The Peanut Butter Trade-Off

Those who know me, know that I eat copious amounts of peanut butter mostly straight from the jar. The downside of this habit is that I am often confronted with a sink full of peanut butter spoons, which are the worst to clean. Alternatively, I could go at that sweet jar of nutty deliciousness with a butter knife – less effective for consumption, but a hell of a lot easier to clean (pre-cleaning on the brim of the jar plus one solid wipe with a sponge). So the question becomes do I maximize pleasure (that massive mouthful of peanut butter) or minimize pain (cleaning those nasty peanut butter spoons)?

Why would I bother to share this dilemma? Because it is the same one that confronts you each time you set out to design a service. How do you choose to make the trade-offs between the optimal “holy shit – this is awesome” moment and the ask (money, personal information, contacts) that allows you to provide that moment?

Take Netflix as an example. Right now they have a free 30-day trial. Unfortunately, I still don’t know if Netflix is any good because I lost interest by the time I got to the third screen (credit card information). Since they are mailing out DVDs, I understand them wanting some collateral, but as a result, I never got to experience that mouthful of peanut butter that might have converted me to a long-term customer. They offered me the spoon, but I didn’t take it because they demanded that I clean it afterwards and I couldn’t tell if their peanut butter was any good.

Silly Netflix didn’t realize that there was a third option… The spatula. It’s not quite the full experience of the spoon, but it is pretty damn close and is just as easy to clean as the knife. Netflix should have offered me a free trial option where I didn’t have to put down a credit card, but only had access to the streaming service. If they offered a spatula, I would be streaming a movie right now instead of writing this blog post.

What’s your spatula?