PriceWell

Maybe this is how PriceWell should have started to begin with. I'm finally splitting out the service that I'm offering our customers as part of their monthly subscription. Stripe and Pricing consulting.

Over the last 10 or so years I've become a defacto expert on these topics. Every startup I worked for I ended up as the "billing person". I've been using that knowledge to help our customers at PriceWell but I figured that even those who don't need our product might need some help with their pricing or figuring out the best way to do things in Stripe.

You can book my services here:
https://www.pricewell.com/stripe-consulting/

It all started with a cold email to Emmanuel the founder of Bubble.io. They have raised over $100M, it's incredible that the CEO replies to personal emails like this. But reply he did! (send a cold email today, you never know what might happen).

Emmanuel passed me over to their marketing team. I scheuduled a call with Theo there to demo the product. He was super impressed and could immediately see the value for the Bubble community. This was mid December, Christmas happened and I forgot about it.

Fast forward to early January and I received an email from Theo, they wanted PriceWell to be an official Bubble plugin. They also wanted us to write a blog post for their blog (mmmm seo link juice). I couldn't believe it. Our little indie business partnering with a venture funded beast? It was unreal.

Well today is the day and true to their word, Bubble have been excellent. The blog post comes out in a few hours and we have launched on PH. I'd really appreciate if you could support us on Product Hunt

We started experiencing high customer churn a few months ago. It was tricky to find out why because customers would simply downgrade to the free plan and not say why.

That's why we built our new Cancellation Reason feature. PriceWell can now collect a cancellation reason for 100% of churning customers. We now offer the ability to collect a cancellation reason BEFORE the cancellation actually happens, forcing users to tell us why. Of course we're using this feature ourselves and it's saving us $100's every month.

There are whole SaaS products that specialise in churn prevention so we're entering a competitive space but this added value for our non-technical customers will be a no-brainer.

We've got lots more coming in the Churn Prevention space too...

The time between $0 and $100 MRR was 1 year. The time between $100 and $200 was 3 months. I've seen this time and time again with indie hacker businesses. The hard work you put in at the beginning really does compound later on. Making sure we focus on SEO as well as things that don't scale (Reddit, Twitter) has helped us compound our growth.

It's not going to be easy to get the next $100 MRR, churn is starting to bite (that's what we're working on in earnest right now). So for every customer we add, we have to make sure we are pleasing those we already have.

I don't feel like we've reached true product-market-fit yet but we are getting there and our value is growing stronger each week.

At the beginning of 2022 we set ourselves some goals for Q1 they included getting to ramen profitability ($100 /mo) and getting 1k unique visitors to our site per month.

I'm super excited that we hit both of those goals on Jan 24th already! The two things help each other of course. The more of the right type of visitor we get to the site, the more signups we are likely to get.

What's been really great to see is the number of self-serve
paid customers we are getting. The hook to upgrade from our Customer Portal feature is really working well. Customers get into the product using the Pricing Page (or really just want the Customer Portal) and then go through the upgrade flow like a dream.

There's still plenty of manual work in getting visitors to the site so we want to address that soon by publishing some great content to encourage organic traffic.

Time to increase those goals 🎯

We normally do at least one demo call with customers before they come on board. The product was originally intended to be self-serve, but we've found that our clients (non-technical) require a bit of help to get started with the product. Everyone has different pricing requirements and they often want to check that we cover their use case.

It's really great validation for the scalability of our product that we were able to get our first self-serve customer though. Eventually, we don't want to be having personal calls with every single client who comes on board. The goal is that the product should be so self-explanatory that it's easy to sign up, embed your Pricing Page and Customer Portal and that's it.

We just closed our second paying customer and they picked our highest value plan ($49 /mo). This is great validation that our new pricing strategy is working. We have a free-tier, $19 /mo and $49 /mo plans. The free tier is enough to get started but the majority of subscription businesses will need the features found in our paid tiers eventually, so we hope to move people up to the paid tiers once they are getting value from the product.

Our biggest sticking point right now is the conversion rate of sign-ups to connecting their Stripe account. It's unclear what people expect to do without connecting a Stripe account (that's the whole point of the product) but we've taken steps to try and improve the situation. Customers can now try out the pricing page feature without connecting a Stripe account. Once they see the value, connecting to Stripe is easy and they can get full value out of the product (for FREE of course).

Pricewell partners with Klarna to make no-code, buy now pay later payments a thing! 🤩

Make your biggest ticket-items seem affordable and your smallest purchases negligible, effortlessly, without third-parties!

We've been asked many times to deliver a feature that combines the ease of use and simplicity of no-code payments, but lets you spread the cost, interest free!

Now, you can let your customers spread the cost of payment (without any extra work for you). If you are a European company, you can now enable Klarna payments from Pricewell's dashboard.

Klarna gives you the full amount to your Stripe account, but allows the customer to spread the cost over 6-12 months.

This is completely transparent and risk-free for the business owner, as Klarna makes the payments clearing, therefore taking on the risk.

Sign up now and start spreading the cost!

Since we've started ramping up our marketing efforts, we've seen a ton of engagement with our platform and happy users integrating our product.

Thus far we were only generating revenue in the form of commissions, based on the selling prices of our customers.

We were long waiting for our first recurring payment, solidifying and validating the idea, as well as giving a firm dopamine boost.

Voila! Stripe notification just landed! Our first subscription! 💙

We cannot be more excited about our first subscribed customer and we are looking looking forward to help him and his Small Business scale and succeed one processed payment at a time!

We will never forget this day and we are grateful to all of you Indiehackers out there that you onboard with our mission to simplify pricing for the creator's economy!

Cheers 🍻
&
Thank you! 🙏