I was talking to a person recently who expressed how when it comes to gathering up a group of people to enter into some kind of collaborative project for fun, if it requires a lot of time commitment he insists in using money as a way to semi guarantee results.

Essentially, everyone would put say $100 into a pool of funds and at the end of the event everyone would get their money back except for those who decide to dropout in a voluntarily manner. He expressed how this has worked great for him as it sorts out people who are serious and would increase the odds that they will actually follow through in an environment where people depend on each other.

When I think about it companies do it all the time. I guess the question is would people take it as an insult?

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Recently I was reading about a business strategy for a seminar where they tried to sort out the serious minded people from those who didn’t really care when it came to attending. What they did was that they mentioned the event had a registration fee of about $20.

In actuality, the event was free upon arrival. The end result was that most of the attendees were people who were serious when it came to learning at the event and was the ideal type of people they were looking for. So while they didn’t get as big of a response, they definitely got a lot of “qualified traffic”.

I learned that technique before and it is definitely true in many cases where if something is free people don’t tend to take it very seriously. Just like joining say some kind of web publishing network, since most of them are free people tend to just sign up and do nothing with it as there is no immediate fear of loss. Just by putting a price tag on it, many times it will make people want to take action immediately and to really be serious about it.

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