Madhavan Ramanujam: commitment

Transcript context

…Okay. So this is what you want to not do. You mentioned you have nine strategies for how you actually want to approach pricing, monetization, scaling, monetization, and innovation. Can you share a couple of these strategies, maybe two or three, maybe some of your favorites? Sure. So I will unpack a couple of strategies. Maybe the first one I would take is what we call as beautifully simple pricing. So in your early days it is by far more important to have pricing that is really simple and it's not creating too much friction in the sales conversation. I mean, the asset test that you probably should go back on Monday morning and do is take some of your early prospects or customers and ask them to articulate the pricing strategy back to you, right? If they were to actually sell on your behalf, how would they describe the pricing strategy? And if they cannot contextualize that in a simple manner and actually explain, you don't have a simple pricing strategy. It's as simple as that. And having a simple pricing strategy also means that your pricing needs to be able to tell a value story, as in you need to contextualize your price based on the value that you actually bring to the table. A great example here is Superhuman. When they started, they were actually competing with free email products and they were coming up with a premium email experience. And how do you actually price that? And I thought the team at Superhuman with Rahul and others did a pretty good job. They came up with a $30 price point per month, which was pretty simple. But the way they kind of told the story was that you pay a dollar a day for actually getting four hours of productivity back in the week, and then suddenly the pricing doesn't look too off. I mean, it's like the price for a latte in a week to actually get four hours back. Why wouldn't I actually do that, right? And pricing contextualization and value story doesn't need to just apply for premium products. If you take another example, like the Subway $5 footlong is a different way to say a story with pricing that, oh, for $5, you get a lot of value actually back. So beautifully simple pricing really means coming up with a simple pricing strategy that your customers immediately get and your pricing is actually telling a value story and how do you actually get that. So in the book, we have a checklist of 10 different things that you actually need to look at to make sure that your pricing is beautifully simple. As we go through these strategies, is your advice try all these things, like you should do as many of these strategies as you can, or is it maybe pick a few that work for you or just one is enough?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.