> It's why they all follow that common trend of low-price growth hacking and immediately follow up by raising prices.
The key difference is that startups are rarely selling the same product, to the same people, for different prices at different phases of growth. They're more often selling different products, with different positioning, to different market segments at different times in their growth; where they just happen to call those products "editions" of the same thing.
A common startup lifecycle:
1. get seed capital to build an MVP targeting one distinct market (usually consumers or individual professionals);
2. market (or give away) your consumer-product MVP to price-sensitive early adopters (which is where the initial look of "giving it away" comes from — that's what this market segment demands);
3. wait for those early adopters to educate the rest of the market about what's cool about the product and the brand;
4. meanwhile, use the "social proof" (rather than earnings reports) from these early adopters, as leverage to get a Series A investment; and use it to build a separate, more polished product targeting the enterprise market;
5. use your enterprise product, in combination with a bunch of new sales staff, to reach the non-price-sensitive late adopters. (While continuing to sell/give away the MVP consumer version!)
6. At some point, after achieving traction in both product lines, you can also "trickle down" the benefits of the enterprise product — and integrate process, saving OpEx — by building a new version of the MVP [now "consumer/SMB" product line] using the enterprise product's technology. (It's still a separate product, though, not just a feature-limited version of the enterprise product — there are a lot of things enterprises want that actively get in the way for consumers.)
This is less like Goodyear charging less for tires until they monopolize the market; and more like Goodyear starting off selling car tires, achieving brand recognition there, and then making all their real money by selling semi-truck tires.
A clear example of all six phases (but with bootstrapping in place of VC investment): Microsoft built initial versions of Windows for consumers, at retail prices (or "given away" via OEM channel-partners with steep volume discounts); achieved reach; then reinvested the revenue from that to build a more polished and robust Windows NT for enterprises, and made big money from non-discounted enterprise volume licensing; then "trickled down" the technology from Windows NT to create Windows XP, with the consumer/SMB product now just an "edition" of Windows XP.