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How to know if people are willing to pay for the product?
We pre-launched indify.co today and we got many emails showing interest in using the product. However, we didn't have pricing validation. We would really like our work to be paid if possible. What should we do to figure out our pricing strategy?
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The best way to figure out whether people are willing to pay you, is to ask them to pay you. Anything else is just going to be an approximation with a varying level of reliability.
Even if you don't have a product to sell right now, you can do pre-order. You might need to include a discount, a promise of early access, or something else to incentivise people to pay you now rather than wait. Although depending on your type of customer, you might be able to just tell them: we want to know if we should invest into building this product. Tell us by pre-ordering it.
There are some other strategies as well that will help you gauge whether people are willing to pay. I'll list them below, but I strongly recommend going with the above approach if at all feasible.
Alternative 1: research how people are currently solving similar problems and how much money they are investing. If you can offer a compelling alternative to those solutions, some of that money might be going your way.
Alternative 2: rather than asking for their money right now, ask for another currency. This could be their time (assuming they value it), reputation (assuming they have one), or any other asset they value.
In terms of how much to charge: look at the value you're providing. Look at how much customers are spending on alternative solutions. Even if there's no product that solves the same problem, they are likely solving it somehow. If it's by doing manual work, try to estimate how many hours. And how much they value their time (e.g. how much are they paying for other things that save them time)
It's also a matter of just testing a bunch. I find it easier to start low and keep increasing until you hit diminishing returns.
Doing it the other way around (starting high) tends to be trickier as you'll end up with a bunch of early customers who feel they overpaid.
Thank you Marc! This is really good advice:)
Full agree with Marc answer. Obviously you should check what is doing the concurrence or similar products on the market but I guess that you already did it..
My advice is to give grace period of 1-3 months to the current userbase and give them some invite vouchers and make the new subscribers pay (start low as Marc said so they never feel overpaid). Then you'll gather enough metrics to adjust your pricing strategy accordingly without it impacting your userbase (actually some are gonna love you for making them feel special early birds who don't have to pay at the beginning).