How To Approach Your Pricing Strategy
Pricing can be one of the most daunting aspects of product management. Setting the price too high may drive away potential customers, while pricing too low might undervalue your product and hurt profitability.
Join us on June 25th where we’ll be talking about How to Approach Your Pricing Strategy, where some of the top voices in SaaS will tackle common pricing pain points. Our panel of experts will share their strategies, experiences, and best practices to help you navigate the complexities of pricing.
Our panel includes:
- Dani Grant, CEO, Jam.dev
- Craig Watson, CEO, Arro
- Brendan Fortune, Director of PM, customer.io
On the agenda:
– When to start thinking about pricing
– Key considerations
– Selecting your approach
– Lessons learned from experts
– Pricing trends
[00:00:00] Hannah Clark: We’re going
to the latest panel on our community events series. So we’re seeing these so far, we’re, we’re seeing some growth in these and they’ve become a really valuable way for us to engage, uh, with experts and get folks involved in our community. Um, and just, uh, to get some really important discussions out on the table.
So I really appreciate all the feedback we’ve received so far in these sessions. Uh, for those who don’t know, I’m Hannah Clark. I’m the editor of the product manager, and I’ll be your host for today’s panel. Today’s session, we’re going to be focusing on how to approach your pricing strategy, and we’re going to be hearing from three awesome panelists.
We’ve got Danny Grant, who’s the CEO of jam. dev. I’ve got Craig Watson coming in. He’s the CEO of Arrow. And Brandon Fortune, who’s the director of product management at customer. io. So first of all, really warm welcome to all of our panelists today. Thank you guys so much for joining.
[00:00:57] Dani Grant: Thanks for having us.
[00:01:00] Cheers.
[00:01:01] Hannah Clark: So, uh, we’re going to get started in just a moment. Um, so we’re going to go through some housekeeping and stuff, but I’d love to hear, first of all, if folks want to chime in, uh, in the chat with where you’re tuning in from, we’d love to see, uh, where everybody is attending from right now, I’m attending from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
Uh, which if you haven’t heard of that place, it’s okay. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to put it on the map. Um, so right away, uh, we’ll just talk a little bit about how this is all going to work. So today’s session is being recorded. Uh, we may and likely will be using clips from this session on our website and in other content to promote future events.
Um, you can keep your camera on if you’d like to, but you’re welcome to turn it off. And we just ask that you keep your microphone off for the duration of the session. Um, With that said, the first half or so of the event will be just addressing some questions that we’ve prepared in advance that we think will be valuable for you folks.
Second half will be reserved for answering all of your questions. So throughout the session, please feel free to add your own questions to the chat. And we’ll be happy to note them on [00:02:00] the sidebar and I’ll go through them when the time is right. Um, so the rules as far as asking questions is very simple.
You just post a question in the Q& A section and we’ll be answering them as, as many as we can in, uh, excuse me, in sequence once we get to the question and answer portion of the event. Um, and then if, uh, if we’ve got folks here who have, who are joining us who are not members, Welcome. Uh, so this is just one of a many series of events that we are doing, uh, that members as well as non members are welcome to, but we also hold quite a bit of members only events as part of our community, um, beyond events.
We also have a live forum on Slack. We’ve got a growing bank of templates and resources and all kinds of, uh, fun monthly networking events that we hold for members. So if you’re interested in learning more about membership, you can check it out at the product manager. com slash membership, but all the information there for you.
And without further ado, we’ll get straight into the panel. Um, so just to give everybody a little bit of context to get started, uh, pricing strategy has been a really hot topic within our [00:03:00] community lately. Uh, and we can see that a lot of our members are interested in better understanding some of the nuances of pricing and how to really nail it within their organizations.
So since product pricing is just never a one size fits all, uh, affair, we thought this was a perfect topic to address in a panel setting with some experts who’ve So we’ve been through a lot, um, and seen a lot of successes and failures when it comes to pricing and we’ve got lots of knowledge and experience to share with you.
Um, so without further ado, we’ll just get started with some of the questions, uh, and this one, uh, we’ll be starting off with, uh, for Craig. So Craig, at what point do you start thinking about pricing? Is it ever too early or is it ever too late?
[00:03:40] Craig Watson: Great question. Let’s give you a little bit of context. So there was a startup world of, you know, we’re building a 15 years, but I’ve also worked in a bigger company as a Spotify for over five years as a product lead.
I worked on the premium monetization side there. But I think most recently as a startup founder, typically, you know, we like to think about designing around the [00:04:00] price and it doesn’t always pan out that way. So I would say, you know, from my experience, To leave the pricing discussions or the strategy piece too late, there’s a few, I think, pretty seminal books out there, which are really helpful.
We’ve, we’ve certainly been reading a few of them around things like, um, monetizing. Sorry, what was it called? Pricing? Yeah, monetizing innovation, which is basically comparing the, the authors do a great job comparing Or use pricing as a strategy, which from that compared to, I think it was Chrysler as a counter example, where the typical thing, and I’ve made this mistake myself in a startup where you get really excited, you validate the product, you go out there and you build a whole host of features, you launch.
And then it’s like the pricing strategy. And, uh, the, the right way, and I think this is the way that you really can get into the latent demand and see what people are willing to pay is that you think about what is it that people are willing to pay, you know, what’s the right model [00:05:00] and what’s the going to market motion, what channels could we use and not just focus on the product and the tech, which sometimes for the product and tech folks is an easier thing to do.
It forces you as a, basically as a force and function to really think about Think about variables so you can bake in the price from the very start. And your whole strategy is aligned around how you can get this to market and optimize the price. And most importantly, deliver the right. But you need to start.
[00:05:29] Hannah Clark: Well, uh, we didn’t get a comment in here, Craig, that your, um, audio is a little bit, uh, shaky. I’m also kind of hearing that as well. Um, maybe we can switch inputs.
[00:05:43] Craig Watson: Bit easier without the headphones. Oh, so
[00:05:45] Hannah Clark: yeah, that’s better.
[00:05:47] Craig Watson: Cool. Sorry. Uh, I, I don’t know if you need me to cover it again, but basically, um, yeah, I was just mentioning book that I would recommend called monetizing innovation, which is about designing from the price backwards.
And, uh, really like I’ve made that mistake [00:06:00] so many times where you just build something and then you, you tack on pricing at the end and really it helps, I think, to have that framework top of mind where from day one, you can never really be too early when you’re thinking about pricing.
[00:06:11] Dani Grant: To add to what Greg said, I think from the founder perspective, one of the things that I did not appreciate on day one of starting a company If the thing works, you’re going to be working on it for a really long time.
And which is great. That’s the dream. Right. And, and so like, to put it in context, like, uh, we started jam when I was 26. Like if jam goes as, as well as I hope it will, this will be my thirties and maybe even my forties. And so isn’t that very exciting? But if, if you kind of get on this path, you want to make sure that the end state is worthwhile.
