Launching my SaaS-only buyer database today on Product Hunt. Here's the bet I made on pricing.
Been heads down on Backchannels and we're live on Product Hunt today. Wanted to share the thinking, not just the link.
The problem I kept hitting: every B2B contact database is built for the entire economy. If you sell software, the data is something like 80% irrelevant, and you burn hours filtering out non-software companies to find your buyers. On top of that, you pay for a big annual subscription whether you use the data or not.
Two bets shaped the whole product:
Niche down hard on the data. Backchannels is 225k software decision-makers and nothing else. No manufacturers, no local businesses, just software buyers. Narrow data beats big data when your market is specific.
Kill the subscription. Instead of an annual contract, it's pay-per-contact at $0.08 each, and you browse every match for free before spending a credit. You only pay for data you've seen and want. This was the scary commercial call, because recurring revenue is the holy grail, but it removes the biggest reason people churn off data tools: paying for a seat they barely use.
It syncs to Salesforce and HubSpot in one click, so it slots into existing workflows.
Early signal has been good. A few teams replaced their Apollo subscription with it, and one cut cost-per-meeting in half.
Curious what other founders here think about no-subscription pricing for a data product. Reckless, or the right wedge against the incumbents? Launch link in the comments, feedback very welcome.
The pay-per-contact bet has a second-order effect worth planning for: it turns every single credit into a small trust test. Someone spends 8 cents, the contact is stale, and you've lost them in a way a subscription competitor wouldn't have. An annual subscriber already sank the money and will tolerate a couple of bad rows. Yours hasn't and won't.
Sounds like a risk, but it's probably your sharpest line. You can say out loud that you only get paid when someone finds a contact worth paying for, and none of the annual-contract crowd can say that without lying. That's a better differentiator than the SaaS-only dataset, honestly, because a data niche is copyable and a pricing posture isn't, not without them torching their own revenue model.
The thing I'd watch is quiet churn. With no renewal date nobody formally leaves, they just stop topping up, and you won't spot it in the numbers until it's a quarter old. Worth asking the ones who go quiet what happened while you're still small enough to ask.
The pay-per-contact model is the part that stood out to me.
Charging only when someone finds data they actually want changes the buying conversation quite a bit. If that model holds up over time, it could become as much of a differentiator as the SaaS-only dataset itself.
Here's the link to Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/backchannels?utm_source=other&utm_medium=social