19 ms·

Pricing Your Product

474 points by wanderer42 6y ago

jkuria 6y ago
ICYMI (Was on the front page most of the day 2 weeks ago): Once you figure out general price, here's a good guide to Pricing Plans https://capitalandgrowth.org/answers/Article/3169972/The-Definitive-Guide-to-Pricing-Plans https://capitalandgrowth.org/answers/Article/3169972/The-Def...
mcsoft 6y ago
It's insightful to learn that in their guide on pricing Sequoia cites Phil Libin, then-CEO of Sequoia-backed Evernote, who was later kicked out exactly because the company struggled to find the right pricing model.
- vmception 6y ago
  Reminds me of seeing job posting's from Softbank for a "Valuation's Director" immediately after finmeme accounts trashed the WeWork S-1
GCA10 6y ago
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 dropping, and I wanted to get full value from my best customers without seeming out of step with the market. After all, most finance types can afford to be price-insensitive, but they still want to feel like they're getting good value. The solution was to create an unabridged edition for $9.99, and a condensed edition (about 40% of the content) for $3.99. Truth is, the condensed edition gets very few orders. But the fact that it exists makes it much easier for serious buyers to pay up for the full edition. Knowing the customer's frame of mind -- which usually is quite nuanced -- is the key. Especially when, as the Sequoia folks point out, the marginal cost of another digital copy is always very close to zero.
- duxup 6y ago
  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.
  - ludocode 6y ago
    Interesting example. With board games I avoid the deluxe versions because they're often incompatible with expansions. Power Grid and Settlers of Catan come to mind.
  - sah2ed 6y ago
    > 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)
dang 6y ago
This is a stub root comment to collect comments about website formatting, which have been transferred hither.
- paullth 6y ago
  Why not just have white text on a white background? No idea what's in the article
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    On Desktop I see black text on white background, although the videos don't seem to load.
  - tasuki 6y ago
    It's like #222 on #FFF ... not bad contrast?
    - paullth 6y ago
      Not sure why, but on my phone it's barely readable.
      - pests 6y ago
        Night mode or dark theme related maybe? Some sites don't set a body background color thinking it will always be white. Might be related.
      - xellisx 6y ago
        The font could be made bold..
    - lonelappde 6y ago
      Extra thin font violates accessibility standards.
  - vulcan01 6y ago
    Reading mode to the rescue!
paulpauper 6y ago
How ironic given that it's biggest winners in its portfolio are companies that never sold anything (at least not initially), Linkedin and Instagram for example.
- duxup 6y ago
  The article seems to indicate that Linked In has made a lot of money selling services.
  - twelve40 6y ago
    $250mil/year is 1/100th of what they eventually got acquired for. Linkedin was probably eventually making more than that, too (need to look) but I'd be surprised if revenue was the main reason for LI's success, probably more of a nice to have...
    - laurex 6y ago
      LinkedIn has constantly amazed me as far as how little they have done with their main asset, the professional social graph. That they don't offer paid products for hosted professional associations, or verified credentials, a CRM, or even intra-organization communication fascinates me. There are so many other examples of how you could make money with what they have, not even counting creepy ones.
throwaway7281 6y ago
Value-based pricing is the worst societal invention. Imagine a medicine can be made from simple ingredients, but you discovered a recipe by accident. It's very valuable since it might save lives, so the value is high, the cost is low and you can reap the benefit on the mere basis that you discovered something by accident. You also need to make sure that no one "gets it", so do not educate people, just milk them - and in the worst case, mislead them, work against any threat "knowledge" would pose. Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur. Imagine a world, where progress and invention would be something shared and done not out of greed but out of ability and ultimately generosity that would add to the grace of our race. Instead we celebrate greed, as if we were a bunch of apes. My fear is that human society needs to reach new lows before we actually have the chance to see our own potential (and then it might be too late, anyway).
- cortesoft 6y ago
  There are consequences to an economy where the margin is fixed across all industry... just look at the free internet... since the you basically get paid for eyeballs, with no premium for providing more value (a visitor gives you the same per user price for ads no matter the quality of the content), there is a race for cheap content that appeals to the most number of people... you don't get investment in companies that provide high value, because you don't get more return for high value.
- exolymph 6y ago
  Supply and demand dynamics =/= invention, but rather description.
  - throwaway7281 6y ago
    I understand the price signal and the process of price detection through the myriads of needs and abilities. That's all fine and actually great, as a relatively robust distributed system. What I do not get is why keeping people in the dark is a cornerstone to many endeavours - value-based pricing just being an example of that. Edit: maybe I spend too much time in the open source world and mistake it for some model setup for other parts of society that do not work like that at all.
101008 6y ago
My problem with this advice of testing your pricing strategy is how to communicate this to actual customers. Maybe this isn't a thing in Europe or USA; but in third-world countries a change in the price it is important and something your customers want to know. If I set my prices higher, I can't change it for my current customers. They will get mad. So I ahve to create a full logic on the backend for customers created after X date, etc. It is a mess. If I set my prices lower (i.e., display lower prices on landing page, etc), my current customers will get mad at me if I don't change them for them too ("Why I am paying more than the price you are saying this costs?"), etc. So for me, this strategy of A/B testing prices, find the right price, etc, has been always too complicated to implement. When I tried, I end up adding more problems to me to deal with, and at the end I couldn't analyze the trends I wanted it.
- pavlov 6y ago
