Selling What You Can Get For Free

The Hacker’s Diet is a ebook published online for free by the engineer and businessman John Walker.

Walker was the cofounder of Autodesk. The book was the result of his own dislike of being overweight for most of his adult life. He turned his attention to the dieting information available and approached the problem the way an engineer would. The result was a spreadsheet based calorie counting system.

After sustainably losing the weight, he released the book online.

It's information dense and it's filled with numbers and formulas. But the communication style is clear where it needs to be. For the goal of losing excess body fat and staying in a healthy zone, this book laid it all out.

For free.

This is an example of all the information in the world being available for free out there on the internet. If you look long and far enough, you can find whatever you want to know being shared freely. People could recreate what Walker did. They could even follow his breadcrumbs and use the resources he made available.

So given all of that, why does the weight loss industry still exist?

There are plenty of personal trainers out there that earn six figures. Nutritional science is ongoing, but body recomposition is now largely understood. Since the explosion of YouTube, video tutorials of carpentry, plumbing, and electrical work are good enough that a dedicated person could largely build and renovate their own house.

What's missing is the packaging.

What the experts are saving you is not money. It is time. An experienced professional can do this work for you and get you the result in a fraction of the time. They know where to troubleshoot, what errors to avoid and what pitfalls to look for.

Those six figure trainers got to that level by being better at everyone else at organizing and communicating the right information. So good in fact that many create their own digital products the way that Walker did.

Walker’s biggest fans are other engineers - his book isn’t as accessible to the general audience. Millionaire trainers, on the other hand, might give less information, but package it in a way that is more broadly accessible and easier to follow.

They’re not just selling information you could get for free. They’re selling the processes and the insights and the experience that lives between the bullet points on the information list.

It’s easy for marketers to lose sight of this. Although price sensitivity does exist, it’s often not the singular factor that determines buying behavior. For the YouTuber with limited cash but unlimited time, learning to build a house from scratch might make sense. Most people however simply don’t live like that.

In a sense, customers are striking a bargain where they are spending some of their cash to avoid spending some of their time. Time expended is the true cost of working through The Hackers Diet. Some will have to spend more of their time than others - and would be happy to pay some bootstrapper that already understands the Hacker’s Diet to save that time.