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My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder

mtlynch.io

11–20 of 339 posts

Re: My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder

#12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

in what sense is it getting worse? While there may be local minima, I'd argue that its the best its ever been. News has always been pessimistic because negative emotions are easier to trigger to drive attention which pays the bills.

Whether the world as a whole is getting worse is debatable, but I think it's very clear that tech companies are

Re: My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder

#17
post #2

Author here. As always, I'm happy to take any feedback or answer any questions about this post.

Thanks for writing a great summary of year #6 for your business. Question: where do your advertising dollars go and how do you measure their success?

Good luck in year #7!

Re: My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder

#20

That's very cool, Michael. Really great to see your business doing well, congrats! Really interesting to see that adding a metal box and making the product more premium made a huge impact on revenue. Have you run any pricing experiments after that?

Thanks for reading!

>Have you run any pricing experiments after that?

No, I haven't tinkered with the price much for the past few months.

I have a hard time doing price experiments because at my volumes, I have to collect a few weeks of data before I think the evidence is strong, and I don't have a good way to A/B test different prices in parallel, so it's easy for two different time periods to have different results independent of price.

I've also found that there's a lot of friction around changing prices too frequently. When I reduce prices by a significant amount, we get emails for a couple of weeks after from people who are annoyed they paid a higher price just before a reduction, so I've been reticent to invite those complaints.

I don't have strong evidence for it, but $399 for base and $499 for premium "feels" right because they're round numbers and they're close to optimal based on different prices we've tried.

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