Price Intelligently put out amazing content on pricing your SaaS product. This blog's link to the whole report is worth reading. Our key takeaways are below.

Don't base prices on the competition. Competitor-based pricing has clear drawbacks. Their pricing approach is yours. Your company offers customers something unique. Otherwise, you wouldn't create it. This strategy is static, therefore you can't add value by raising prices without outpricing competitors. Look, but don't touch is the competitor-based moral. You want to know your competitors' prices so you're in the same ballpark, but they shouldn't guide your selections. Competitor-based pricing also drives down prices.

Value-based pricing wins. This is customer-based pricing. Value-based pricing looks outward, not inward or laterally at competitors. Your clients are the best source of pricing information. By valuing customer comments, you're focusing on buyers. They'll decide if your pricing and packaging are right. In addition to asking consumers about cost savings or revenue increases, look at data like number of users, usage per user, etc.

Value-based pricing increases prices. As you learn more about the client and your worth, you'll know when and how much to boost rates. Every 6 months, examine pricing.

Cloning top customers. You clone your consumers by learning as much as you can about them and then reaching out to comparable people or organizations. You can't accomplish this without knowing your customers. Segmenting and reproducing them requires as much detail as feasible. Offer pricing plans and feature packages for 4 personas. The top plan should state Contact Us. Your highest-value customers want more advice and support.

Question your 4 personas. What's the one item you can't live without? Which integrations matter most? Do you do analytics? Is support important or does your company self-solve? What's too cheap? What's too expensive?

Not everyone likes per-user pricing. SaaS organizations often default to per-user analytics. About 80% of companies utilizing per-user pricing should use an alternative value metric because their goods don't give more value with more users, so charging for them doesn't make sense.

At least 3:1 LTV/CAC. Break even on the customer within 2 years, and LTV to CAC is greater than 3:1. Because customer acquisition costs are paid upfront but SaaS revenues accrue over time, SaaS companies face an early financial shortfall while paying back the CAC.

ROI should be >20:1. Indeed. Ensure the customer's ROI is 20x the product's cost. Microsoft Office costs $80 a year, but consumers would pay much more to maintain it.

A/B Testing. A/B testing is guessing. When your pricing page varies based on assumptions, you'll upset customers. You don't have enough customers anyway. A/B testing optimizes landing pages, design decisions, and other site features when you know the problem but not pricing.

Don't discount. It cheapens the product, makes it permanent, and increases churn. By discounting, you're ruining your pricing analysis.

Here's the fastest way to validate company concepts.

I squandered a year after dropping out of Stanford designing a product nobody wanted.

But today, I’m at 100k!

Differences:

I was designing a consumer product when I dropped out.

I coded MVP, got 1k users, and got YC interview.

Nice, huh?

WRONG!

Still coding and getting users 12 months later

WOULD PEOPLE PAY FOR IT? was the riskiest assumption I hadn't tested.

When asked why I didn't verify payment, I said,

Not-ready products. Now, nobody cares. The website needs work. Include this. Increase usage…

I feared people would say no.

After 1 year of pushing it off, my team told me they were really worried about the Business Model. Then I asked my audience if they'd buy my product.

So?

No, overwhelmingly.

I felt like I wasted a year building a product no one would buy.

Founders Cafe was the opposite.

Before building anything, I requested payment.

40 founders were interviewed.

Then we emailed Stanford, YC, and other top founders, asking them to join our community.

BOOM! 10/12 paid!

Without building anything, in 1 day I validated my startup's riskiest assumption. NOT 1 year.

Asking people to pay is one of the scariest things.

I understand.

I asked Stanford queer women to pay before joining my gay sorority.

I was afraid I'd turn them off or no one would pay.

Gay women, like those founders, were in such excruciating pain that they were willing to pay me upfront to help.

You can ask for payment (before you build) to see if people have the burning pain. Then they'll pay!

Examples from Founders Cafe members:

😮 Using a fake landing page, a college dropout tested a product. Paying! He built it and made $3m!

😮 YC solo founder faked a Powerpoint demo. 5 Enterprise paid LOIs. $1.5m raised, built, and in YC!

😮 A Harvard founder can convert Figma to React. 1 day, 10 customers. Built a tool to automate Figma -> React after manually fulfilling requests. 1m+

Bad example:

😭 Stanford Dropout Spends 1 Year Building Product Without Payment Validation

Some people build for a year and then get paying customers.

What I'm sharing is my experience and what Founders Cafe members have told me about validating startup ideas.

Don't waste a year like I did.

After my first startup failed, I planned to re-enroll at Stanford/work at Facebook.

