Madhavan Ramanujam: evaluation

Transcript context

…And so if I were to summarize your main point, the ideas, have these conversations right as you're thinking about designing the product. Don't try to just launch it, see how people like it, build a huge audience and then figure out pricing. Your advice is start having those conversations early, right? Exactly. And the folks that first round summarized this in four words, I thought when they wrote a blog article on this, and they call it, price before product, period. So I think that probably succinct, but really it's really that. Because frankly, Lenny, as an entrepreneur, a company, you actually don't have a choice whether you'll have a pricing conversation with your customer. The only thing in your control is when you will have it. You can build the most awesome innovation, you think is awesome, obsess over the engineering, the product and everything else, and then slap on a price [inaudible 00:14:55] in the market and hope to monetize or have this conversation much earlier, pitch the same sales and marketing pitches, and then try to understand whether people will actually pay for it and then design around this information. And you actually know that you will. So you're maximizing your chances for success. It's simply testing and learning. Everyone in your probably listener base knows tests and learn. We are talking about testing and learning pricing and willingness to pay. Why wouldn't you do that? And why would you postpone that to the very end? Do you have any examples of products or companies where they have these conversations either way too early, way too late, or even just nailed it?…

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