Pricing is everything buyers and sellers agree on compressed into a single number.

As such, most pricing problems aren’t pricing problems.

They’re value articulation problems. The company built something genuinely useful, priced it to get in the door, and never asked what it was actually worth.

The result isn’t obvious failure. It’s a quiet erosion of the business’s health. Profitability slipped. Revenue forecasts missed. Money left on the table. Big deals lost because the pricing wasn’t credible. Companies invest in new product features when customers would pay more to better utilize the ones they’re familiar with.

WHY TALK TO YOUR CUSTOMERS?

Because no one on your team does anymore.

You did early, to get the sale. Then stopped. The product shipped. The team grew. The conversations became support tickets and NPS scores.

Customers will tell you everything you need to know. Who they actually consider your competition. What your product changed in their organization. The frustrations they never filed a ticket for. The needs too small to bring up. The internal changes already shifting how they use what you built.

They’ll even tell you how much to raise their prices.

Customers who want you to succeed will tell you everything. One showed up with a list of 35 complaints – every one a thoughtful, obvious product improvement. Another had a genuinely difficult experience with my client three years prior and still booked the second available interview slot.

Three weeks of interviews booked in two days. That’s not unusual.

“Prices have gone up 25-30% in the past 2 years, but it’s not a problem as we’re getting substantial value.” – Site Safety & Inspection SaaS Customer

That’s not research. That’s resuming a conversation you should never have stopped having.

WHY GARRICK

Garrick van Buren has been a 4x SaaS founder, a 2x professional services operator, and led strategy for a corporate venture studio. Across all of them, his role was to identify opportunities worth pursuing, size the value of those opportunities, and convince executives to invest in people, capital, and strategic attention.

This means making the case for something that doesn’t yet exist, to people who need to justify the bet to their own stakeholders. Articulating value others don’t yet see. Making it legible. Making it defensible. Demonstrating the demand for it.

Coming from product, customer research, and a founder’s seat means the work starts where the problem actually lives. Not in the pricing model, but in the founder’s relationship with their product’s value.

One of Garrick’s SaaS products, Kernest, is referenced in five books on marketing and digital products, most recently Noah Kagan’s Million Dollar Weekend. His customer research work is referenced in three other books.

He writes For Starters a newsletter about finding and quantifying customer value before over-investing in product.

He works directly with every client. No junior staff. No subcontractors.

He lives in suburban Minneapolis with his wife and four children.

START HERE

We start with a Value Gap Session to identify where the gap is, what it’s worth, and whether working together makes sense. If it doesn’t, we’ll know by the end of the call.

$1,500. If we work together within 30 days, the fee will be applied toward the larger engagement.