Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Should I drastically increase my pricing (grandfathering included)?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 20 posts

Re: Ask HN: Should I drastically increase my pricing (grandfathering included)?

#11

Post by 3a0e8ff4e557 »

kappaknight wrote: post #6
3a0e8ff4e557 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking to them, I realise that a lot of it is just, "Wow, it's taking up much more time and money than I expected." While we can abstract away some of this time and money investment through better features and better UI/UX, a lot of them are just gunning for building a passive income engine without even investing much money and time in the initial stages. They are the classic get-rich-quick-passive-income-work-from-…

What is taking up most of their time? What can you do to help reduce that, if anything?

The nature of our industry (our customers' industry, to be precise) is that you need to have fresh products/offerings up every other day or so. So the process of adding content is time-consuming. But the same can be said for our competitors. This is one aspect that is very difficult to abstract away.

We have tried: letting them create copies of content, letting them create drafts, and also letting them appoint other users to create content on their behalf.

Re: Ask HN: Should I drastically increase my pricing (grandfathering included)?

#12

Post by bap »

patio11 wrote: post #10
3a0e8ff4e557 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello Patrick, Our landing page is actually converting pretty well, at >5% conversion rate (visit-to-trial signup). The problem is that I'm not sure if the right people are converting. We have no indication on the quality of those signups. If you are willing to help me out, I'll send you an email with my website, so that you can give quick thoughts. I would say the things you pointed out are generally fulfilled, but…

Drop me an email and I'll give it a quick once-over.

I"m not in any way involved with the OP but:

Thanks for being awesome Patrick. :)

Re: Ask HN: Should I drastically increase my pricing (grandfathering included)?

#13

Post by douglee650 »

why not add a 'platinum tier' with an easy to give away service that you know most customers already don't use, and charge extra for it?

or add incremental charges to existing plans to push customers towards the new platinum tier?

and, btw, if you don;t know the lifetime value of your customers by source and date, you should do more tracking

Re: Ask HN: Should I drastically increase my pricing (grandfathering included)?

#14

Post by nreece »

3a0e8ff4e557 wrote: post #5
nreece wrote: post #4

The first thing you must do is find out why your customers are abandoning your product. I think increasing the price without fixing the core problem will not help much.

Talking to them, I realise that a lot of it is just, "Wow, it's taking up much more time and money than I expected." While we can abstract away some of this time and money investment through better features and better UI/UX, a lot of them are just gunning for building a passive income engine without even investing much money and time in the initial stages. They are the classic get-rich-quick-passive-income-work-from-…

"Wow, it's taking up much more time and money than I expected."

You need to ask 5 Whys here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys):

1. Why are your customers abandoning your product?

.. because it's taking up much more time and money than they expected.

2. Why is it taking up much more time and money than they expected?

and so on.

You can certainly increase the price, but it's a dangerous proposition, that can be counter-productive without knowing what's causing your customers to abandon the product and how can you improve the overall user experience first & foremost.

Re: Ask HN: Should I drastically increase my pricing (grandfathering included)?

#15

Post by politikus »

3a0e8ff4e557 wrote: post #11
kappaknight wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is taking up most of their time? What can you do to help reduce that, if anything?

The nature of our industry (our customers' industry, to be precise) is that you need to have fresh products/offerings up every other day or so. So the process of adding content is time-consuming. But the same can be said for our competitors. This is one aspect that is very difficult to abstract away. We have tried: letting them create copies of content, letting them create drafts, and also letting them appoint other…

I think you have answered your question. If your customers are telling you "adding content is time-consuming" you should ONLY be focusing on solving THIS particular problem.

"Should I increase my prices?" is a "vanity question" ( just like "vanity metrics" (E Ries Lean startup philosophy) >> They do not help you build a better business, they take you away from what is REALLY important) Finding why your customer do not want to spend more time adding content and/or why they consider spending more time adding content is not worth it definitely help.

Good luck.

Re: Ask HN: Should I drastically increase my pricing (grandfathering included)?

#17

Post by debacle »

brudgers wrote: post #16

A relevant HN'ers blog post and the HN discussion: http://jacquesmattheij.com/Double+your+price+%28and+no%2C+I%... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639712

And another one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781156

Re: Ask HN: Should I drastically increase my pricing (grandfathering included)?

#18

Post by debacle »

If your intial costs are very high, and that is causing the issue, just wrap people into a contract - maybe 6 months up front (with a 30 day trial) and then you can go month-to-month after that.

It's becoming bad form to charge 'registration fees,' because everyone thinks that with IT you can do all of the paperwork for free. Especially in business-to-business when you're dealing with tightwads quite often.

Figure out what your minimum contract duration to break even (t) would need to be at your current prices. Multiply t * 1.25 and round to the nearest 4 or 6 month interval. That's your new initial minimum contract length.

Re: Ask HN: Should I drastically increase my pricing (grandfathering included)?

#19

Post by 3a0e8ff4e557 »

brudgers wrote: post #16

A relevant HN'ers blog post and the HN discussion: http://jacquesmattheij.com/Double+your+price+%28and+no%2C+I%... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639712

A quote from JangoSteve that really resonates with me: "There are ways your users tell you your product is too cheap, without actually having to tell you. One good indicator is when you have a lot of people signing up, and then not using it, in which case your product is so underpriced that it attracts indifference."

Our product attracts a lot of indifference. This is good in the short-term (free money), but ultimately we don't get to provide the value we want to provide, garner feedback from their regular usage, and they also eventually cancel and not even switch to a competitor.

Re: Ask HN: Should I drastically increase my pricing (grandfathering included)?

#20

Post by kappaknight »

3a0e8ff4e557 wrote: post #11
kappaknight wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is taking up most of their time? What can you do to help reduce that, if anything?

The nature of our industry (our customers' industry, to be precise) is that you need to have fresh products/offerings up every other day or so. So the process of adding content is time-consuming. But the same can be said for our competitors. This is one aspect that is very difficult to abstract away. We have tried: letting them create copies of content, letting them create drafts, and also letting them appoint other…

Not sure if you've tried this because you didn't mention it...

How about letting them schedule and set future publish times for the items? As a small biz owner, if I'm in the groove of adding products, I would love to just spend 4 hours straight on a Sunday night adding all the products for the week and have the system publish them on a schedule I set. It's much harder (and more annoying) to do this fresh every day for 15 minutes than doing so in a large block of time.

If freshness of the content is a real concern, I'd pay for something like that to make my site appear more fresh.

Post reply on HN