Pricing Strategy
Pricing Your SaaS Start-Up: Mastering the Early Stages with Data-Driven Strategies
Launching a new SaaS product? You don't need to guess at pricing, even at the earliest stages of your startup.
Launching a new SaaS product? But guessing at your pricing?
You don't need to guess even at the earliest stages of your startup.
I've got a couple of tips to get you going…
Barring going to market with a complete pricing study and deep research, there are some smart ways to think about pricing in the early days of your SaaS startup.
🧐 Perform an ROI analysis as best you can. What's the impact you can make on your customer's business? Can you measure it? In B2B SaaS, it's usually time or money. Do your best to figure it out, extrapolate that value over 12 months, and use a percentage as an initial guide to price. Typically 10-20% is a safe place to start.
🥊 Conduct competitive research to understand the market, spot areas of differentiation and understand the pricing strategy your competitors use. See if your price falls within the envelope of your competitor's pricing, but don't fall into the trap of adopting your competitors' pricing.
👣 Start with a single plan with all the features you've got; you need to gain insight into how customers use your product, so don't package too early. Start tracking feature usage to understand what customers value and what they don't.
🕺Along with features, you'll need to track which types of users are doing what and get to know your personas. Tracking persona usage will help you tailor your value prop and prepare you to start segmenting and packaging. Try and capture persona data on signup, it may add a little friction, but it's worth it.
💵 And above all, don't give it away just to gain traction; customers need to open their wallets for you to really get any meaningful data. Free is forgotten but spent money demands ROI.
Don't leave pricing to chance, even at the earliest stages. The data you start tracking now will be wildly important as you gain traction and need to get your pricing strategy dialled in.
How did you price your early stage SaaS product? Join the discussion on LinkedIn here.