After people paid, I quit for good.

I've hit $100k!

Hope this inspires you to request upfront payment! It'll change your life

Start now.

When it comes to building my business, I’m passionate about a lot of things. I love creating user experiences that simplify branding essentials. I love creating new typefaces and color combinations to inspire logo designers. I love fixing problems to improve my product.

Business marketing isn't my thing.

This is shared by many. Many solopreneurs, like me, struggle to advertise their business and drive themselves to work on it.

Without a lot of promotion, no company will succeed. Marketing is 80% of developing a firm, and when you're starting out, it's even more. Some believe that you shouldn't build anything until you've begun marketing your idea and found enough buyers.

Marketing your business without marketing experience is difficult. There are various outlets and techniques to learn. Instead of figuring out where to start, it's easier to return to your area of expertise, whether that's writing, designing product features, or improving your site's back end. Right?

First, realize that your role as a founder is to market your firm. Being a founder focused on product, I rarely work on it.

Secondly, use these basic methods that have helped me dedicate adequate time and focus to marketing. They're all simple to apply, and they've increased my business's visibility and success.

1. Establish buckets for every task.

You've probably heard to schedule tasks you don't like. As simple as it sounds, blocking a substantial piece of my workday for marketing duties like LinkedIn or Twitter outreach, AppSumo customer support, or SEO has forced me to spend time on them.

Giving me lots of room to focus on product development has helped even more. Sure, this means scheduling time to work on product enhancements after my four-hour marketing sprint.

It also involves making space to store product inspiration and ideas throughout the day so I don't get distracted. This is like the advice to keep a notebook beside your bed to write down your insomniac ideas. I keep fonts, color palettes, and product ideas in folders on my desktop. Knowing these concepts won't be lost lets me focus on marketing in the moment. When I have limited time to work on something, I don't have to conduct the research I've been collecting, so I can get more done faster.

2. Look for various accountability systems

Accountability is essential for self-discipline. To keep focused on my marketing tasks, I've needed various streams of accountability, big and little.

Accountability groups are great for bigger things. SaaS Camp, a sales outreach coaching program, is mine. We discuss marketing duties and results every week. This motivates me to do enough each week to be proud of my accomplishments. Yet hearing what works (or doesn't) for others gives me benchmarks for my own marketing outcomes and plenty of fresh techniques to attempt.

… say, I want to DM 50 people on Twitter about my product — I get that many Q-tips and place them in one pen holder on my desk.

The best accountability group can't watch you 24/7. I use a friend's simple method that shouldn't work (but it does). When I have a lot of marketing chores, like DMing 50 Twitter users about my product, That many Q-tips go in my desk pen holder. After each task, I relocate one Q-tip to an empty pen holder. When you have a lot of minor jobs to perform, it helps to see your progress. You might use toothpicks, M&Ms, or anything else you have a lot of.

3. Continue to monitor your feedback loops

Knowing which marketing methods work best requires monitoring results. As an entrepreneur with little go-to-market expertise, every tactic I pursue is an experiment. I need to know how each trial is doing to maximize my time.

I placed Google and Facebook advertisements on hold since they took too much time and money to obtain Return. LinkedIn outreach has been invaluable to me. I feel that talking to potential consumers one-on-one is the fastest method to grasp their problem areas, figure out my messaging, and find product market fit.

Data proximity offers another benefit. Seeing positive results makes it simpler to maintain doing a work you don't like. Why every fitness program tracks progress.

Marketing's goal is to increase customers and revenues, therefore I've found it helpful to track those metrics and celebrate monthly advances. I provide these updates for extra accountability.

Finding faster feedback loops is also motivating. Marketing brings more clients and feedback, in my opinion. Product-focused founders love that feedback. Positive reviews make me proud that my product is benefitting others, while negative ones provide me with suggestions for product changes that can improve my business.

The best advice I can give a lone creator who's afraid of marketing is to just start. Start early to learn by doing and reduce marketing stress. Start early to develop habits and successes that will keep you going. The sooner you start, the sooner you'll have enough consumers to return to your favorite work.

ZERO GRACE/ZERO MALICE

Big companies and wealthy people make stupid mistakes too.

