ashmaurya

Founder-led sales

Pains and gains aren't enough without stakes

I'd like to subscribe to your formula as well if you can tell me how to repeatedly delight customers :-)

As I point out in the post, I'm not one for needless process... but beyond a certain threshold, I find predictability is needed.

Yes, but this kind of anchoring is "artificially" manipulative. It's possible you convince a customer to accept a higher price at first, but pretty soon buyer's remorse will set in and you're screwed.

I do believe you want to pick "valid" anchors and sometimes be more selective (as-in the iPad case) but the comparison has to stick.

In the next post, I'll cover my approach to not only how to test price with customers, but how to get them to want to pay.

Yes, pricing is a conversation but you need to lead the conversation because if you pause and think about it, there is no rational justification for your customer to offer you a fair price.

They are either clueless on value and don't know OR they'll low-ball you because they want a good deal.

"The fair price for your product is usually higher than what both you and the customer think".

I'd disagree and say with wine you'd have to explain a lot more (as you did). We know from the existing bottled water market (in the U.S.) that a viable market exists at both $0.50 and $2.00. $2 might be a ripoff to you but it's what some customers always purchase which leads to Principle 2.

The brilliance is picked an externally accredited source (pundits) for a product twice in price. Another alternative was positioning the iPad as a better (bigger iPhone) but that obviously would not have worked as well.

The context here is for products where one would sell a product or service directly to customers e.g. SaaS, enterprise. Crowd-sourcing is a different model. So are multi-sided and marketplace models.

Customer development is not billed as a customer acquisition strategy but there is an implicit expectation that because "customers hold all the answers", cust dev will reveal the path to customers.

I don't believe customers hold all the answers and the point of this post is that you can't be complacent about finding and testing that path to customers.

It's not the customer's job to know what they want. - Steve Jobs

Customers are great at articulating problems but whenever they start suggesting solutions, I try and get to the root problems whether it's before Version 1.0 or a feature request after.

Before launch I do talk to customers - the first is an interview, second is for feedback. The interview is to learn about problems and how they solve them today (existing alternatives).

Armed with that knowledge, I then build a "demo" (prototype, mockup, etc.) that I show to them once more to validate this "will" solve the problem before I build the real product/feature.

For a more detailed write-up: http://www.ashmaurya.com/2011/07/how-we-build-features/

- Ash

If you're interested in customer development / lean startups as applied to web products, also checkout the book roughcut: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1977124

If you'd like early access to LeanCanvas, please drop me a line [email protected]

Download link: http://www.runningleanhq.com/downloads/running_lean_rc.pdf

Thanks jefflinwood.

The book isn't a lead-in to LeanCanvas and I was/am conscious about not making the example in the book self-promotional. I wanted to pick a "real" example to which readers could relate and one that I had recently built. The software would most likely be bundled with the book. As a standalone it wouldn't cost $49/mo but more like $14/mo (still early to tell).

Thanks for the SEO tip.