Should I lower the pre-order price?
Hello! I recently started accepting pre-orders for Rocket. I announced the launch on IH, reddit and twitter and have since then received positive feedback. But the general opinion is that the price for pre-orders is a bit higher.
Should I continue to find potential buyers at the current price or should I lower it and refund the balance to existing customers? Also, what would be a good price for this? Thank you!
I know some of the pricing tactics can seem scammy, but I love Kolenda's take on the subject: https://www.nickkolenda.com/psychological-pricing-strategies/
I would either lower the price to $59 or raise it to $79. Change the color so it feels "special". Add a timer to the page if possible.
My background is mostly selling books. But I used Kolenda's advice to sell my first courses ($100-$500 pricepoints) and made $ every launch.
Thank you for the suggestions! I'll look into the strategies. Adding a timer looks promising. Thanks!
or keep the $65 special price but make it a LTD?
Interesting! But how do I make an LTD for a single payment purchase? Like lifetime updates and support?
Yeah you just announce that the $65 pre-launch / early-adopter (call it what you want) deal gives lifetime access to support, updates, etc.
When we launched Clickacall on Appsumo (which is 100% LTD's) we were told not to worry about needing to be around in 50 years to support clients. The average time someone sticks around is not usually more than 3 years. So if you factor that in to your costings it hopefully isn't too scary.
I guess the philosophy is "reduce the price" versus "keep the price but offer more". And as developers we know 'more' usually doesn't cost us any more to run ;-)
As hackers we (me included!!) can sometimes be too generous. If you have decided $65 is a figure you can live with then it seems sad to start discounting the already discounted figure.
Yeah the average time a customer stick being around 3 years makes a lot of sense.
Yup and long time updates/support can be easily managed I guess. I too think that $65 is a pretty good deal already, I think I'll stick to that and switch to an LTD for pre-orders. Thank you!
great! keep us all updated, I'd love to see how it goes for you.
I personally think LTD could/should be a perfectly acceptable ongoing model for SaaS solutions where the ongoing running cost is minimal.
A lot of Saas services disrupted existing solutions with what for a while have seemed reasonable monthly fees. But the profits some of the bigger SaaS players make is crazy and I think there is now room for "disruptors to disrupt the original disruptors" ;-)
Definitely I'll keep updating!
I’d go with lifetime access to updates only.
Lifetime support can get out of hand, unless you’ve capped it at a max amount of support hours/tickets per year.
They think $65 is too much to spend to "save weeks or months of time compared to building it by yourself?"
I suspect it was mostly Redditors complaining about the price. These guys are broke. Don't listen to them. They are not your customers. They're just looking to collect templates and then launch nothing with them.
$65 is the price of a premium HTML and CSS template on ThemeForest.
Similar full-stack boilerplates cost hundreds, if not thousands. 10x your prices. If you sell ten times less, all the better. You'll weed out non-serious people who suck up your time asking for help.
Indeed, $65 is a steal for the boilerplate. I plan on gradually raising prices when I'm adding more features and when there are more customers.
Raise prices now.
How much money does your ideal customer have? How much would he be willing to pay to achieve what your product allows him to achieve?
The chances are if he can speak English and has the technical chops to take your boilerplate and actually build something, $65 is an insignificant amount of money for him. That's like 1 hour of work or less for a skilled developer in the USA.
Makes sense. The reason I kept it so low was in the hope that it'll be too attractive a deal to miss. But the point about higher prices can compensate lower sales is very true.
That's never the way.
Remember when that 10k Apple Watch came out? Dumb, right? No. It's just not for you.
Up your price and push your quality and level of service delivery to the absolute max. Make your site ultra aesthetic and talk in the language of your ideal customers.
Did you see what the Bullettrain guys said on their website? "Concierge onboarding."
Sounds so much better than "support."
Support is what you get from a call centre in India. A concierge is what you get when you buy a $40 million Manhattan apartment.
Their product is the same as yours, but their positioning is upmarket.
Ask yourself who you see as the ideal customer for your product and give them what they want.
I see the ideal customer for your product as a business, not an individual, that wants to quickly iterate on new ideas to get MVPs to market so that they can collect real world feedback. They are not that price sensitive. If they can spend $20k to run a quick business experiment they stand to learn things that are worth tens or hundreds of times that.
Or maybe you want to serve indie devs who have learned through trial and error not to waste their time reinventing the wheel. These are the guys who buy your single-site license for $400 and don't get the benefit of "concierge onboarding."
They are not that price sensitive either. They are cash rich and time poor from their dev jobs.
Your promise to them is that they can get their side project launched without wasting 2 years of evenings and weekends writing signup flows and other nonsense.
You should put a "contact us for bespoke implementation" thing on the right hand side of your pricing plan too. Their MVP, delivered with a velvet glove. Prices starting at $5000 for a single feature MVP. Make them feel like they're getting a bargain when they pay you $750. This is called price anchoring.
