multiplying by hours.
(2) Companies frequently rename. Put a dollar figure on the cost of a company rename 6 months in, then multiple that by the percentage risk you think the typical company has of renaming (how many renames do you see? how many companies do you think there are in your market?).
(3) Better names generate business (or, they ostensibly do). By the way, I'd probably use Mint vs. Wesabe as my primary example here, since both sides mentioned Mint's name as a key asset.
There is no way these three factors add up to just $50.
A side benefit of charging something closer to your value is, working with people who think $20 is OK but $50 is too much will absolutely inevitably cause you heartache. The people that think $50 is too much are going to be bad customers (as a group). For any business, be it outsourced order management for prop trading firms or hobby figurine sales, $50 is a rounding error.
Geeks have a hard time remembering that pricing isn't just about optimizing customer acquisition vs. customer value. It's also a key component of your positioning. If you charge hobbyist rates, you will serve the hobbyist market. Look at graphic design. It is very possible to get good-looking illustration done near your price point, but impossible to get it done by anyone with a reputation. Designers that serve real companies charge multiple orders of magnitude more just for piecework. And real companies wouldn't dream of slumming with the $50-$100 illustrators, even when those people have more talent. Pick the market you want to serve, and then tailor the price point to that.
Apparently you missed the part where he quoted PG saying: "Take a luxury and make it into a commodity"
It's because he's charging a commodity price that I decided to give it a go and pony up. I would never ever pay the going rate for a 'professional' in this business.
No, I got that part, and also the part of his positioning where he said "name consulting was previously only available to big companies and we want to make it available to smaller companies".
Pricing isn't a binary decision between "cheap" and "nosebleed". This is another geek pricing pathology.
I think $50 is too cheap. I think, if your market is "people that actually need names but are smaller than PepsiCo", there are very few three-figure prices that aren't rounding errors. Why would he want your business? How many entities are there like you, and how often do they pony up for names, and how much does it cost to support them?
Well, in our case we would normally just come up with a name ourselves. But because 50 dollars is worth a shot we're giving him some business. And something tells me there might just be more people in the same situation as we are. But I guess we won't know until he lets us know how many from HN decided to give it a go.
Same. $20 sounded worth the risk, but I'm not going to do it for $50, especially without seeing any evidence of past names generated.
Perhaps a Hacker News special? Or perhaps a different price for those who don't mind sharing the outcomes of your service, and a more expensive price for those who do mind?
As a graduate student, $50 seems like a lot of money to spend on anything except rent... Plus figuring out the return process and if its not super simple just seems like quite a lot of hassle.
