How to Price an Early Stage B2B Software Product

Talk to customers, but don't ask what they'd pay. Keep it simple and understand how they buy. (#70)

Recently, I was speaking with a few early-stage founders about pricing. The common questions are:

How should I price my product? Should I try and pre-sell it before it’s built? Do I give early adopters a discount?

Let’s break this down…

1. At the outset, pricing is binary

At the earliest stages, your price doesn’t matter. As your startup evolves and scales you’re going to change pricing a lot.

If a customer is willing to pay $1, it’s significantly better than $0. That’s what I mean by “pricing is binary”. Convincing people to pay for anything is a big deal, the amount itself is not super important. Charging people money early on isn’t a sign that you have a functioning business model with strong economics, it’s a sign that people want your solution (i.e. you’re using price as a validation of desirability).