Help me think about my pricing
Hey folks, I've been working on a side project called Sets which is a community portal built for people who run Slack communities. It's post-MVP, pre-revenue. www.getsets.co.
I've currently got the price set at $60 a month, which is in the ballpark of most
cheaper community management tools, with a free tier for <15 members of the community signed up.
By doing demos I think there are broadly two categories of people who try it out - individuals/small businesses that run a Slack commmnity that is pretty small, and larger organisations like Universities who have thousands (or tens of thousands) of people on their Slack communities.
My instinct right now is to talk to the former group as my beachhead - I think larger orgs won't want to take a risk on a small startup like mine.
What I'm trying not to do is under-charge, but also being aware that often these people I speak to are individuals, not businesses. I suspect a price point similar to Meetup.com (which is between 16 and 25 bucks a month) might be more to their liking. I think they do cover similar jobs to be done for community managers - events hosting, community connection, etc.
What do you think?
I am not sure that comparing to meetup.com is such a good idea, if you have such a strong USP with the Slack integration.
Just guessing/random ideas here:
How important is running a small slack community to these small businesses you are talking to? Mission critical? Or is it a nice to have that some intern is operating for the boss?
Instead of undercharging, can you differentiate your pricing somehow? e.g. pricing per seat/feature/usage/supportlevel? Or offer a flat fee and add ons? (I did not look at your pricing to be honest, just some ideas here)
What worked for me is that I looked for an ideal first customer. Somebody who really was happy that I was solving a severe pain for them. That resulted in the customer not caring if it was 50/month or 100/month, what mattered was that the pain was taken care of.