Naomi Ionita: belief

Transcript context

…Not an investor in these yet. And so that's cool. Quick tangent, do you have a strong opinion on pricing models, usage based versus seed based versus something else? What's your guidance to founders? Is this the way to go, usually one of them, or is it super dependent? What do you recommend? Yes, this is a similar answer I had before. I don't think that they're mutually exclusive. And so if you look at all the companies that in different pricing models in SaaS, a small sliver less than 10%, around roughly 5% have just pure natural escalator kind of usage-based model. The vast majority have a hybrid approach. And so what I mean by that is they're typically some good, better, best subscription model where there's some consumption component across each tier, like some quota limit for your given value metric. So in Slack there might have been number of messages sent or Dropbox number of terabytes of storage. Invoice2go might be number of invoices. There's some dimension that's been sort of packaged in with a given pricing plan, and once you reach that limit, it is a trigger to get you to upgrade to the next plan over, or sometimes there's overages that you can pay for. So I don't believe that you should just be seat-based or just be usage-based. I think one challenge with purely usage-based models is that's not always how CFOs want to buy. I think buyers sometimes want predictability. They want to be able to budget for your tool, and I've lived that. I remember using tools like Mixpanel and Segment and even Jira to an extent where I was paying a cheap amount to get going, and all of a sudden I realized we had grown quickly and I looked at all of our SaaS spend and I was blown away by how much more we were paying. So it's the other side of this... I'm advocating for people getting paid and compensated for the value that they're delivering, but there can be a breaking point. And so how do you think about packaging a fixed and variable component so that people can more predictably buy your software? Any other layers of the stack that you want to touch on slash which would you be most excited about in the future? Do you think people should be paying more attention to that maybe they're not paying attention to?…

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