And so I think one big mistake that founders make is on day one, not having sort of a map of how does this become so such a big company that it’s worth me spending a decade or two on it, or like, how does this become as big as Atlassian and, you know, the tech giants before us? And so I think, uh, Craig is right.
It’s like the earlier you can have sort of [00:07:00] a plan that includes How much can we price and for what, uh, that’s helpful. And it doesn’t have to be like, our first product is going to be monetized at this rate. It can be like by building this first product, we gain trust with our users to build this next product.
And we think there’s a lot of like money in that, but we can’t do it as our first step. But just sort of like having a plan on day one, I think is very helpful.
[00:07:20] Hannah Clark: Yeah, setting the foundation. Absolutely. Anyone want to chime in, um, before we move on, Brendan?
[00:07:27] Brendan Fortune: I think my question is going to lead us to the next one.
So I’m, I want to hear from Danny a little bit more from Danny. So I’ll kick it back to you, Hannah.
[00:07:34] Hannah Clark: Okay, cool. Uh, well, uh, so the next question we have on the books is when doing user research, what are the most helpful questions to ask in this one is for Danny.
[00:07:43] Dani Grant: Okay. So you’re going to hear me speaking, but really the genius here is my co founder who led all of this.
We found, um, Uh, we found there were two questions that we were advised to ask that were so helpful for us. The first is, at what price would this be [00:08:00] so expensive that you would just be offended? And the second is, at what price would this be so cheap you’d think it’s a scam? And probably your price should be somewhere in the middle.
[00:08:13] Hannah Clark: That’s a very helpful and interesting model to kind of put things very simply in a perspective. Brendan, did you want to chime in with your question?
[00:08:22] Brendan Fortune: Yeah, I was, uh, I’m curious to hear from Craig too. So the, those questions that you list, Danny, those are, those are one of the things in that monetizing and it’s like, it’s got a little spin on it, but that’s one of the, uh, tactical practices in, in monetizing innovation that’s called out.
And all of the, the, when it comes to user research around pricing, one thing that I found particularly fascinating is there are really interesting questions. You just listed two of them that can lead to insights. Where, where I see a lot of the information fall down is before you can get good answers to those questions, you have to communicate what the value of your [00:09:00] product is, unless they’re literally using it already.
Okay. Then, then you don’t have to do that. So you can ask someone what’s an amazing price for a screen sharing thing that files bugs. And I don’t know, but you probably had to do more than that in these conversations. And I’m curious how you, how you approach that. And maybe Craig as well.
[00:09:16] Dani Grant: Yeah, one thing that we’ve learned the hard way by building Jam is there’s sort of an order to which you build a PLD startup, like, and, like, first you have to get to product market fit, like you just need to build a product that retains users that they love and they use every day and they refer other people to.
And until you have that, nothing else matters, right? And then once, once you have that, then we’re like, great, can we grow it? And then once we could grow it, we’re like, great, now we need to monetize it. And we found that every single time that we tried to skip a step and get ahead, that actually those efforts would fall flat.
It would be a lot of waste of time, um, and like energy. And, and so exactly what Brendan said, it was like, we could look at SAS tools out there in our space. Like how much does Jira charge? And we could know, like, [00:10:00] that’s going to be our price point. How much, how many users do we need in order to get to 10 million of ARR, a hundred million of ARR, if that’s our price point, because that’s sort of the meme space out there.
And like, could we conceivably grow to that amount? So we’d have like an idea maze of here’s how we’d make this a really big company. But then actually the first thing we had to do is just build a product users love. And we focused a hundred percent on that, ignoring pricing. And only then we started asking those users, these questions.
Yeah,
[00:10:28] Craig Watson: I think that’s a, it’s a great way of thinking about it. So for us as well, with the user research interviews, we typically split it between problem interviews and solution interviews. And what we found quite helpful with the problem interviews, a bit like the questions Danny mentioned is always asked, like, where is the, where would the budget come from if you were to buy this?
And that’s quite an open question that people say, Oh, you know, it might come from our CPO. Yeah. And we’re trying to understand a little bit about the competitive environments as well. Like what other tools are they using? What’s the anchoring bias they have? What price are they paying for other tools?
Just to get a ballpark, you know, before we try and it’s all relative, you know, in [00:11:00] absolute terms is quite hard to give a price point, but in relative terms, it’s not as difficult. And on the solution side, Typically what we’ve done on the startup space anyway, is, is we build lots of web flow pages, you know, super quick pricing pages, different variants, like we’re talking about it later in the AI space.
So a lot of usage base, a lot of new kind of pricing strategies, which aren’t, don’t resonate straight away. So you have to have more context, your point, Brandon, about what’s the solution, what’s the value, what are your offering, and I think I love seeing when people’s eyes light up when you give them a price of page.
And it’s kind of awkward, you know, for those five, 10 seconds, it’s like, Oh, you’re okay. You’re charging that now. I understand. Then you get the real feedback and that’s where the gold comes out. So, you know, I find that quite helpful as a tactic.
[00:11:42] Dani Grant: I think one of the, um, if you’ve ever read thinking fast and slow, like the meme of the book is as soon as you have to think about something, it becomes very complicated and you’re more likely to think that it’s false or not true or dangerous or bad or all these things.
And so you sort of, you sort of want, um, product experiences to feel like going [00:12:00] down a great slide where it’s just easy. It’s just leading you to the next. Low or the next step in the process. And, and so people have all these ideas about pricing in their head and you kind of want to match it and not make them think.
And so, um, I, what Craig says, like, what other tools are they buying? Um, like what’s the most recent tool they bought and like, just literally match their pricing page is just, we have found that to be a very helpful way to approach us, like don’t reinvent the wheel in pricing, just give people what they want.
[00:12:30] Hannah Clark: Awesome. So now that we’re kind of working through some ideas around pricing and some of that user research, uh, let’s talk a little bit about key considerations. And this one is for Dani as well. Uh, so before we start shouting out numbers and that kind of thing, so what are some, uh, some key considerations that we want to take into account?
[00:12:45] Dani Grant: So the first key consideration is what is the strategy of your company and how does pricing fit in? So for example, if you’re building Figma, Figma did not have pricing for the first four years the product was live. And why? Because they were [00:13:00] defining a new meme in the market. For them, adoption was more important than monetization.
And so yes, they needed proof that people would be willing to pay so that they could know that there’s a business to be built here. But they didn’t need to push pricing ahead of time. And so for every company, there’s a different strategy to win. And you should make sure that your pricing strategy prioritizes the things that are important for your business.
The next thing I’ll say is, Pricing is so complicated because it is so total. It is not just a number. It is also a product experience. It is a sales experience. It is a human to human thing. And so the, the, you should think about from the point of view of the buyer, what their experience is from beginning to end, like from the moment they first hear about your product to the moment that they’re buying it, um, and, and sort of design it.
