If you’re a Mac user chances are good you already know about MacHeist. In summary MacHeist is a bundle of Mac apps sold at a very ridiculously attractive price. Usually if only one or two apps in the bundle appeal to you you already save money by buying the bundle.
This is all well and good, but the really interesting thing about MacHeist is that it’s a stroke of marketing genius. Since the first iteration through to the third and current one the MacHeist guys have used an amazing array of guerrilla marketing and the traditional “It slices! It dices! It solves world hunger!” tactics to create a buzz around the product, including but not limited to:
- Detective style “missions” to unlock free stuff, usually by snooping around Mac-centric sites for clues but extending to even Rot15 encrypted ads in Mac-blogs’ RSS feeds.
- Fake hacker-defacing of several well-known sites in the Mac community. (With the paticipation and consent of the owners of those sites). This one really caused a lot of controversy.
- Enlisting people to do Twitter promotion (spam) for freebies, referral programs etc…
- And; charity donations which is of course very cool.
There’s been loads of controversy over MacHeist, concerning both their marketing tactics (see the defacing thing above) and their buisness model. Exemplified here by highly regarded Mac pundit John Gruber.
All this has been said and debated, so I won’t go into those criticisms. And before I bring up my own peeve with MacHeist let me first state that I do find the bundle to be a very lucrative deal for the end-user (me) and I have in fact shilled out the 39 bucks for it.
Alright; MacHeist, as I mentioned, donates 25% of their earnings to a charity you may pick yourself from a selection, and theres no getting around that this is a great thing. One of the ways they promote this is to “lock” some of the apps until a certain amount has been “raised for charity”. When the first goal is reached the first app is unlocked (for all customers) and the next goal is stated, and so on.
The main reason I bought the bundle was to get The Hit List and Espresso. $39 for those two alone is a very sweet deal. What I didn’t notice before I actually swiped my credit card was that these two apps won’t be available before a certain, unknown amount of money has been, as they say, “raised for charity”.
The fact that I didn’t read the agreement properly is my fault.
The way they go about this however makes me feel a bit queasy. You see, what I mistakenly read, and grudgingly accepted, was that the locked apps would be made available when 400.000 had been “raised”, but it turns out that some other app I don’t care about will be unlocked at 400.000, and the two apps I do care about will be unlocked when an amount of money they won’t tell you what is has been raised. So even when I was willing to gamble, now I’m suddenly playing blindfolded.
Now, I’m not actually worried that I’ve wasted my money, and I’ll tell you why in a second, but I think this adds itself to a number of questionable marketing practices. Here are my grudges:
- The goal is stated to be to “raise money for charity”. What we’re doing however is purchasing your product which earns you money of which you will donate a portion to charity.
Only stating that “we won’t give you these apps before we’ve made enough money” doesn’t sound as nice as “C’mon folks! Let’s help them starving kids. If we can get enough for a new orphanage we’ll give you these apps as a bonus!”. It’s disingenuous and icky. I really think that you’re donating to charity is great, and something you can pride yourselves on, but this is pushing it.
- I don’t mind your refferral scheme. I do mind your Twitter spam scheme, but I’ll let that one lie for now. But the fact that what you’re doing with this unlocking schtick is to hold the apps ransom so that your customers will go pester their friends or spam forums to get people to purchase the bundle is obvious and ugly.
I didn’t like it back in the nineties when the less intellectually endowed among my friends joined the pyramid schemes and tried to recruit me every other day, and I don’t appreciate it now.
- And even if I didn’t feel that this “it’s for charity” angle is nauseating, I strongly dislike the idea of not telling me what the goal is for the final apps in the bundle.
To paraphrase Terry Pratchett; “It’s like playing a game of cards in a dark room when no one will tell you the rules, and everyone is smiling all the time!”.
Now, that was a good long rant. Now let me tell you why I’m not actually feeling very concerned that I might have wasted my money.
- If MacHeist doesn’t unlock the final two apps they’ll have a PR shitstorm to deal with. MacHeist thrives on the rep of being a wildly successful, highly engaging experience, rather than just a software bundle.
I don’t know any other software bundles that has a forum of dedicated members (complete with fanboys and trolls) and can get their customers to jump through hoops for bits and bobs.
If they hold out on the last two apps they’ll appear to A: Having failed business-wise. And B: Being mean to their customers.
- Secondly; I’m fairly certain that The PotionFactory and MacRabbit (makers of The Hit List and Espresso respectively) won’t be too happy to have participated in this whole mess and then not get paid, so of course they will get paid; and if they get paid I’m pretty sure MacHeist doesn’t really feel like wasting some tens of thousands of software licenses at the expense of angry customers.
And even if they would do something inane like that, I’m pretty sure that the afore-mentioned developers actually want to see their apps distributed, because happy users recommend products and sell more licenses.
- Thirdly; There really is no other reason for the hare-brained move of keeping the goals secret than to make sure you can adjust them according to what you feel certain the outcome can be.
In conclusion; MacHeist has some wacky marketing solutions. Sometimes actually quite cool, sometimes pretty yucky and on occasion only describable as doubleyou-tea-eff. Still. There’s no denying that the bundle is a fantastic bargain.