  One trick you can use is to figure out a set of product parameters that you can tweak into new combinations to create lots of pricing plans. They may be effectively identical to previous ones as far as your cost and engineering are concerned, but different enough that customers don’t feel someone is getting a different price for the same thing. E.g. your previous “Medium Starter” plan included 10 foobags and up to 1.5 zoffobytes of data for a price of $19. Your new “Basic Plus” plan includes 15 foobags and 1.2 zoffobytes for $25.
  - andi999 6y ago
    I didnt buy a robot vacuum because of this. There was a crazy amount of different ones from the same company with different pricings. Maybe it is better now. But usually I want a product which fulfills my supposed needs for a reasonable price. Too many different products (especially from the same vendor) give me the certainty no matter which one I choose one or the other criterium will fail.
    - pavlov 6y ago
      The advice is more applicable to SaaS products where users can easily switch between plans, and creating new combinations of the product parameters is free. Assuming you don’t overdo it, having multiple plans for different types of users can actually help customers feel more confident that your company has the experience to understand their needs.
eruci 6y ago
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.
- IAmGraydon 6y ago
  Did anything else besides the price change since 2018?
  - eruci 6y ago
    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.
  - eruci 6y ago
    Also, at the end of 2018, based on their feedback, I added a "pricing" & comparison page: https://geocode.xyz/pricing https://geocode.xyz/pricing
lpolovets 6y ago
One of the biggest lessons I've learned as a VC in the past few years is that pricing really has to be aligned with and proportional to the value your product provides. If someone gets $100 of value per seat and you charge $15/seat, that's great. If you charge $15/seat for a product that creates value per gigabyte, people start gaming the system. E.g. they'll buy one seat for their company and ask that person to be the proxy user for your product. Or if you charge $10/GB and people get $20/GB of value of the first few gigabytes and then $5/GB of value after that, you're going to run into problems. So figure out how users perceive and quantify your value to themselves, and then try to come up with a simple pricing scheme that captures 10-25% of that value. That way every time someone pays you $1, they get $4-$10 of value, and that's a no brainer purchase. Getting pricing right has a huge ROI across the board. Good pricing improves margins, reduces sales friction, and creates happier customers. The best book that I've read on pricing is Monetizing Innovation: https://www.amazon.com/Monetizing-Innovation-Companies-Design-Product-ebook/dp/B01F4DYY1I https://www.amazon.com/Monetizing-Innovation-Companies-Desig...
- bobbyz 6y ago
  I just spent my last audible token 5 minutes ago D:
  - dolguldur 6y ago
    Guess what, you can get 3 tokens for around $35, so one token will be cheaper than the average prices (anchors) you'd otherwise pay.
- tyre 6y ago
  A related thing is knowing when pricing is no longer the issue. If the pricing correlates enough with value and you can't close deals, I've seen too many companies think pricing will solve that.
- ultrasounder 6y ago
  Also worth noting that Leo Polovets also is one of the early engineers at LinkedIn and is still very much hands-on. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/12/19/which-is-the-best-programming-algorithm-that-you-have-ever-created/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013...
lucb1e 6y ago
> 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 premium product,” says Matthew Rabinowitz, the company’s CEO. Is this normal in the USA? Talking of "premium offerings" in the context of healthcare seems sickening to me. Premium hospital beds with high speed broadband, alrighty, but premium healthcare itself? I understand that one needs to recoup R&D costs a few times over for it to be worth the risk, but that's simply cost price (risk * R&D cost / unit count * unit cost) and not a "premium product". This isn't a non-essential premium Ferrari, it could help a lot of people. Is it just me who finds this a really weird example?
- ryeights 6y ago
  That stuck out to me as well, but it makes sense as an incentive for companies to create better products. Why pour money into R&D to develop new products if you're restricted to charging existing prices? Might as well just develop the existing product and save on the R&D costs.
  - freepor 6y ago
    Bounties are a good way to solve this. Invent a new therapy? The government buys your patent for a sum proportional to the value created (not to the dollars invested) and releases it to the public domain.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  >I understand that one needs to recoup R&D costs a few times over for it to be worth the risk, but that's simply cost price (risk * R&D cost / unit count * unit cost) and not a "premium product". How are you going to attract top minds to do the R&D without paying them a premium? And investors need a premium to incentivize investing R&D, especially in the low probability of success field of biotech. I don't agree with the way their CEO characterized it. He probably should have just said the pricing is commensurate with the costs involved in developing it or something, which include the opportunity cost of not using the funds to buy tech stocks.
x3blah 6y ago
A better title might be "Pricing Your Service" since the overwhleming majority of examples cited are services, not products.
zoomablemind 6y ago
Good read, emphasizes an importance of figuring out a customer-perceived value of your product. Sidenote: reading it was very much painful on eyes, at least on my phone screen. That thin font looks almost like a watermark. Maybe it'd be better on a laptop screen.
reubenswartz 6y ago
This is a helpful article and I would add to the general "value-based" pricing discussion: Price is limited by perceived differential value. So if there's value that the buyer doesn't perceive, it doesn't count. (Often, there's value that the buyer perceives and you don't in the SaaS world.) If there's perceived value, but you charge $1000 and someone else offers the same perceived value for $100, it's going to be hard going. This feeds back into understanding your customer subsegment really well. In the example above, perhaps the general market thinks you are at -$900, but for your niche, there are some critical aspects that make it worth much more. Another corollary is to offer different price points, all aligned with how the buyer perceives value, such that you're happy with whatever choice they make.
koolhead17 6y ago
When it comes to pricing I relate it with Jobs to be Done. Pain, desire to progress and willingness to pay as a prime lever. Whatever pain you are solving, if customers have no money they are not going to buy the product. If customer has no desire to progress, they will stick with existing software even your product will make like 100X better.