And, and that’s really, really hard to do. And it takes a lot of different like disciplines together, all trying to hash it out. And, and that’s something I’m actually really curious to hear either now or later on, um, from the others in the panel, like [00:14:00] who have been the key people around the table to help you do that?
Like, is it like a growth marketer and a designer or like, is it like PM and founder? I’m, I’m just super curious. Cause I think, uh, the key consideration is what is the experience we want and designing that I think is really tricky.
[00:14:15] Hannah Clark: Yeah. Anyone want to chime in?
[00:14:18] Brendan Fortune: I’ve got something I would add, but I’m kind of curious, Craig, to hear a little bit first about how, how that resonates with you.
Was, was there a similar kind of comparison company or is there one that you’ve been thinking about? How do you.
[00:14:29] Craig Watson: Yeah, do you know what, we’ve kind of tried to stay in our own lane a little bit recently, just like primary research and try and learn a little bit more about it. But, um, yeah, I, not, not a huge amount.
Nothing jumps out at me there. Yeah. I’d be interested to hear a bit from your take, cause you kind of probably see it more from the enterprise side as well.
[00:14:46] Brendan Fortune: Yeah. I think what, what resonates with me most from what Danny was saying before is, uh, knowing your company’s. I find strategy is, uh, I kind of hate that word because people throw it around so much and you’re like, okay, great.
So is it the [00:15:00] vision? It’s like this mission statement? Like, what is this strategy? Can like you show me one of those? And at Customer IO, one of the things that we’ve done, um, and it relates directly to pricing is figure, uh, figured out, uh, like the growth, uh, Not all companies have this, but especially if you’ve got usage based pricing, you do.
And, um, I don’t know if, if I could, I could run through it and I’ll kind of defer to you, it would probably take like two to three minutes. I could share my screen real quick and show what we do. Okay.
[00:15:29] Hannah Clark: Yeah. The green light.
[00:15:30] Brendan Fortune: All right, let’s try this. So bring up trustee Miro. So, um, a customer I owe, uh, we’re a marketing automation product.
So companies come to us and they say, Hey, I want to try and augment my, uh, product live growth motion. Like, maybe I want to send an onboarding email after people sign up. Maybe it’s a mobile app and I want to send mobile push notifications. Maybe I want to put in app pop ups in at various points or whatever.
And I want these to be like resonant [00:16:00] and personalized, not annoying. Uh, and, uh, so we give them tools to do that. So our, our growth flywheel connects directly to our pricing, uh, starts with, with data. So, uh, customers have to give us data, whether that is like someone signed up. All right, that’s data. That’s great.
Someone clicked this button. That’s fine. Someone used this feature for the first time. That’s also fine. Everything starts with data. They got to get it into our product. Once they get data in, then our product helps them send a message out. That message could be an email. It could be a text message. It could be a push notification.
It could even be like a Slack can be all sorts of stuff. And so this. Flywheel kind of naturally follows and the reason that they send a message is because they’re trying to influence customer behavior. They want the message to create some sort of action on the recipient’s part, whether that’s reading a blog post, upselling to a new package, trying out a new feature, can [00:17:00] literally be anything, any sort of behavior that they want to drive.
And once, uh, our customers have seen that they can automate messages. And influence behavior, that’s the aha moment where they’re like, Oh, I get it. That’s why I’m using your product. And that’s the moment where they’re like, Ooh, okay. I want to put more types of data into your platform. I want to try to send more different types of messages and influence more different kinds of behavior.
What could I do here? How can I experiment? So. With this flywheel growth model that we demonstrably see, like we have the data to prove this is what happens when folks are moving around this, they grow with our product and their own businesses faster and faster. We place our, uh, our pricing right up here.
So, uh, we charge usage based based on data, the data that’s coming in. So when they’re sending us, we call them like, Attributes in events, so if they’re sending us an event like signed up or [00:18:00] an attribute like first name equals Craig, um, those would be data elements. So all of our pricing is based on this and it’s usage based and because we’ve thought through this strategy of what we’re trying to push people through.
So our job as product people becomes moving people around this flywheel as quickly and as frequently as possible. As possible. That’s our job. And because we’ve connected pricing to that, it just naturally, it’s, uh, there’s a phrase that I heard from a former boss, Rob Walling, who’s big in the startup space.
Um, he said, uh, you want customers to fall into the pit of success. So this is a little bit of like the internal version of that. We’re like, product managers will fall into the pit of revenue generation. Um, if you structure your pricing in a way that’s consistent with your product strategy. So that’s, that’s how we’ve done it.
[00:18:49] Dani Grant: Another thing that Brendan’s team did really well, uh, we’re customers of customer IO is their strategy. Like another part of their strategy is get in early with teams. And [00:19:00] grow with them and make that really easy and they leveraged pricing in order to do that So when we first started jam on day one, which like just two co founders They made it free for us for the first year to use their product It became a no brainer because the product was self serve to sign up for we didn’t have to talk to anyone It was easy to onboard.
It was like dead simple great ux and it was free for the first year so we felt like No problem. Then this became the way we do things at Jam. And as we hired, we trained them how to use customer IO. And so I think we’ll probably be customer IO customers forever because the, the platform scales with us and, but so did the pricing.
And so that’s like another way that your pricing strategy was really, really successful.
[00:19:39] Craig Watson: So
[00:19:39] Brendan Fortune: nice. I love hearing that.
[00:19:45] Hannah Clark: All right. We’ve ready to move on to the next thing, or are we. Have any other final comments? That was great, Brendan, by the way. Thank you for the visual aids. Um, and speaking of Brendan, we’re going to be, uh, the next one is for you as well. Um, so we’re going to be talking a little bit about pricing models and kind [00:20:00] of doing a little bit of a showdown between some of the decision making around, um, some kind of key pricing model decisions.
Um, so we want to kind of go through, uh, just in order of subscription versus one time pricing, usage based versus fixed pricing and all in one versus package pricing and kind of compare, uh, notes on. You know, like, what, what are some of the questions that we need to ask when we’re kind of working through some of these decisions?
Um, so from the top then, Brendan, um, do you want to kind of walk us through subscription versus one time pricing and kind of move, uh, from there? Like, how, how do we kind of make a decision around, you know, which model is a better call for our product?
[00:20:37] Brendan Fortune: Yeah, um, I, I love this question. Uh, I think pricing, uh, it’s a, it’s, it’s one of the best examples of like, uh, science married with art in terms of how you, uh, how you need to think about it.
So, like, the science side is the subscription versus one time and some of the other decisions that we, uh, that a lot of folks want to make. [00:21:00] But, um, but there is, there’s a little bit of art to it. And the art is kind of what I was, or at least my. My opinion on the art is what I was showing before with like the flywheel kind of thing, like that’s a, it’s a little ambiguous, but just clear enough to be useful.
