Slate Auto’s attempt to bring an affordable electric pickup to market is a live experiment in price-by-subtraction…The result is a product that forces a fundamental question about what buyers actually value versus what they’ve simply been conditioned to expect. Stripping away paint, navigation systems, and ambient lighting to hit a price point is not cost-cutting […]

Thanks to all the readers requesting a discussion on pricing pages.Across dozens of B2B SaaS and professional services pricing engagements, not one client has asked for help on their pricing page.They ask for help with pricing architecture, customer segmentation, value articulation, tier structure, renewal strategy, or compensation plan impacts.Not only do executives skip asking for […]

“Price before Product, Period.” – Madhavan Ramanujam, author of Monetizing Innovation “You’re trying to kill this project!” They were visibly frustrated with me. Uncharacteristically so. We were both inside a corporate venture studio. They were leading a venture. I was assessing if it had enough traction to continue. Or not. While the full-time, three-person team, […]

1. When to Revise Pricing Talking to a prospective client earlier this year, they had a horizontal product serving a dozen distinct verticals. The pricing metric for financial services and healthcare verticals were ‘assets under management’ and ‘beds’ respectively.  Pricing on the remaining verticals were still seat-based and they wanted help migrating to something vertical-specific, and […]

1. Who, Specifically, Is Your Bullseye Customer? Last week a CEO called me about commercializing an internal tool their services company built to accelerate their own operations. The tool was providing them substantial internal value – would someone pay for it. Unlike many teams in a similar spot – they don’t need to commercialize. They […]

They’re all great. Here are a few of my favorites:

Construction customers wanted the advanced analytics capabilities from their mobile forms vendor, but the tool was sophisticated and brittle. What they actually wanted was the vendor’s team to set it up and maintain it for them. Read-only access was fine.  Enterprise customers in the entertainment space wanted managed service. They don’t want seats, logins, or […]

“If your $200k/year employees spend their time vibe-coding a replacement for a $15/mo Calendly subscription, your business is not going to make it.” – Davide Grieco, Head of Growth, Clay Early in my career and in the early days of SaaS, I built a time tracking system for the agency I worked at. Twenty people, eighteen […]