474 points by wanderer42 6y ago

ICYMI (Was on the front page most of the day 2 weeks ago): Once you figure out general price, here's a good guide to Pricing Plans https://capitalandgrowth.org/answers/Article/3169972/The-Definitive-Guide-to-Pricing-Plans https://capitalandgrowth.org/answers/Article/3169972/The-Def...

mcsoft 6y ago

It's insightful to learn that in their guide on pricing Sequoia cites Phil Libin, then-CEO of Sequoia-backed Evernote, who was later kicked out exactly because the company struggled to find the right pricing model.

vmception 6y ago
Reminds me of seeing job posting's from Softbank for a "Valuation's Director" immediately after finmeme accounts trashed the WeWork S-1

GCA10 6y ago

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 dropping, and I wanted to get full value from my best customers without seeming out of step with the market. After all, most finance types can afford to be price-insensitive, but they still want to feel like they're getting good value. The solution was to create an unabridged edition for $9.99, and a condensed edition (about 40% of the content) for $3.99. Truth is, the condensed edition gets very few orders. But the fact that it exists makes it much easier for serious buyers to pay up for the full edition. Knowing the customer's frame of mind -- which usually is quite nuanced -- is the key. Especially when, as the Sequoia folks point out, the marginal cost of another digital copy is always very close to zero.

duxup 6y ago
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.
- ludocode 6y ago
  Interesting example. With board games I avoid the deluxe versions because they're often incompatible with expansions. Power Grid and Settlers of Catan come to mind.
- sah2ed 6y ago
  > 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)

dang 6y ago

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

paullth 6y ago
Why not just have white text on a white background? No idea what's in the article
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  On Desktop I see black text on white background, although the videos don't seem to load.
- tasuki 6y ago
  It's like #222 on #FFF ... not bad contrast?
  - paullth 6y ago
    Not sure why, but on my phone it's barely readable.
    - pests 6y ago
      Night mode or dark theme related maybe? Some sites don't set a body background color thinking it will always be white. Might be related.
    - xellisx 6y ago
      The font could be made bold..
  - lonelappde 6y ago
    Extra thin font violates accessibility standards.
- vulcan01 6y ago
  Reading mode to the rescue!