Uh, and I think about that the same way when, uh, when considering different, different ways to price. So the subscription model where you’re charging every year, every quarter, every month, um, versus like a one time thing, um, that one I think is one of the simplest decisions to make. Um, are you hosting the product?
Yes. Well, you should probably do subscription pricing. There might be a couple exceptions, but that’s one of the biggest questions. The second one is like, are you releasing new features, uh, every year? I would say every year even, doesn’t have to be every month. And if yes, then you still would want to do subscription pricing.
So, um, it’s an interesting example. There’s a company or a product called CleanShot. Not sure if anyone has heard of it, but it’s, Little desktop app. You can take [00:22:00] screenshots with it. I use a Mac. I’ve got built in screen, uh, screenshotting abilities, but why do I pay clean shot? Well, it’s I like the experience a little bit better.
I like the editing experience a little bit better and they have 2 versions of pricing. They’ve got a 1 off 1 time price. And then they’ve got a subscription model. What’s the difference? Well, if you’re doing the subscription model, they’re hosting something for you. Every time you take a screenshot, they’re storing it for you and they’re making it easily available to different places, destinations that you might want to send it.
So, uh, you can also do a little bit of a hybrid of both, but in general, um, if you are hosting the product and it’s not running on someone else’s server, like you, you always want to. I would say it’d be hard to build a business not in a subscription model, although companies have done it. Um, I don’t know, Craig or Danny, if you have any other comments on that before I move on to the next one.
If that resonates, what other questions you would ask?
[00:22:54] Craig Watson: For sure. I just saying, I love that clean shot as well. I’m a user, but I actually have to think, I don’t know if I’m paying a one time or [00:23:00] a subscription, I’ll have to check out.
[00:23:03] Brendan Fortune: That’s a nice thing about sneaky subscription pricing too. If you’ve got like 5 a month or something, I remember, uh, when I was at drip, we had a little bit of that where customers just forget that they’re paying you, which is not a good thing.
Um, but, uh, but yeah, it certainly happens with some of the subscription pricing.
[00:23:22] Hannah Clark: Right. Can move on to usage base versus fixed pricing then.
[00:23:26] Brendan Fortune: All right. This is my favorite one. Uh, I think usage based pricing, I think is such magic for businesses. Uh, it certainly has been at customer IO because it creates compound growth and I am not a math major, like a, not particularly strong in math, but, um, every time I look at the revenue charts, I can’t, I can’t really do the visual, but it is, that’s how you get this like hockey stick thing that goes up.
And it’s because you, um, we call them vintages. I don’t know if that’s. What to make of that being like a vintage of wine or something. [00:24:00] So like we’ve got our like 2015 vintage of customers and you see that those customers, um, are still like many of them leave. But enough stay where they, the revenue that they’re paying is still exceeds the churn that we’ve gotten.
The only reason that is true is because of usage based pricing. If we’d done like seat based pricing or something else, we would not see that. That’s the sort of trend. Uh, but because we charge based on data and we’ve tried to pin data to customer value, it’s not a perfect fit, but it’s at least in the ballpark enough where it works for, for most of our customers.
Um, we’ve been able to create compound growth. So, uh, as a. As a company or as a product leader, if I was trying to decide between usage based and fixed, the core question is like, does my product create a consumable resource, consumable resource, like gas, like AWS or Google cloud or bike, those are clear examples.
You buy like compute, buying compute. Once I’ve consumed it, the value is much [00:25:00] lower over time. Clean shot is another interesting example. Like if I’m going to take a screenshot and just drop it in a Slack to send to someone just as a quick reference. Hey, that has value in that moment, and then the value drops off quite significantly.
Um, chat GPT responses, those are, those are an interesting one. Um, actually, I’m curious, just do a quick, quick poll here. So, uh, Craig, chat GPT responses. Do you think they’re a consumable resource or not?
[00:25:28] Craig Watson: Uh, they, I think they were, and they’re becoming more. I think more of a curation too. I think people are starting to build on top of them, but probably evolving.
Yeah.
[00:25:40] Brendan Fortune: Yeah.
[00:25:40] Craig Watson: What do you think, Danny?
[00:25:42] Dani Grant: Uh, the opposite of Craig. Okay.
[00:25:44] Brendan Fortune: Okay. All right. So not a consumable resource. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I certainly don’t have the perfect answer, but my, my thought is, is a little close, uh, closer aligned to, to Craig on this because, um, Now it becomes an [00:26:00] option. Do you want to have that context?
Do you want to have all of your responses like feeding into your, like the next question you ask, like remembers that that piece and contextualizes it. If so, there’s still some value over time. Uh, chat GPT, of course, is still a monthly subscription price and, uh, but their API isn’t. Which is, which is telling, uh, so in any case, if you’re trying to do usage based versus fixed, does it create a consumable resource?
Of course, sometimes it’s a little bit of both. And actually, I bet Danny, you’ve got a fascinating perspective, um, with your work in Jam, because a session recording that’s turned into a bug. It does have immediate value up front, and maybe that decreases over time, but also it might get referenced down the line as, oh, remember this weird bug?
Okay, it’s resurfaced. It’s a regression or something. So it’s never like a perfect black or white kind of thing. Um, but, uh, but if it has a, if you do create a consumable resource and your internal costs go up every time you produce one of these, you should [00:27:00] probably be doing usage based pricing would be my pitch.
Nothing is black and white. There, there are always reasons, but those are the two questions that I would ask myself to kind of determine.
[00:27:10] Dani Grant: And then of
[00:27:10] Brendan Fortune: course,
[00:27:12] Dani Grant: the one more question to ask is what’s the strategy of the company to win? And so like, GPT is a great example because what’s their strategy to win?
It’s to become the tab you open when you need to get something done. They want the whole world to change a habit. And so if they ding you every time you use it, like every time you use it, you have to think, is it worth it? You’re not going to build that habit in the same way. But if they say just pay once, use us however much, then it’s, it’s sort of painless in this way.
So. Yes, like if you just ask those two questions, you might be like, this should be usage based. But if you then think about what’s their long term strategy, you might think like we, we may want to incentivize people to change their behavior in a different way.
[00:27:50] Craig Watson: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. I think like also just considering the history of the bifurcation of like B2C and B2B, right?
B2C has always traditionally been [00:28:00] subscription based. And to your point earlier about like helping people succeed, it’s hard to suddenly just going to change their mindset and be like, Oh, okay. There’s a new model here. You got to consider this. You got to consider that. Whereas, you know, customer, I owe other tools, which are, are maybe a little bit more usage focused enterprise.
Like that’s the, the common approach it has been and traditionally has been. So it’s not like you’re reeducating people. I think sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that like, yeah, this is great new tools on the market, but this pricing has been on, you know, since SAS years. It’s not like it’s just going to swap overnight.
So, um, yeah, I think it’s a, it’s a really good point. Yeah.
[00:28:37] Brendan Fortune: That’s such a good example, Danny. Thanks for the
[00:28:39] Craig Watson: math.
