7 isn't a bad number - and it seems to have worked with getting the bailout passed. 700 Billion feels closer/is easy to report as "Half a billion". 800 Billion would have been rounded to "One Trillion" - a (slightly) scarier number. It's very much the same problem, though at a different scale & with different decision makers - in the case of the bailout, the target audience was Congress with a nod to the media. In any case - to bring this back around to the original post - the lesson here is to know (or be) your audience and to understand the sacrifices they'll make for the value you offer.
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7 isn't a bad number - and it seems to have worked with getting the bailout passed. 700 Billion feels closer/is easy to report as "Half a billion". 800 Billion would have been rounded to "One Trillion" - a (slightly) scarier number. It's very much the same problem, though at a different scale & with different decision makers - in the case of the bailout, the target audience was Congress with a nod to the media. In any case - to bring this back around to the original post - the lesson here is to know (or be) your audience and to understand the sacrifices they'll make for the value you offer.