I think making something inconvenient to use unless they pay you is the absolute worse way to make money. Want to watch that movie on any device? Tough luck! Want to read that article? Well, you can't unless your a subscriber. Oh, you didn't think we would let you listen to that song anywhere you wanted, did you?

I would like to say the idea of making money through inconvenience is the exclusive domain of large dying giants like the RIAA, MPAA, and publishing conglomerates, but it's not, lots of startups fall into this same trap also.

Heck, we even tried inconvenience as a business model at First Opinion. We want First Opinion to be the first place people turn to when they have a medical question, and yet, what did we do? We limited your interaction with our doctors to once a month unless you gave us money. A move that all but assured we wouldn't be the first place you turned to when you had a medical question.

While we gathered extensive stats that told us this model just wasn't working for us, it really hit home as a problem when my wife, my own beautiful wonderful wife, said she had two more days until her free question renewed when I asked her why she wasn't asking her First Opinion doctor a medical question she had.

Our mistake was we were making people stop and think about what they should do, as Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion notes, this is a huge no no:

The renowned British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead recognized this inescapable quality of modern life when he asserted that "civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them."

Evan Williams, of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium fame, expanded on this in an XOXO talk he gave in 2013:

"The internet makes human desires more easily attainable. In other words, it offers convenience [and] Convenience on the internet is basically achieved by two things: speed, and cognitive ease [...] If you study what the really big things on the internet are, you realize they are masters at making things fast and not making people think.

"Here's the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar internet company [...] Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time [...] Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps."

In other words, people would much rather pay for convenience over inconvenience. So, if you're trying to decide what business model to pursue, I would encourage you to choose making your product more convenient, even if it results in less money at the start, because chances are, doubling down on convenience will make you larger in the long run than a model of inconvenience ever would.

This is exactly what we've observed at First Opinion, we dropped our inconvenience model and made access to a First Opinion doctor free for everyone, anytime, and instead decided to focus on charging for additional conveniences like speed of our doctor's responses and the ability to send photos to our doctors.

And if you're a large dying giant that has decided to go the inconvenience path, remember this observation by Clayton Christensen and hopefully take heed:

In nearly every instance of disruption we have studied, the survival instincts of the disruptees—the prior industry leaders who are being disrupted—set in motion defensive actions intended to slow the pace of disruption. In the end, however, the advantages that disruptive competitors bring to customers in terms of quality, cost, convenience, and accessibility become so apparent that the regulations are removed and the disruption proceeds apace.