paulpauper 6y ago

How ironic given that it's biggest winners in its portfolio are companies that never sold anything (at least not initially), Linkedin and Instagram for example.

duxup 6y ago
The article seems to indicate that Linked In has made a lot of money selling services.
- twelve40 6y ago
  $250mil/year is 1/100th of what they eventually got acquired for. Linkedin was probably eventually making more than that, too (need to look) but I'd be surprised if revenue was the main reason for LI's success, probably more of a nice to have...
  - laurex 6y ago
    LinkedIn has constantly amazed me as far as how little they have done with their main asset, the professional social graph. That they don't offer paid products for hosted professional associations, or verified credentials, a CRM, or even intra-organization communication fascinates me. There are so many other examples of how you could make money with what they have, not even counting creepy ones.

throwaway7281 6y ago

Value-based pricing is the worst societal invention. Imagine a medicine can be made from simple ingredients, but you discovered a recipe by accident. It's very valuable since it might save lives, so the value is high, the cost is low and you can reap the benefit on the mere basis that you discovered something by accident. You also need to make sure that no one "gets it", so do not educate people, just milk them - and in the worst case, mislead them, work against any threat "knowledge" would pose. Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur. Imagine a world, where progress and invention would be something shared and done not out of greed but out of ability and ultimately generosity that would add to the grace of our race. Instead we celebrate greed, as if we were a bunch of apes. My fear is that human society needs to reach new lows before we actually have the chance to see our own potential (and then it might be too late, anyway).

cortesoft 6y ago
There are consequences to an economy where the margin is fixed across all industry... just look at the free internet... since the you basically get paid for eyeballs, with no premium for providing more value (a visitor gives you the same per user price for ads no matter the quality of the content), there is a race for cheap content that appeals to the most number of people... you don't get investment in companies that provide high value, because you don't get more return for high value.
exolymph 6y ago
Supply and demand dynamics =/= invention, but rather description.
- throwaway7281 6y ago
  I understand the price signal and the process of price detection through the myriads of needs and abilities. That's all fine and actually great, as a relatively robust distributed system. What I do not get is why keeping people in the dark is a cornerstone to many endeavours - value-based pricing just being an example of that. Edit: maybe I spend too much time in the open source world and mistake it for some model setup for other parts of society that do not work like that at all.

101008 6y ago

My problem with this advice of testing your pricing strategy is how to communicate this to actual customers. Maybe this isn't a thing in Europe or USA; but in third-world countries a change in the price it is important and something your customers want to know. If I set my prices higher, I can't change it for my current customers. They will get mad. So I ahve to create a full logic on the backend for customers created after X date, etc. It is a mess. If I set my prices lower (i.e., display lower prices on landing page, etc), my current customers will get mad at me if I don't change them for them too ("Why I am paying more than the price you are saying this costs?"), etc. So for me, this strategy of A/B testing prices, find the right price, etc, has been always too complicated to implement. When I tried, I end up adding more problems to me to deal with, and at the end I couldn't analyze the trends I wanted it.

pavlov 6y ago
One trick you can use is to figure out a set of product parameters that you can tweak into new combinations to create lots of pricing plans. They may be effectively identical to previous ones as far as your cost and engineering are concerned, but different enough that customers don’t feel someone is getting a different price for the same thing. E.g. your previous “Medium Starter” plan included 10 foobags and up to 1.5 zoffobytes of data for a price of $19. Your new “Basic Plus” plan includes 15 foobags and 1.2 zoffobytes for $25.
- andi999 6y ago
  I didnt buy a robot vacuum because of this. There was a crazy amount of different ones from the same company with different pricings. Maybe it is better now. But usually I want a product which fulfills my supposed needs for a reasonable price. Too many different products (especially from the same vendor) give me the certainty no matter which one I choose one or the other criterium will fail.
  - pavlov 6y ago
    The advice is more applicable to SaaS products where users can easily switch between plans, and creating new combinations of the product parameters is free. Assuming you don’t overdo it, having multiple plans for different types of users can actually help customers feel more confident that your company has the experience to understand their needs.

eruci 6y ago

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.

