I raised my prices by 70%. It was a huge mistake.

Last year I made a mistake when I raised the price for Indie Worldwide membership from $29 to $49 for new members.

That was a 70% increase and it took membership out of the reach of too many great founders.

​At the time, I calculated the price change would be worthwhile as long as new signups and churn went up less than 70%.

Boy, was I wrong. Growth almost immediately stagnated.

I didn't want to walk back the change because I thought it was just a marketing issue. More content -> more eyeballs -> more signups even at a higher price, right?

Well, no. Wrong.

It turns out $49 was too high for prospective members to feel confident trying out the community and too expensive to keep if they had some slow months.

Signups went down. Churn went up. I should have reversed course after the first month, but I stubbornly pushed on...for a full year.

Big yikes.

I made a third mistake last month when I got rid of the monthly option entirely.

I wanted to encourage annual and lifetime memberships, which give members the chance to actually see the full benefits of the community.

Well, that was a mistake too.

Despite adding a 3-month long no-questions-asked refund period we had the same number of annual signups as before and lost out on new monthly memberships.

(Even worse, I accidentally turned off payments even for existing members, losing over $1k in the process.)

Cut to today and I'm finally walking things back:

• Monthly membership is $29 a month again for all new members.
• Anyone who was paying $49/month will now pay $29/month.
• The annual price is now $290.
• Lifetime is $590.
• We're keeping the 3-month long money-back guarantee.
• PPP is available for indie founders in developing economies (reach out if that's you).

So, how's it going?

Well, I rolled these changes out silently a couple of weeks ago to test. And would you look at that--signups are already increasing.

It's too early to talk about churn, but I think our now-daily meetup cadence will be helping a lot there as well. (Have you joined daily standups yet?)

The community is growing again in a way it hasn't in nearly a year.

I'm getting a ton of great energy from the daily standup, seeing everyone's daily updates, and seeing how quick you all are at jumping to help each other out.

I spend every day thinking about how to make this community more valuable, attract great people, and help founders build great businesses online.

This is just the beginning.