[00:28:39] Brendan Fortune: You
[00:28:39] Dani Grant: brought the example. I like, I liked it when you said it and I was like, oh yeah, more on that.
[00:28:45] Brendan Fortune: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a fascinating one. All comes down to what your strategy is first. These are just addendum questions.
Right.
[00:28:51] Hannah Clark: Oh,
[00:28:53] Dani Grant: sorry. Go ahead. Another like, what’s your company strategy? So, um, if you think about what’s going to be your key go [00:29:00] to market channel, like how are you going to sell your product? So if you’re a PLG company and mostly in the most important loop is your product sells itself. Like it’s all self service.
You don’t talk to anyone. The product has to do the selling. You want to keep things as simple as possible, right? But if a human is going to be there helping you like see the ROI, there’s a lot more room to build a more complicated pricing structure. And actually it’s possible that that more complicated pricing structure is a better experience for the buyer because they really see the value of what they’re buying.
And so, yeah, once again, it’s, it’s, uh, yeah, it’s nothing exists in a vacuum, um, as, as Brendan started, it is art and it is science, but it really, it is, what is your company? How do you make money? And then what makes sense given that?
[00:29:46] Hannah Clark: Yeah, I think is a perfect segue into the last one, which is all in one versus package pricing.
[00:29:52] Brendan Fortune: This one I feel like is, I don’t know if Danny and Craig will agree, but this one to me is the simplest, which is like, Do you have a compelling [00:30:00] reason? To charge for packages. And, uh, and I think a lot of companies don’t do this. This is a common mistake I’ve seen. Anyone’s heard good, better, best. I hate that so much because there it’s, it’s rare, at least in my experience, it is rare when customers actually feel the same way that companies do about good, better, best.
I think good, better, best is a really, really slippery slope to, Ooh, imagine all this money we would get if all of a sudden people started choosing the middle package. Cause isn’t that what people do? Uh, and, uh, You have to have a good reason. So we’ll give, give an example for at least what I consider a good reason.
We haven’t done it yet at customer. I have what we’ve been talking about it for a while. So we have customer has like a base package. I know it’s a hundred bucks a month. Like that’s the starter one, unless you’re in the startup program, like Danny’s called and we have a few other things like that. Um, and then the next package up is a thousand bucks a month.
That’s a huge jump. Like, and the reason for that is it’s humans. [00:31:00] Basically, you’ve got like a human who’s like dedicated to helping you figure out more complex cases and data and stuff like that. But, uh, so that, that’s a reason maybe to package, but, um, we’ve also thought about having kind of a mid tier package because, uh, our, our pricing is based on data, like I said, attributes and events coming in, and it’s also based on the number of profiles that you have in customer I own a profile is usually a human person.
The customer or a lead or something like that. So that’s great for B to C companies. But for B to B companies, they tend to have fewer companies that they’re selling to. Um, and maybe they’ve got lots of users under them, but they’re usually messaging at the company level or an account level or something like that.
So we could create a package of customer IO that is tailored, that has our features. Um, we have a feature called custom objects and it allows you to build out relationships between like companies and then the various users at the companies. If you want to send a message. Messages more towards like a company or something like that.
We could feature gate that as a middle [00:32:00] tier package and then have try and make more money basically off of that feature, which has unique value. It’s like 10 times more valuable if you’re a B2B company and your whole business is structured this way than it is for a B2C company who’s not. That’s a great reason, at least in my opinion, to do a package because you’ve got a very clear value prop for why you have it.
It’s not better. It’s like, well, what do you need to do with the product? You care about this? Great. Then that’s going to be included there. So for, for whether you’re going to do all in one versus package pricing, I think just making sure you’ve got a clear story is important. And if you’re going back to Danny’s point about product led growth versus if you’ve got a human involved in the mix, if you’re doing product led growth, like packages, it’s okay, but like simple as almost always.
Um, if you’re doing the sales night human approach, you can, you know, you can get a little bit more custom if you really need to. But again, there should always be some reason, uh, maybe it’s a final point. I always tell, uh, product managers who are thinking about pricing, like imagine that you’re standing in front of the [00:33:00] customer.
This is more for bigger companies, not the founders who do this every day. But imagine you’re standing in front of a customer and you have to explain to them what your pricing is. Based on that value. And if, if that makes you a little uncomfortable, like, Oh yeah, that’s a pretty good deal for us. Maybe it’s not so good for you, but like, you know, we did good, better, best, or whatever, that’s a sign that maybe you need to be thinking about it a little bit differently.
Maybe you’re, you’re going to just, just have a disconnect between your customers and the value you’re providing. Um, so always kind of think about that as in addition to like, how do you connect your strategy to your pricing? And that’ll lead you the right direction.
[00:33:32] Dani Grant: One thing that helped us was to think about.
To think about from the point of view of our users and like, what are the big categories of users we have and what do they need? And then we just named our plans for them. So it’s like small startup team, like it, yes, it’s good, better, best, but we’re like, Hey, this is for small teams. And then fortune 500 company.
It’s like, this is for organizations. And so that helps everyone get the thing they need at the price point [00:34:00] that they can afford. Um, And yes, it’s more complicated, but by making it like user focus and naming it that way and tailoring the, the features in that package for them, it feels a bit simpler.
[00:34:11] Craig Watson: Yeah.
I love that framework. And I think it’s, uh, It’s almost like persona based pricing, Danny, what you’re, what you’re saying, which I like people can relate to it. And then I think that the other example, which jumps out at me is bigger companies, maybe like compound products, you think of something like Ripple, you know, big HRIS system, probably more like to Brendan’s point jobs to be done type of pricing packaging, or it’s like, well, what do you need?
What’s the actual end solution? What’s the job you’re trying to solve here? Okay, you need expenses. You need provisioning, you need X, Y, Z. And it’s like, I’m not then trying to judge what are the X different variables within that? It’s like, I just need that thing fixed. And I also would say, you know, when I was finishing up with Spotify, there was a huge push to condense the, the number of expenses that companies had, like all of these smaller point solutions, software tools, it’s, if you can get into a [00:35:00] bigger compound play type of company and they have all those offerings, you’re paying, you’re kind of effectively just paying one bill, but then you can kind of slice and dice.
You know, from the supplier, what it is that you need. So I think that’s a trend. Obviously that’s playing out in the current market as well. Um, which is probably a factor.
[00:35:17] Hannah Clark: Well, so before we move on to the next question, which will also be for Craig, by the way, uh, I just want to remind everyone that we will be just taking a few more minutes to answer some of these pre prepared questions, but, uh, we’ll be also answering your questions from the chat.
So if you have any questions on your mind, uh, throw them in the Q and a. Uh, I’ll give you a few minutes to put your questions in so we can make sure to get to as many of them as possible. Uh, and then our next question here would be about team collaboration. So everyone in the organization has always got a valid reason for wanting to approach pricing differently.
