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Pricing Your Product

sequoiacap.com

61–70 of 82 posts

Re: Pricing Your Product

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but who's going to build that system when 110% of engineering is building customer features. Much more likely that a ) engineering doesn't want to touch it ( for obvious reasons so b) sales/sales support maintains this in Excel or worse...

Nothing wrong with maintaining in Excel as long as a computer system can serve that data. At that point it's just a fancy lookup table. Engineering != programming. People forget that choosing not to code is also an option.

One of the companies I worked for got acquired. The CTO of the bigger company decided to personally lead a large rewrite, including:

• replacing our Wordpress blog with something custom written, including building our own database migrator (you could manually data entry our few blog posts by copy and paste)

• Replace our Google Sheets based asset tracking with an overengineered backend. The frontend was never built due to a lack of FE and design resources and everyone continued to use Google Sheets.

• choose to delete some old sections of our app that still used jQuery, angering vocal customers.

Re: Pricing Your Product

#62
post #40

> Natera recently brought to market a non-invasive pre-natal test that can detect Down syndrome and other conditions in a mother’s blood. Previously, testing for these conditions required a risky procedure that extracted tissue from the fetus. Other non-invasive tests aren’t as comprehensive. > Because Natera's test is better than its competitors' products, the company charges more. > “Premium pricing communicates a…

What solution do you propose? Regulated pricing? That would remove the incentive, which would lead to far less innovation. It’s better to have these innovations at a high price than not at all.

Re: Pricing Your Product

#63
post #40

> Natera recently brought to market a non-invasive pre-natal test that can detect Down syndrome and other conditions in a mother’s blood. Previously, testing for these conditions required a risky procedure that extracted tissue from the fetus. Other non-invasive tests aren’t as comprehensive. > Because Natera's test is better than its competitors' products, the company charges more. > “Premium pricing communicates a…

> Is this normal in the USA? Talking of "premium offerings" in the context of healthcare seems sickening to me.

The whole US healthcare system is sickening.

Just related to corona:

1) ventilators have been used not to help patients, but to protect staff from aerosolization. The problem is that intubating and drugging somebody causes serious health problems in itself.

2) various hospitals and doctors are adding corona as a cause or factor to increase billings, whether it's related to corona or not.

Re: Pricing Your Product

#65
post #21

This is a stub root comment to collect comments about website formatting, which have been transferred hither.

I found this to be quite readable. Nicely designed site!

It's useful to compare the desktop and mobile versions. On desktop it's nice. On mobile it's unreadable for many people - so much so that I think it'd be breaking some disability accessibility laws.

Re: Pricing Your Product

#66
post #21

This is a stub root comment to collect comments about website formatting, which have been transferred hither.

You've been saying recently that HN is like a water cooler.

I feel like disabled people talking about how frustrating they find it when a well funded company makes accessibility mistakes are a useful part of that water cooler conversation.

I know some people find this meta discussion about website accessibility tedious, but perhaps those people should try to show a bit of insight into just how tedious disabled people find it to have to keep making this point, year after year.

(FWIW, I did stop making comments about the accessibility of sites after you said this 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238739 )

Re: Pricing Your Product

#67
post #25
post #16

The article hits its stride at paragraph 14, where they talk about the importance of "value-based pricing" rather than "cost-based pricing." My wake-up moment came in 2013 or so, when I was pricing the digital version of a long-ago print book I'd written. ("Merchants of Debt"). I knew that it kept finding a niche audience among investment bankers and people who want to be investment bankers. E-book prices were droppi…

I fall for this time and again. I want to buy a board game. I've already decided I'm buying it but hey there is a deluxe version for a price I wasn't planning to pay... so yeah I buy it.

> I fall for this time and again.

That tactic is called price anchoring and the reason it tends to work on a lot of people is because it relies on a cognitive bias called anchoring [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)

Re: Pricing Your Product

#68
post #21

This is a stub root comment to collect comments about website formatting, which have been transferred hither.

Could this be done for every thread? The comments that are only about the metadata rather than the content of the articles posted can be quite tiring to sift through.

Certainly thinking about it. It's the first time we've done this.

Re: Pricing Your Product

#69
post #66
post #21

This is a stub root comment to collect comments about website formatting, which have been transferred hither.

You've been saying recently that HN is like a water cooler. I feel like disabled people talking about how frustrating they find it when a well funded company makes accessibility mistakes are a useful part of that water cooler conversation. I know some people find this meta discussion about website accessibility tedious, but perhaps those people should try to show a bit of insight into just how tedious disabled people…

I don't know a good solution. Those concerns are for sure legitimate, and at the same time it's tiresome when complaints about website formatting crop up often in threads. Especially because meta complaints show up about those complaints, and then meta meta, and so on.

Perhaps the solution is for people to express accessibility concerns to the proprietors of the websites in question, instead of to forums where the concerns are most likely not going to be seen by the people who would need to fix them.

The watercooler aspect of HN goes back to the beginning, btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8314 - though it's true that I've been citing it more lately.

Re: Pricing Your Product

#70
post #33

Pricing is HARD. I launched a SaaS in 2016 with a 100eur per month recurring plan. only 5 signups in two years. Then around 2018 someone wrote me "that's incredibly cheap. why?" So, I doubled it to 200eur per month. Today there are 60 recurring plans at 200 per month, and only 3 @100(grandfathered plans from the early days.) Clients tend to think that if something seems too cheap, something is wrong with it.

Did anything else besides the price change since 2018?

The product kept evolving too. (Updates, new features, etc) I think people started to value it more once the price doubled. Most new features were in response to their feedback.
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