IAmGraydon 6y ago
Did anything else besides the price change since 2018?
- eruci 6y ago
  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.
- eruci 6y ago
  Also, at the end of 2018, based on their feedback, I added a "pricing" & comparison page: https://geocode.xyz/pricing https://geocode.xyz/pricing

lpolovets 6y ago

One of the biggest lessons I've learned as a VC in the past few years is that pricing really has to be aligned with and proportional to the value your product provides. If someone gets $100 of value per seat and you charge $15/seat, that's great. If you charge $15/seat for a product that creates value per gigabyte, people start gaming the system. E.g. they'll buy one seat for their company and ask that person to be the proxy user for your product. Or if you charge $10/GB and people get $20/GB of value of the first few gigabytes and then $5/GB of value after that, you're going to run into problems. So figure out how users perceive and quantify your value to themselves, and then try to come up with a simple pricing scheme that captures 10-25% of that value. That way every time someone pays you $1, they get $4-$10 of value, and that's a no brainer purchase. Getting pricing right has a huge ROI across the board. Good pricing improves margins, reduces sales friction, and creates happier customers. The best book that I've read on pricing is Monetizing Innovation: https://www.amazon.com/Monetizing-Innovation-Companies-Design-Product-ebook/dp/B01F4DYY1I https://www.amazon.com/Monetizing-Innovation-Companies-Desig...

bobbyz 6y ago
I just spent my last audible token 5 minutes ago D:
- dolguldur 6y ago
  Guess what, you can get 3 tokens for around $35, so one token will be cheaper than the average prices (anchors) you'd otherwise pay.
tyre 6y ago
A related thing is knowing when pricing is no longer the issue. If the pricing correlates enough with value and you can't close deals, I've seen too many companies think pricing will solve that.
ultrasounder 6y ago
Also worth noting that Leo Polovets also is one of the early engineers at LinkedIn and is still very much hands-on. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/12/19/which-is-the-best-programming-algorithm-that-you-have-ever-created/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013...

lucb1e 6y ago

> 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 premium product,” says Matthew Rabinowitz, the company’s CEO. Is this normal in the USA? Talking of "premium offerings" in the context of healthcare seems sickening to me. Premium hospital beds with high speed broadband, alrighty, but premium healthcare itself? I understand that one needs to recoup R&D costs a few times over for it to be worth the risk, but that's simply cost price (risk * R&D cost / unit count * unit cost) and not a "premium product". This isn't a non-essential premium Ferrari, it could help a lot of people. Is it just me who finds this a really weird example?

ryeights 6y ago
That stuck out to me as well, but it makes sense as an incentive for companies to create better products. Why pour money into R&D to develop new products if you're restricted to charging existing prices? Might as well just develop the existing product and save on the R&D costs.
- freepor 6y ago
  Bounties are a good way to solve this. Invent a new therapy? The government buys your patent for a sum proportional to the value created (not to the dollars invested) and releases it to the public domain.
lotsofpulp 6y ago
>I understand that one needs to recoup R&D costs a few times over for it to be worth the risk, but that's simply cost price (risk * R&D cost / unit count * unit cost) and not a "premium product". How are you going to attract top minds to do the R&D without paying them a premium? And investors need a premium to incentivize investing R&D, especially in the low probability of success field of biotech. I don't agree with the way their CEO characterized it. He probably should have just said the pricing is commensurate with the costs involved in developing it or something, which include the opportunity cost of not using the funds to buy tech stocks.

x3blah 6y ago

A better title might be "Pricing Your Service" since the overwhleming majority of examples cited are services, not products.

zoomablemind 6y ago

Good read, emphasizes an importance of figuring out a customer-perceived value of your product. Sidenote: reading it was very much painful on eyes, at least on my phone screen. That thin font looks almost like a watermark. Maybe it'd be better on a laptop screen.

reubenswartz 6y ago

This is a helpful article and I would add to the general "value-based" pricing discussion: Price is limited by perceived differential value. So if there's value that the buyer doesn't perceive, it doesn't count. (Often, there's value that the buyer perceives and you don't in the SaaS world.) If there's perceived value, but you charge $1000 and someone else offers the same perceived value for $100, it's going to be hard going. This feeds back into understanding your customer subsegment really well. In the example above, perhaps the general market thinks you are at -$900, but for your niche, there are some critical aspects that make it worth much more. Another corollary is to offer different price points, all aligned with how the buyer perceives value, such that you're happy with whatever choice they make.

koolhead17 6y ago

When it comes to pricing I relate it with Jobs to be Done. Pain, desire to progress and willingness to pay as a prime lever. Whatever pain you are solving, if customers have no money they are not going to buy the product. If customer has no desire to progress, they will stick with existing software even your product will make like 100X better.