Uh, leadership might want to charge for a higher limit just to drive revenue. Sales might be interested in a heavier discount, uh, to appeal to customers. Marketing might want to push for a more of a freemium version of features. So, uh, so Craig, how do [00:36:00] you handle those internal discussions and Alliance stakeholders at Arrow?
[00:36:04] Craig Watson: For sure. I mean, to, to give a bit of context, we’re a pretty small team, so it’s easier, right? It’s like founders and a few engineers. It’s not a huge, uh, political discussion. I think probably the more interesting example is when I was working on a premium team in Spotify. Um, I was the product lead for Duo.
So that was like a new tier that we’d introduced that didn’t exist in the market. So that’s for two, a plan for two people that want to pay for premium. Um, we’d seen data that people were sharing their accounts and we thought, okay, maybe there’s an option here where they don’t want to buy a family plan.
There’s this mid step between a single tier and, and a family plan. And, um, you know, there was definitely a little bit of conflict on the business side. They were looking to charge as close to the family plan as possible. Then maybe on the free side, they were thinking, oh, how can we use this as a lever to get more people in and kind of grow and think about that as a main channel.
Um, I think the biggest takeaway from the whole experience, which took months, we did a lot of formal studies, propensity to pay. It got quite complicated, the analytical side of it, but ultimately it came down [00:37:00] to just the primary research again. It was like getting the packaging in front of potential customers, understanding did the value resonate?
How did that compare to other price points that they wanted? And, you know, try and remove the politics and get alignment. It always is easy just to actually have. Primary data that you can show, like here’s an interview you had, here’s an example of the sessions that we conducted, and this is very clearly, you know, fine for this particular market.
And then from there, you can also just be a little bit more agile. We didn’t have to go off and suddenly ship Joe into, you know, every hundred plus markets. We actually started with six markets and we thought, okay, well, let’s pick a subsample of different markets. We want to see if this pricing point works.
And then again, it builds confidence on the alignment side, because not everyone feels like this, this binary all are in bed, right? It’s like, okay, well, let’s just treat it. It’s an experiment. And I think people lose sight of that. Sometimes pricing is, is like one of the ultimate experiments when it comes to building a business, because nobody has the answers, it’s always changing.
Like, how can you treat it? Just like any other product experiment, keep it light, get the learnings and then kind of adapt from there and build out something more sustainable. [00:38:00] So yeah, that’s probably my take.
[00:38:02] Dani Grant: I have a question. When can you say pricing is the ultimate experiment? Keep it light. Experiment.
But if, if you put out pricing and some of your users pay, then you change the pricing, you make it cheaper. Like, Or more expensive, you raise your prices, how, like, doesn’t that, I mean, how are you experimenting with pricing so fluidly?
[00:38:27] Craig Watson: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a fair question, but also look at like all the price raises that have happened across some of the subscription services, right?
You think like, Oh, this is going to absolutely crater their subs, but prices move. And. People are more amenable to those changes and you might think, I think in some, in certain circumstances, of course, I’m talking from a B2C perspective, very different if you suddenly like doubling the cost for a big enterprise sale, you know, it’s not, it’s a probably harder to experiment depending on the type of the company, but our experience was you can do it.
I mean, and also depends how you frame it. You, you probably have more experience with [00:39:00] this Transcribed Danny and Jam, but it’s also, you know, if you manage expectations that you’re in, this is a new plan you’re introducing, or this is something you’re testing out before you do a full rollout. You know, I think there’s a little, if you, especially if you incentivize people and offer a discount or whatever it is to kind of try that new thing out, it gives you a bit of wiggle room, but I’m intrigued to hear, it sounds like you’ve maybe had a different experience where you’ve been a bit more locked into pricing.
So I’m interested to hear.
[00:39:27] Dani Grant: I just, if we were to change our prices tomorrow, it would, it would be a project we’d have to communicate to all our users. And so as soon as you said that, I was like, I’m dying to know, how are you doing this?
[00:39:37] Craig Watson: Yeah, I think it’s also, but like production changes are the most expensive ones.
Like, you know, I’m sure you’re doing this when you introduce a new plan, you’re going out, you’re trying to learn about, you know, what will resonate, what the price point will be. It depends on where you are in the, in the development cycle as well, in terms of the experimentations you’d run. But yeah, I take your point.
Yeah. It’s an interesting one.
[00:39:58] Brendan Fortune: I certainly don’t, [00:40:00] don’t have the answer, but, um, there are a couple of things that. That kind of jumped to mind on this that I could call out to. I mean, I think we’ve been talking about product led growth where you don’t talk to a human, the ultimate experimentation is when you do.
Every time you’re having a conversation, you get to experiment with pricing, especially at a small stage when it’s like the founder is doing the sales or whatever, like amazing. And you know, every time you can, you can tweak it. Um, and I, customer IOs founders have some stories, um, early on when they were realizing, Oh, we could charge a lot more for this.
And they still, you know, couldn’t believe like, wow, someone’s paying 500 bucks a month for this. And when you have this first kind of realization, like I thought it’d be like 10 bucks a month or something. So, so I think the, that’s one of the benefits of, it depends on how big you get. Once you’ve got a big sales team and it’s hard to call it experimentation every time.
But talking to customers and having flexible pricing is a good way to do it. The other thing, and I don’t know enough about this, but, um, don’t want to turn this into like a crypto [00:41:00] thing, but, uh, bidding auction based pricing is fascinating, like, like that happens for advertising or like when you’re buying crypto, it’s like, well, do you want to buy from one of these three networks?
And they’re going to bid on how much they’re going to charge you to turn this into a token or something like. That’s, that’s more niche. Like if, if you were working in a, on a product that has auction based pricing, that’s a fascinating way to experiment.
[00:41:25] Hannah Clark: Well, I think we can start moving on to some audience questions. I want to make sure that we’ve got time to address some of those before we might, we might end up coming back to some of the other questions that we had in mind. Um, so to start off and, um, I I’m actually interested in anyone chiming in on this is an interesting question.
So once you’ve kind of derived a sort of price range, the question is, is it wise to come up with a pricing comparison with other competitors and have it on the website? And I think what they’re referring to is, you know, having your pricing and then a competitor’s naming a competitor and their pricing, uh, right on your marketing [00:42:00] materials.
Um, has anyone tried that experienced it? Uh, what, what are, what’s our take on. Uh, naming competitors and, uh, stacking ourselves up against them.
[00:42:14] Dani Grant: Brendan, what do you all do? Like, we’re an established company.
[00:42:19] Brendan Fortune: Yeah. Just going to wait to see if anyone else jumps in on this one, but I certainly, yeah, like, um, uh, so, so I worked at a few different companies. Marketing departments are like, Ooh, SEO lead gen. What are we going to do? Great idea. Let’s make a bajillion competitor, uh, pages like customer versus whatever.
