Getting Knowledge Faster Saves Money

While making my board game, I met another designer who was desperate to find more testers for their game, and asked me how I'd found people to test mine. I told them that (among other things) I'd found a bunch of testers by posting on a Facebook group and offering a $10 thank-you for people to spend 20 mins with me.

This other game-designer wrinkled their nose at this, saying it seemed expensive and unnecessary. I found this strange because:

• Their progress seemed to be bottlenecked by lack of testers
• I knew they had a far, far better paying day-job than I did
• We both live in cities where rent alone costs many thousands of dollars a month

I hope it goes without saying that if you can't afford to spend money on a project then that's completely valid, and the following argument doesn't apply to you in the slightest, but I basically think that some people (like this example game designer) living in big expensive cities while working on side-projects are irrationally under-investing. Here's how I think about it:

• In New York, my burn rate is necessarily thousands of dollars a month: market rent costs thousands of dollars, food and entertainment are very expensive, and while there are ways to live more cheaply if you're serious about it, most people I know here are spending $3k+ per month just on rent and food and everyday life.
• Getting information about the viability of a side-project is much more urgent (and valuable) as a result. Very roughly, think of it this way: at any point in the future you might 1) decide to give up your creative projects to focus on more-stable income-generating work, 2) decide to move out of the expensive city to a place where cost of living is literally 1/3rd or less every month in order to pursue your projects.
• If you can speed up the development of any of your creative projects by even a month, that could allow you (in expectation) to either get a higher-paying job a month sooner, or move out the city a month sooner, some time in the future. This is worth thousands of dollars if it only saves you a month, and tens of thousands of dollars if it saves you a year.
• With that in mind, offering a bunch of people $10 a pop to test your game is an absolute bargain if it allows me to speed up either releasing my project or giving up on it. Tons of other extravagances (e.g. express shipping on prototypes, or even just manufacturing prototypes professionally instead of hand-making them) become obviously rational when you stop thinking of them in terms of the cash price and start thinking of them in terms of time. The details will differ per project, but my rule of thumb would just be "finding out one week sooner if this project is viable or not is worth hundreds of dollars, so I should be willing to spend hundreds of dollars to get that knowledge sooner."

Again, none of this applies if you simply can't afford the spending, and I think there's a whole different category of problems people get into by over-spending on projects where they can't afford to, so I don't want to seem in any way to be encouraging that. But for the category of people who live in expensive places and have money in the bank but are trying to economize it, I think giving up development-speed to save money can be false economy. There is probably a more general mental move this relies on where you feel ok about converting time and money, in general, but I haven't figured that out yet.