When to think about pricing
I was to work out a SaaS pricing plan for my product (markfolder.com) and I was wondering whether it's wise to do this before even launching. Should I just launch the free tier, and then work out how to price it? But I'm glad I did it now, because it made me realise a few things.
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Working on pricing early forces you to think hard about the problem you're solving. It made me reframe the problem I'm solving in terms of monetary value. "How much would a markfolder.com user pay to have their twitter bookmarking problem solved"?
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Pricing is also a positioning problem. How you price affects which competition you're compared against. When researching for Markfolder's pricing, I was comparing against read-it-later apps, to-do apps, and note-taking apps. There are subtle pricing differences for each.
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Thinking about pricing helps product development. E.g. I know now that I won't need to support caching tweets for the free version. Which means less dev work, and earlier launch of the free version.
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Finally, the earlier you think about pricing, the earlier you can test, get feedback and learn what works. I'll be launching with a pricing page so I can test the price sensitivity, and use that data to inform future feature development.
Any other experiences on pricing early vs later?
I have no experience to share on how they compare.
But I love to think about pricing as early as possible. There's just too many nice things that people won't pay for even if they would use it.
And so, I like to test as early as possible if people will pay for it.
Yeah, this is important. If the goal is profit, then charging early is definitely one of the first things we need to do.