Increasing your price can be used to filter out people who are considering your "only kinda seriously". When you're at the beginning of creating a product, you

Increasing your price can be used to filter out people who are considering your "only kinda seriously". When you're at the beginning of creating a product, you want to talk to people who are really feeling the pain and really need a solution (and thus are willing to pay more). Sure, you're going to lose a lot of people if you post a high price, but they were going to waste your time anyway. The goal isn't to get as many paying users as possible, but to start getting the most important users to pay anything at all.