So I see 3 price tiers:
Single-site for indie devs without concierge onboarding (but good support docs and access to the Slack where they can ask you stuff)
Multi-site for medium-sized entrepreneurial businesses where they get like 5 hours of screen sharing with you (or your future employees) to onboard them. They also get priority email support.
A "bespoke implementation" offer for bigger businesses. Or maybe they want on-site training to get their devs up and running. (Devs wasting time is a huge business expense.) You might not hook anybody in for this, but if anybody does get in touch, set up a sales call with them, get their requirements and then figure out how to deliver.
Also, you are not an individual selling this. You are an "agency." Take your own name off the bottom of the website and link it to a landing page for Mittal Solutions.
To be honest, I would put a "who are we" thing on it. You can be senior developer. Get your friend to be UX designer. Get another friend to be biz dev. lol. Show your faces. People want to buy from humans.
It goes without saying that you should keep your promises to your customers and actually give them what they pay you for.
Also look up the concept of a value ladder.
"Or maybe you want to serve indie devs", this was in my mind all throughout the development. Businesses, I agree have much financial freedom, but the expectations and support expected is equally high. I'm sure the product is good enough, but I'm also aware of the expectations the businesses have.
"Up your price and push your quality and level of service delivery to the absolute max", this is the aim always to have the best service, and will be achieved after multiple iterations.
I really like this point of yours, "Make them feel like they're getting a bargain when they pay you $750. This is called price anchoring." I've heard about this but you've put it in the perfect frame. Thanks!
"you are not an individual selling this", but ain't I? It feels like knowing the customer personally and seen associated with the product might be a better way. "People want to buy from humans" would be covered by buying from me not an agency which takes time to respond and is slow over iterations.
It isn't, though. Support for enterprise software is usually not great, actually. I worked for "implementation partners" of huge enterprise software businesses, and not only was the support awful, but it cost an arm and a leg. Tens of thousands a year for support contracts.
The customers considered it quite normal too. The cheapest customers are the ones who expect the most.
It's just a little credibility hack you could use. I agree there is probably no need for it. However, I think a boutique agency looks more credible on paper than a single guy to anybody who wants long term support.
Yeah that is a fair point. Working with businesses does not look terrible actually. What is the paperwork like with these huge contracts?
Yeah true, I'll see if I can work on this.
"Special preorder price. Cancel order anytime before launch."
Don't do this. If people want to cancel, let them think up the idea themselves. IMO you shouldn't offer cancellations. Take their money and launch when you say you will. No backsies.
I felt a customer might feel safer if they knew they can cancel, are there any downsides to offering cancellations?
I'm almost complete with the product, still chose May as the launch date to save some time for documentation and preparing a demo.
The downside is you put it in their head. You pre-framed their purchasing decision with "oh well I can always cancel it."
Also, why would they want to cancel if it's good? It sounds like you're unsure about the quality and whether you can deliver.
I don't think you are actually unsure, but that's what people will think when they read that.
Bullettrain (RoR) - $1450
They only offer a multi-site license with support.
https://bullettrain.co/pricing
SaaS Pegasus $295 (one site) $750 (multiple sites)
https://www.saaspegasus.com/pricing/
The SaaS Pegasus guy is on here. I think I was talking to him a few months ago. Maybe hit him up?
Don't underprice your work. Add stuff like access to a private Slack workspace to increase the perceived value.
Great suggestion! Would get in touch with him.
I plan on creating a slack workspace but maybe after the launch when I have a few more customers and some discussion points?
I'd populate it with socks first, to be honest. Just create a bit of activity in there. Doesn't have to be scammy. Just like:
Sock 1: hey, how do I do X?
You: here's how
This is actually useful content that your customers can use to help themselves.
And set up stuff like automatic bot messages with a list of resources and a FAQ when people join. This is always a pro touch.
Awesome! Will definitely setup a Slack room asap. Thank you.
Another thought: it's better to give something away for free than to sell it for cheap.
If Patek Philippe gives George Clooney a watch for free, it doesn't cheapen the brand. It just means George Clooney is special. If, however, Patek Philippe releases a $50 quartz watch and every Tom, Dick and Harry can get one, their brand is toast. It could even be a very nice watch. Doesn't matter.
If you need beta users right now, offer it to like 5 people for free. Dress it up as an exclusive "early access" thing. Make them apply with what they want to build using your boilerplate. In return they give you product feedback, they populate your slack for you, and they give you testimonials. It's not a discount; it's a gift.
Your goal with these guys is to pick people who are actually going to use it. Then hold their hands, roll their feedback into the product, and get them to give you a quote saying your boilerplate is amazing and saved them so much time.
Then you take the ones who launched a product, and you make a page on your website called "believers" where you shout out to them for being awesome early adopters.
Social proof > everything.
This is very interesting! I can see how this will help extremely. Some of the best advice I've received.
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