Your ancestors kept snakes and drank bad water. You (probably) don't because you've learnt from their failures via instinct+, the ultimate life-lessons streaming network in your head. Instincts foretell the future. If you approach a lion, it'll eat you. Our society's nuanced/complex decisions have surpassed instinct. Human growth depends on how we handle these issues. 80% of people believe they are above-average drivers, yet few believe they make many incorrect mistakes that make them risky. Stupidity hurts others like death. Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo Cipollas:

1. Everyone underestimates the prevalence of idiots in our society.

2. Any other trait a person may have has no bearing on how likely they are to be stupid.

3. A dumb individual is one who harms someone without benefiting themselves and may even lose money in the process.

4. Non-dumb people frequently underestimate how destructively powerful stupid people can be.

5. The most dangerous kind of person is a moron.

Professor Cippola defines stupid as bad for you and others. We underestimate the corporate world's and seemingly successful people's ability to make bad judgments that harm themselves and others. Success is an intoxication that makes you risk-aggressive and blurs your peripheral vision.

Stupid companies and decisions:

Big Dumber

Big-company bad ideas have more bulk and inertia. The world's most valuable company recently showed its board a VR headset. Jony Ive couldn't destroy Apple's terrible idea in 2015. Mr. Ive said that VR cut users off from the outer world, made them seem outdated, and lacked practical uses. Ives' design team doubted users would wear headsets for lengthy periods.

VR has cost tens of billions of dollars over a decade to prove nobody wants it. The next great SaaS startup will likely come from Florence, not Redmond or San Jose.

Apple Watch and Airpods have made the Cupertino company the world's largest jewelry maker. 10.5% of Apple's income, or $38 billion, comes from wearables in 2021. (seven times the revenue of Tiffany & Co.). Jewelry makes you more appealing and useful. Airpods and Apple Watch do both.

Headsets make you less beautiful and useful and promote isolation, loneliness, and unhappiness among American teenagers. My sons pretend they can't hear or see me when on their phones. VR headsets lack charisma.

Coinbase disclosed a plan to generate division and tension within its workplace weeks after Apple was pitched $2,000 smokes. The crypto-trading platform is piloting a program that rates staff after every interaction. If a coworker says anything you don't like, you should tell them how to improve. Everyone gets a 110-point scorecard. Coworkers should evaluate a person's rating while deciding whether to listen to them. It's ridiculous.

Organizations leverage our superpower of cooperation. This encourages non-cooperation, period. Bridgewater's founder Ray Dalio designed the approach to promote extreme transparency. Dalio has 223 billion reasons his managerial style works. There's reason to suppose only a small group of people, largely traders, will endure a granular scorecard. Bridgewater has 20% first-year turnover. Employees cry in bathrooms, and sex scandals are settled by ignoring individuals with poor believability levels. Coinbase might take solace that the stock is 80% below its initial offering price.

Poor Stupid

Fools' ledgers are valuable. More valuable are lists of foolish rich individuals.

Robinhood built a $8 billion corporation on financial ignorance. The firm's median account value is $240, and its stock has dropped 75% since last summer. Investors, customers, and society lose. Stupid. Luna published a comparable list on the blockchain, grew to $41 billion in market cap, then plummeted.

A podcast presenter is recruiting dentists and small-business owners to invest in Elon Musk's Twitter takeover. Investors pay a 7% fee and 10% of the upside for the chance to buy Twitter at a 35% premium to the current price. The proposal legitimizes CNBC's Trade Like Chuck advertising (Chuck made $4,600 into $460,000 in two years). This is stupid because it adds to the Twitter deal's desperation. Mr. Musk made an impression when he urged his lawyers to develop a legal rip-cord (There are bots on the platform!) to abandon the share purchase arrangement (for less than they are being marketed by the podcaster). Rolls-Royce may pay for this list of the dumb affluent because it includes potential Cullinan buyers.

Worst company? Flowcarbon, founded by WeWork founder Adam Neumann, operates at the convergence of carbon and crypto to democratize access to offsets and safeguard the earth's natural carbon sinks. Can I get an ayahuasca Big Gulp?

Neumann raised $70 million with their yogababble drink. More than half of the consideration came from selling GNT. Goddess Nature Token. I hope the company gets an S-1. Or I'll start a decentralized AI Meta Renewable NFTs company. My Community Based Ebitda coin will fund the company. Possible.

Stupidity inside oneself

This weekend, I was in NYC with my boys. My 14-year-old disappeared. He's realized I'm not cool and is mad I let the charade continue. When out with his dad, he likes to stroll home alone and depart before me. Friends told me hell would return, but I was surprised by how fast the eye roll came.

Not so with my 11-year-old. We went to The Edge, a Hudson Yards observation platform where you can see the city from 100 storeys up for $38. This is hell's seventh ring. Leaning into your boys' interests is key to engaging them (dad tip). Neither loves Crossfit, WW2 history, or antitrust law.

