How to Get Over Your Fear of Asking Your First Customers to Pay You

I lead a little rural product studio, and we teach $0 classes to help rural founders talk to customers. In our classes, the single most common question we receive is, “How do I ask my customers to pay me for using my product or service?”

So, I published a post on our blog, and I thought that I'd summarize the points here.

Happy building!

1. Asking customers to pay for your product or service is no different from asking for feedback about anything else. There is no good news or bad news. Only news.

2. Pricing is an experiment. You can charge different prices to different customers until you’ve established what the market has a willingness to pay for your product or service. Economists dream of this pricing strategy, called perfect price discrimination.

3. The right point to ask might be when you feel like it's too early to ask. If you're providing a product or service to customers who value what you've made, you've got customers who will pay you.

4. Waitlists are amazing, but you shouldn't trust them. Waitlists are an easy way to learn about interest, but they certainly should not be entirely trusted as a measure of demand.