Um, and then we’ll. You know, gather those leads. And one of the things you might do on those pages is talk about pricing. I think, and this might be a frustrating answer to people listening in, but I, I really think it’s the right answer is going back to what is pricing? Your strategy, your like monetization strategy, because if your strategy, uh, if your [00:43:00] strategy is to be cheaper, uh, and do like a race to the bottom kind of commodity play, which I mean, is a totally legitimate way to do it.
Uh, depending on your, your company and your product, then you want to be highlighting pricing all the time. And that’s, that’s great. But if you want, uh, the general wisdom that I’ve heard and subscribe to is like, you want to sell more on value than on price. So like you’re first thinking about how well is this going to solve my problem?
And then secondarily, you’re like, well, okay, then how much do I have to pay for it? Rather than making it like, you know, Yeah, yeah, this is exactly like this other thing. The only thing you care about is that we’re 50 percent cheaper. I’ve got a little bit of a failure story to share. Maybe a lesson learned on on this, um, customer.
I recently shipped a new product about a year, a little under a year ago now, a customer data platform. So we customers shove all their data from, you know, bajillion different sources in one place. And then they want to send it out to various tools, including customer IO. And we looked at the CDP [00:44:00] market and we’re like, Oh, we think this is going to become a commodity in the next like 10 years.
Not there. Now people pay thousands of dollars for segments and other companies that, that offer CDPs. Um, but we think over time there’s more and more entrance to this market. So we’re going to do like a pricing. Thing we’re going to be like, Hey, 50 percent cheaper than like the dominant player. And it does everything better.
That’s great. And, uh, I went and talked to a bunch of our established customers that were using third party, uh, products just to kind of understand, test this out a little bit. Um, and long story short, no one cared.
[00:44:37] Dani Grant: They just didn’t,
[00:44:37] Brendan Fortune: they did not care, uh, if it was cheaper or not. They were like, yeah, I think we already kind of pay them something.
It’s, it’s. Goes back to this old edict. I don’t know what book this is from, but like, you have to be like 10 times better to get people to move, not like two times better or three times better or whatever, like, Way, way better, even for a cheaper kind of price. Um, I remember I had a [00:45:00] conversation with one, uh, it was a startup, uh, company.
They were probably doing like five to 10 million in ARR, uh, every year. And he was paying 15, 000 a year for this other company. And he was like, eh, probably would take like a week or two of my engineer’s time to migrate. And, uh, and yeah, you could save me like 7, 000 a year. No, just not interested. And I don’t know, like it’s price competing on price is a, is a delicate business unless you’ve really got economies of scale that cannot be replicated elsewhere.
So in general, I would recommend away from doing price comparisons on your website.
[00:45:41] Dani Grant: That’s very interesting.
[00:45:45] Hannah Clark: Does anyone have anything to add or
[00:45:47] Craig Watson: nothing to add? No, I think that was a great overview of it. Yeah.
[00:45:52] Hannah Clark: All right, we can move on to the next user question. Um, so the next one is, how do you determine or what are some of the factors to consider [00:46:00] when you’re deciding between a pay per user model Or a pay, you know, a certain amount for X or Y amount of users model.
Um, I think Brendan, this might be a good one to lobby to you first, since we are already kind of looking at, uh, some different, uh, comparisons and, and kind of criteria for pricing models.
[00:46:19] Brendan Fortune: Yeah. So if I’m reading this correct or question correctly, it’s like, do you pay, is it per user like 10 bucks per user?
Or is it like, okay, this package includes 10 users and you pay 80 bucks or something like that? That’s how I interpret it as well. Yeah. I I’ll, I’ll do a short answer and then I’m quite curious to toss it back to Danny. Cause I know Danny does, has probably done some thinking on this with her, uh, per per seat model.
I, um, the more flexibility usually the better, but, uh, this is what I have experienced. But I, I think it’s a, it depends again on your, your company and product strategy and how you want to monetize, uh, to decide what to do. Uh, in general though, I have [00:47:00] found that, uh, adding the complexity of like, oh, it’s 10 at this price point rather than each one, uh, makes you run into that problem of like, well, but I only need five, but I’m paying for 10, but I only, and then it starts to feel like unfair.
And it just starts to get you into like emotional waters that I find aren’t worth the, uh, The cost, uh, but Danny, I’d be curious, what do you think?
[00:47:26] Dani Grant: In our company, the rule is we don’t reinvent the wheel on pricing. We can reinvent the wheel on technology. We can like, there are lots of things we can innovate on.
Pricing is not one of them. And just all the SAS tools in our space are doing a per seat model. And so we are doing a per seat model. I
[00:47:42] Craig Watson: was going to ask, maybe that is, is it, how are you thinking? Cause I see you’ve kind of started implementing some AI features into the product, but like I was talking to a friend of mine in Stripe and he was saying something interesting.
He was saying 80 percent of. SAS companies they’re working with now are exploring usage based pricing. So they brought out [00:48:00] Stripe meter, their API. You can do kind of meter based pricing, you know, Brennan touched on it, but I have my own theory, which is like, eventually some of the proceed stuff will probably go away if you’ve, if you’ve kind of got more agents doing the work and it’s probably an evolution, it’s not going to happen quickly or overnight, but is that something you’re thinking about in terms of potentially moving from a proceed model, or as you said, you’re just not going to reinvent the wheel for now.
[00:48:24] Dani Grant: So we, we. We are not reinventing the wheel in pricing. And so we’re looking at what is everyone else doing? What we see happening right now in SAS tools is they’re offering an AI add on as like an add on paid package to the core plan. So for an extra, like 4 a month, you can get Slack AI, or for an extra 4 a month, you get Notion AI, Loom AI.
That’s, that’s the meme space. And so one day we’ll do the same, like when we get around to it. As far as like, what if agents are using Jam, like AI agents, do they have to pay for seat? Once again, we’ll do whatever all the other SAS tools are doing, but I’ve got to say [00:49:00] what a great problem to have.
[00:49:04] Hannah Clark: Absolutely. Um, so we’re, uh, we’re kind of rounding up the last 10 minutes. So we’ll kind of go through as many of these as we can. Uh, we’ve got a question from the community. So what’s your general process for calculating cost pre development and during development? Um, I’ll lobby this one to Craig, I think.
[00:49:21] Craig Watson: Ours is pretty straightforward. I mean, we are an AI applied AI startup. So very much using a foundational model with an API usage based, uh, because it’s conversational, the billing is not linear. It’s actually quadratic because it’s stateless. They were not storing the chat. So you have to re inject it. So it can get quite expensive.
Um, so there’s. Like unit economics matter and we’re, again, this is why pricing backwards is important. And, um, we have a pretty clear monitoring on what’s happening. We’re able to, but this is again, why I kind of brought up the topic because we’re now forming this kind of hybrid model where we don’t want to be just project usage [00:50:00] based because that can lead to some weird incentives.