We take selfies on the Thrilling Glass Floor he spots. Dad, there's a bar! Coke? I nod, he rushes to the bar, stops, runs back for money, and sprints back. Sitting on stone seats, drinking Atlanta Champagne, he turns at me and asks, Isn't this amazing? I'll never reach paradise.

Later that night, the lads are asleep and I've had two Zacapas and Cokes. I SMS some friends about my day and how I feel about sons/fatherhood/etc. How I did. They responded and approached. The next morning, I'm sober, have distance from my son, and feel ashamed by my texts. Less likely to impulsively share my emotions with others. Stupid again.

"Competition" is beautiful and hateful.

Some people bury their dreams because they are afraid of competition. Others challenge themselves, shaping our world.

Competition is normal.

It spurs innovation and progress.

I wish more people agreed.

As a marketer, content writer, and solopreneur, my readers often ask:

"I want to create a niche website, but I have no ideas. Everything's done"

"Is a website worthwhile?"

I can't count how many times I said, "Yes, it makes sense, and you can succeed in a competitive market."

I encourage and share examples, but it's not enough to overcome competition anxiety.

I launched an SEO writing website for content creators a year ago, knowing it wouldn't beat Ahrefs, Semrush, Backlinko, etc.

Not needed.

Many of my website's pages rank highly on Google.

Everyone can eat the pie.

In a competitive niche, I took a different approach.

Look farther

When chatting with bloggers that want a website, I discovered something fascinating.

They want to launch a website but have no ideas. As a next step, they start listing the interests they believe they should work on, like wellness, lifestyle, investments, etc. I could keep going.

Too many generalists who claim to know everything confuse many.

Generalists aren't trusted.

We want someone to fix our problems immediately.

I don't think broad-spectrum experts are undervalued. People have many demands that go beyond generalists' work. Narrow-niche experts can help.

I've done SEO for three years. I learned from experts and courses. I couldn't find a comprehensive SEO writing resource.

I read tons of articles before realizing that wasn't it. I took courses that covered SEO basics eventually.

I had a demand for learning SEO writing, but there was no solution on the market. My website fills this micro-niche.

Have you ever had trouble online?

Professional courses too general, boring, etc.?

You've bought off-topic books, right?

You're not alone.

Niche ideas!

Big players often disregard new opportunities. Too small. Individual content creators can succeed here.

In a competitive market:

• Never choose wide subjects

• Think about issues you can relate to and have direct experience with.

• Be a consumer to discover both the positive and negative aspects of a good or service.

• Merchandise your annoyances.

• Consider ways to transform your frustrations into opportunities.

The right niche is half-success. Here is what else I did to hit the Google front page with my website.

An innovative method for choosing subjects

Why publish on social media and websites?

Want likes, shares, followers, or fame?

Some people do it for fun. No judgment.

I bet you want more.

You want to make decent money from blogging.

Writing about random topics, even if they are related to your niche, won’t help you attract an audience from organic search. I'm a marketer and writer.

I worked at companies with dead blogs because they posted for themselves, not readers. They did not follow SEO writing rules; that’s why most of their content flopped.

I learned these hard lessons and grew my website from 0 to 3,000+ visitors per month while working on it a few hours a week only. Evidence:

I choose website topics using these criteria:

- Business potential. The information should benefit my audience and generate revenue. There would be no use in having it otherwise.

My topics should help me:

Attract organic search traffic with my "fluff-free" content -> Subscribers > SEO ebook sales.

Simple and effective.

- traffic on search engines. The number of monthly searches reveals how popular my topic is all across the world. If I find that no one is interested in my suggested topic, I don't write a blog article.

- Competition. Every search term is up against rivals. Some are more popular (thus competitive) since more websites target them in organic search. A new website won't score highly for keywords that are too competitive. On the other side, keywords with moderate to light competition can help you rank higher on Google more quickly.

- Search purpose. The "why" underlying users' search requests is revealed. I analyze search intent to understand what users need when they plug various queries in the search bar and what content can perfectly meet their needs.

My specialty website produces money, ranks well, and attracts the target audience because I handpick high-traffic themes.

Following these guidelines, even a new website can stand out.

I wrote a 50-page SEO writing guide where I detailed topic selection and share my front-page Google strategy.

My guide can help you run a successful niche website.

In summary

You're not late to the niche-website party.

The Internet offers many untapped opportunities.

We need new solutions and are willing to listen.

There are unexplored niches in any topic.

Don't fight giants. They have their piece of the pie. They might overlook new opportunities while trying to keep that piece of the pie. You should act now.