10 Pricing Resources To Boost Your Startup's Revenue
Read one blog and become a pricing expert?
That’s my goal for you today!
Price is more than a dollar figure on a webpage.
It determines if your business makes money!
Pricing is all about confidence in what you are building and objectively understanding your value.
But the majority of founders build something without understanding what and if people will pay for it. What does your market think about your value???
Pricing is hard, not intuitive, rarely taught or discussed, and often becomes a fingers-crossed number on a sales presentation!
That ends today.
We had an amazing Masterclass-level webinar with Fynn Glover of Schematic where he walked through an 8 step process to assess a customer’s “willingness-to-pay.”
It’s a process used by top (read: expensive) pricing strategy consultants — now available to you via GDoc, webinar recording, and slide deck!
I’ll share an overview of Fynn’s webinar, 2 great pricing podcasts, plus some of my own real life stories about startup pricing.
(Expert tools would have saved us months of bad pricing and made us way more money. 🙃😉🥴)
Buckle up and prepare to rake in the dollars!
Here are 10+ resources to make more money starting meow!
Willingness-To-Pay: Overview
Willingness-To-Pay is a framework for figuring out your value to customers and how to price correctly. You can learn more in one intentional 30 minute call than months of tweaking your pricing page!
Use this Gdoc template for customer conversations
Willingness-To-Pay: Timing
Fynn suggests running “willingness-to-pay” conversations at 3 stages:
Pre-product: is this worth building?
Design partners/early users: what customers will pay?
Post-product market fit (Seed or Series A-ish): does price align with value?
Pricing will evolve over time. Build the muscle of revisiting pricing regularly and plan to iterate!
8 Steps of Willingness-To-Pay Conversations
Demo & Value Prop - set the stage
Value Prop Discussion - where do they see most value
Your Relative Value - how does your value compare to other tools they use
Price Metric - fave new term! users, API calls, # of contacts are all price metrics
Packaging Schema - react to example good, better, best packages
Maximum Willingness To Pay - what’s the most you’d pay
Other Factors Influencing The Buyer - get more context
Closing Feedback - thank them and ask for feedback on the process
Want more? Get the specific questions to ask and context on each step in the webinar recording and slide deck.
Even a grizzled startup veteran like myself learned some awesome new strategies and questions. I’m coming at you with a relative value question soon!
Willingness-To-Pay: Key Insights & Reminders
Some favorite takeaways:
Pricing is an emotional conversation. It can be hard on both sides.
Get comfortable in silence. Let customers really think and reflect.
Avoid founder charisma. You’re searching for objective truth. The bigger the company gets, the more founders removed from this process.
Willingness-to-pay is not customer discovery or a sales tool. Do this after you “Mom Test” and run real life experiments.
Reminder from Kathryn: When in doubt, launch and make people pay something. Don’t let “must run willingness-to-pay process and have perfect pricing” become a reason to not ship the thing into the world!
It’s a tool, not a delay tactic.
As you’ll see in my stories👇, companies can be successful even with bad pricing! 😂
Real Life Pricing Stories & Lessons
Straight from the startup trenches! Supplement your Willingness-To-Pay process with tactical tips like, retire old pricing, opt for simplicity to start, and make sure it will cost IBM $1M to buy your product. 😉
2 Recommended Pricing Podcasts
Get even more expert advice!
1) Invest Like the Best: The DNA of Software Companies with Miles Grimshaw
Hear the story of Segment’s pricing evolution
#1 rec from Fynn
2) Monetizing SaaS: Lessons from SaaS Operators
50+ episodes, ~30 minutes each from real folks who built and monetized great products
Hosted by Fynn
Schematic & Sales Tip
Fynn didn’t mention his product a single time on the webinar.
I will though!
(If your investor can’t talk you up, who can??)
If you don't want your engineers to work on pricing and billing, and want your GTM founders to fully control pricing and packaging without code changes → check out what Schematic is building!
P.S. I love that the webinar was 100% educational and not a pitch. Everyone expects you to plug your product so when you don’t, it builds curiosity and goodwill. I’ve seen other founders do the same thing with similar results!
Want More?
Fynn offered more pricing deep dive sessions! Shoot him a LinkedIn message if you’re interested.
Pricing AI Products - 6 AI pricing models with pros and cons of each
Pricing 102 - Determining your price elasticity, power, and sensitivity
Packaging 102 - Determining leader, filler, killer features, and add-ons
Negotiation - How to successfully negotiate pricing for enterprise deals
Anatomy of the Pricing Page - How do drive conversion from your pricing page
What’s been your most helpful pricing insight or advice? Did you attend Fynn’s webinar? What was your favorite takeaway? Have you run “Willingness-To-Pay” exercises before?
This is really helpful!
Thank you sharing all of this Kathryn!!