And it’s very, it’s not very predictable revenue. So we’re trying to land on this mid tier or this hybrid approach, which is, uh, where we have a cap usage and amount of number of AI led interviews that you conduct through arrow and you pay monthly subscription for that. And you can have add ons so we can cover the overage if you do go over, but then you would tend to move into like the next tier up if you’ve kind of want to move into a bigger package with feature gating, et cetera.
Um, so. Yeah, I think it’s an interesting problem. And we’re not the only ones like this. I would say every AI for a startup is going through this at the moment is trying to understand how can they take the unit economics and show value back to the end customer in a good way. I always like the intercom example here where they have created this.
Yeah. Very good alignment model where they’ve got a successful resolutions of the AI bots. You only pay if the AI actually solves the issue for your customers, which is a great, because then everyone wins. It’s not, you don’t feel like you’re paying for the AI to actually do nothing on your behalf. I think it’s not always as [00:51:00] clean as that.
Like we don’t necessarily have a value metric where you can say, yeah, definitely. Let’s just charge for that thing. Like insights generated, for example. But I, I’d love that because I think that’s when you can get everyone on the same page and that really helps.
[00:51:13] Hannah Clark: That’s really cool. Um, in the, in the name of time, is it all right with you guys?
If we just move on so we can cover more of these questions? Um, perfect. So what are the indicators that you’ve adopted the wrong pricing model as opposed to say the wrong price point or bad UX or other factors that might be pushing customers or prospects away? Let’s hear from Dani on this one.
[00:51:32] Dani Grant: I, I don’t know because so far for us, it’s all been like, Okay.
The way we’re approaching pricing is the way we approached product market fit, right? It’s, it’s ship something and then just talk to users so much and try to find out, did they see enough value in the next plan? Was the UX confusing? Did they get confused in the process? Did they need more time to try?
Like, who are the people in their company that they talk to? Like, what was the process that they had to go through to buy our product? And just through [00:52:00] that, we’re getting like qualitative information to help us. Like change the product for the better. We have not encountered that our plans are wrong. So I don’t know, but I wonder Brendan or Craig, if you have
[00:52:14] Brendan Fortune: let Craig go first.
[00:52:15] Craig Watson: Yeah,
[00:52:19] Brendan Fortune: I think, um, this one, uh, and I don’t, I don’t have the perfect answer, but I do have an answer of what is not an indicator that you’ve adopted the wrong, uh, pricing model. And this is when I have not seen. Yeah, that’s not true. Um, I have seen it at startups as, as well. But, um, when you, one of the interests, I’ve worked at a couple of companies where the founder has scaled.
With the company. So sometimes you’ve got like founder comes in there for, you know, first 10 years, find product market fit. That’s great. And then they’re like, Whoa, I don’t want to scale this thing. I’m out. I want to go create something else. And then you’ve got the, some of the founders, which my experience is usually the [00:53:00] minority who like, stay with it for the longterm and want to grow into like a real, you know, CEO of a big company.
And for the, uh, the latter, sometimes it’s hard to let go of that customer connection and Danny, you were just calling it, right? Like talking to customers all the time. So important, so valuable, and so possible to do when you’re still at that smaller stage. And so I have experienced cases where, um, we’ll lose a big brand name, some, some recognizable thing.
And, uh, all of a sudden, and they’ll make like an offhand comment, like, yeah, you know, we think we think we could get some a better deal somewhere else. And then that becomes a, like, whoa, that is an indicator that our pricing model is broken. Like, we need to do a full investigation, da, da, da, da. Sometimes that can be a little bit overweighted, um, and I think that you, uh, that’s a useful piece of information, but, um, look for patterns versus, you know, Versus anecdotes and even like two or three that kind of sound vaguely the same.
I think aren’t that I would plus one to what Danny said, like, the, the [00:54:00] indicators are that you’re hearing that customers are saying, like, this doesn’t like, this is too expensive. This doesn’t like, I don’t understand this. This is too complicated. People are asking me questions internally and I can’t explain to them why we’re paying you what we’re paying you like.
Uh, just in general, like confusion and dissatisfaction. You want customers to love the pricing. Like they love the product, love it a little bit less because no one likes to pay for things. Like it’s always better if you can get, get something for less, but I do think you need the feedback loops built in and the feedback loop should be satisfaction around pricing.
[00:54:34] Hannah Clark: Well, I think, uh, we will have time for one more question. Uh, and this one’s actually going directly to Craig. Uh, so question for Craig regarding your experience with Spotify premium. Wondering what your in market price testing looked like when making that change.
[00:54:48] Craig Watson: Yeah, so I’m trying to rack my brains back.
Um, We, we did a lot of, yeah, so there’s a lot of field studies we actually, uh, did, uh, we had our [00:55:00] research team go out to, I think Mexico was one of the markets, uh, the Nordic countries, I think he, Ireland was actually one of the markets as well, um, and just go out and, you know, kind of almost what we were just saying, pattern matching, having those Discussions trying to understand to this price point resonate, how was it compared to other things that they were paying, getting that primary data.
Then we also did big analytical studies, typically power through a third party vendor, or you were trying to understand how this compared to other subscription services. And like that was marrying the qual and the quant somewhat. Um, and then, as I mentioned, when we were kind of rolling it out, it was very much.
Duo was a beta product and this was the price point we were trying, which gave us the optionality to go up or down a little bit if we had to. Um, that’s kind of how we tackled it. Yeah.
[00:55:46] Hannah Clark: Really cool. All right. Well, I think we’re going to start wrapping up then, uh, since we’re just three minutes to the top of the hour.
Uh, so just a little, uh, heads up for everybody what’s coming up in membership. Um, if you have not yet RSVP for AMA [00:56:00] with Clement cow, who’s the, uh, founder of product teacher, um, we’ll have a link in the chat shortly to RSVP for that AMA. It’s going to be really cool. Um, also remind you to keep an eye out for our next panels in July.
Our next one is going to be on people management and product. So it’s sure to be really interesting. Um, some really great insights are sure to come out of that for folks who are already in the product leadership role, as well as people who are really gunning for a position in people management. And the members of the community will also be able to sign up soon for our next head to head session, uh, which is a situation where we’ll have PMs testing use cases across multiple tools and see which one does it best.
Kind of like a little showdown for, uh, some of the cool tools in the, in our rosters. Um, so if you want to get part of all of our member events or get access to our templates and resources and other community goodies, um, I’d encourage you to check out our So for membership, which is the product manager.
com slash membership. And otherwise I just want to give a warm thank you to all of the panelists for setting aside time to chat with us today, answer [00:57:00] questions and share such really cool insights. It was great stuff coming out of here. Uh, so thank you guys all so much for being here.
[00:57:06] Dani Grant: Thanks for having us.
[00:57:07] Craig Watson: Thanks a lot.
[00:57:09] Hannah Clark: Well, thank you guys all so much for being here. I appreciate all of you panelists for coming in and asking such a great questions and we will see you guys next month for our next panel.