Hi, I am Josh, one of the Founders of Craftsy and I thought I would chime in with a little extra info about last week's $14.99 promotion... The promotion was intentionally limited to a very small group of members as an experiment to see what impact a much lower price would have on sales of certain courses. In this case it was particularly important that the promotion was limited to a small group of users we could identify... we of course knew that word would spread a bit as people forwarded the email and posted it on message boards like QuiltingBoard, but since the initial recipient group was quite small, we were able to keep careful track of their purchases. Normally when we run a promotion, we make it available to all of our users at the same time and enthusiastically offer refunds to people who may have recently purchased the same class at a higher price - it is of the utmost importance to us that every Craftsy member feels like she is being treated fairly in this regard.
In the case of this promotion we felt that we had to differ from this standard practice and keep the promotion as limited as possible because, given the magnitude of the price reduction, we were highly concerned that the promotion could negatively impact the earnings of the instructors teaching the discounted classes... we were of course hopeful that the increased purchase volume driven by the lower price would make up for the discount, but honestly we didn't know how it was going to play out. Many Craftsy instructors earn a significant portion of the income they need to pay their bills and feed their families from the sales of their Craftsy classes - it is truly an honor to have the opportunity to work with such an amazing group of talented people and to play our small role in enabling them to support themselves doing what they love. We take this responsibility very seriously and as a result are very very careful when it comes to doing anything which might be detrimental to their businesses... on the other hand, we feel it is our responsibility to test, experiment, and try as many new things as we can which may help more and more talented instructors connect with more and more passionate students... so, from time to time we do limited promotions or other experiments with elements of our website. My least favorite thing about these experiments is that we really can't tell anyone the full story about the experiment and what we are trying to learn while the experiment is going on - otherwise the experiment is tainted in a way which might impact the results. I know this can be quite frustrating and as a result we do not do things like this very often.
I greatly appreciate your patience with us and your faith in the fact that everything we do, while far from perfect as we make well-intended mistakes along the way, is focused on making Craftsy as great as we can possibly make it for you and all of the other amazing Craftsy members.
I look forward to your continued feedback - feel free to reach out to me directly anytime: josh[at]craftsy[dot]com