Watching people at the IH London meetup present their businesses.
Watching people at the IH London meetup present their businesses. Lots of great ideas and growth strategies, and almost all of them were just created today!
Top advice I'd give so far is raise your prices. If you're teaching people to code, improving their habits, providing meals for them, etc., charge $500/mo not $5/mo. And do it on day #1.
I've heard it said (in a startup school video, I think) that early stage startups need users and feedback more than perfectly optimized prices. So starting too low isn't a big deal, but starting too high might keep you from getting enough feedback to get to product-market-fit.
Plus, you can always raise prices, just grandfather everybody and they'll never know or care.
What say you? :)
I wouldn't advocate anyone spend time "perfectly optimizing" their prices early on, but being 100x off the mark ($5 vs $500) is a serious issue.
Ultimately, price is not an arbitrary number. It affects the other parts of your business, too. How many customers do you need to find? That depends on the price you're selling at, and that results in you going sales-heavy or marketing-heavy. What channels can you afford to acquire customers through? If your price is low, you'll be using free or low-cost channels, but if your price is high, you can afford advertising and other expensive options. What features should you build? That depends on how who your product is for, which depends on what your customers can afford, which depends on who they are and the value you provide to them, which depends largely on your pricing. Etc.
To me, someone is only a user if they'd potentially pay for your offering at the price you need to sell it at. Getting feedback from a bunch of people who'd never pay more than $5/month (or, worse, who'd never pay at all) isn't going to help you make the correct decisions for building and distributing a product that needs to be sold for $500/month. If anything, it'll lead you in the wrong direction.
Additionally, there's nothing stopping you from talking to your real customers and gathering feedback right off the bat. If your product is worth $500, then call up your real customers and try to sell it for $500. If they tell you no and explain why, that counts as feedback. In fact, it's much better feedback than what you'll get from talking to the wrong customers.
Finally, there's nothing wrong with giving people a discount or free trial just to get things started, as long as they're the right people. But that's not the same as planning to go after the $5/month market indefinitely.
Ha. Were Gareth and Jonathan from Email Octopus there?
Didn't see them there
Were they all very niche ideas? Can you tell us more :D
Not particularly. The ones I most thought needed to raise their prices were in markets where people have proven they're willing to pay a lot of money for results. Specifically: