Question

Topic: Strategy

How To Educate An Average College Student...

Posted by Anonymous on 8/13/2013 at 11:20 AM ET 25 Points
on the difference between a word processor such as Word, a generic note-taking program such as Evernote, and a special purpose learning tool such as Knowledge NoteBook, that is designed to help them with their study?

One answer is:
Word or other word processor is great for creating a formal document such as a proposal or resume which needs to look sharp and it's formatting heavy. And Evernote etc. are great for taking notes for recipe or something as a record that one may rarely go back to it. But note-taking for learning is different because the student needs to go back to the notes to review it, to understand it better and for certain information they need to remember them, Knowledge NoteBook has study tool set to help them with that whereas neither Word nor Evernote etc. generic note-taking program is able to.

Supposed you were such an average student upon reading the above paragraph would you want to try out Knowledge NoteBook to see if it is true? Say, some of you do, then upon landing, oh well, it may takes me several minutes to download and install... forget it? Or hmm, it may cost me $20 something, not sure... Or well, heck, it sounds interesting, let me try it and if I have questions I'll ask them?

Using survey to answer the above questions might be surreal, that is, less real in this case...
Your thoughts? Your basic profile...

Thanks.



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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 8/13/2013 at 2:54 PM Member
    Since students don't have much discretionary income, they are likely to either use the tools that the school provides access to, or free tools. So, likely not to pay to try your software. Evernote (etc.) has the advantage of working across multiple OSes/devices (and is free).
  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 8/13/2013 at 9:58 PM Member
    If I were an average student, your explanation above would not be powerful or strong enough to entice me into checking out the program on offer.

    From Wikipedia, there's this: "Evernote is a suite of software and services designed for notetaking and archiving. A "note" can be a piece of formatted text, a full webpage or webpage excerpt, a photograph, a voice memo, or a handwritten "ink" note. Notes can also have file attachments. Notes can be sorted into folders, then tagged, annotated, edited, given comments, searched and exported as part of a notebook."

    Microsoft Word is a word processing program, not strictly speaking, a note taking program. Compring your product to other products is strategically a bad move because the comparison takes attention AWAY from your product.
  • Posted on 8/13/2013 at 10:00 PM Author
    "Evernote (etc.) has the advantage of working across multiple OSes/devices (and is free).",
    its basic version is free but data volume goes up or a more useful version one has to pay. It's very good at driving many to believe it's free tho.

    Student's low "income"? well, thousands of dollar for intuition is for what? Investment. Hence, why not invest a few more dollars to make your major investment to pay off better? Not logical?

  • Posted on 8/13/2013 at 10:05 PM Author
    "Compring your product to other products is strategically a bad move because the comparison takes attention AWAY from your product.",
    I'll take your thought into consideration.
  • Posted by Moriarty on 8/14/2013 at 2:35 AM Accepted
    When you say "Student's low "income"? well, thousands of dollar for intuition is for what? Investment. Hence, why not invest a few more dollars to make your major investment to pay off better? Not logical?"

    Yes, if life were logical you'd be right.

    Yet we have Walmart and Aldi because people would rather spend money on things they value rather than food. Yet eating well will improve their health and their enjoyment of life immensely. What your customer perceives as value needs to be addressed - and buying software that they can "get for free" is a big hurdle for you to leap.

    Too big for most marketing budgets.

    My suggestion is to have a free trial period - but not stated as such. Make a voucher with a code that will allow someone to test out your system to see if they like it. After several weeks (months?) they will need to purchase a licence or it stops working. The voucher has a definite value in this instance - and that is way more attractive than telling your customers that your stuff ain't worth anything (that is to say, a free trial, free software).

    That has been used successfully since the 1920s, so why more people don't use it baffles me. The psychology works to reinforce the value of your product, not undermine it.
  • Posted on 8/14/2013 at 5:10 AM Author
    "
    My suggestion is to have a free trial period - but not stated as such. Make a voucher with a code that will allow someone to test out your system to see if they like it. After several weeks (months?) they will need to purchase a licence or it stops working. The voucher has a definite value in this instance - and that is way more attractive than telling your customers that your stuff ain't worth anything (that is to say, a free trial, free software).
    "
    Very interesting point. I've realized that free trial isn't a good model. And that's one of the reasons why my current download page did not say so,
    https://www.knowledgenotebk.com/download.html

    More interesting "thing" will come...

    Thanks.

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