Episode 529 | A Pricing Deep Dive with Slingshot

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2020

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Rob chats with John Howard, a MicroConf Connect member and founder of Slingshot. They unpack the business model of measurable swag giveaways and then dive deep into John's pricing strategy and explore alternatives as well as opportunities to move into a subscription-based model. The topics we cover [9:26] Starting a physical product business [24:53] Previous pricing models [30:48] Customer acquisition [39:41] Removing setup fee or raising prices Links from the show Slingshot Black Airplane MicroConf Masterminds If you enjoyed this episode, let us know by clicking the link and sharing what you learned. Click here to share your number one takeaway from the episode. If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this week's episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling. Every week on this
0:04.4	show, we dive deep into topics that relate to building ambitious startups. These are not
0:09.8	startups that require us to work 90-hour weeks, our sacrifice, our life, our relationships,
0:14.9	our health in order to build a great company and a business that can change our lives and
0:19.2	change the lives of those around us.
0:21.0	We focus on bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped startups, those that are highly capital
0:25.4	efficient, but still want to be ambitious, still want to build interesting things, and we want
0:30.8	to have an impact on the world. This week, I have a really interesting conversation with John
0:34.6	Howard of Slinghot, And he actually connected with me through
0:38.2	MicroConf Connect. That is our Slack channel has more than 1,600 founders and aspiring founders.
0:44.4	It's microconnect.com. We connected there and he was asking me some pricing questions. And I said,
0:49.1	look, I don't do consulting, but I'd be happy to have a conversation with you if we can record it.
0:53.1	And if it's good, we'll put it out as a podcast episode. So that's what this conversation is. It's John explaining
0:58.5	how his business works. And it's not just a straight ahead SaaS. There's some SaaS-ish elements,
1:03.1	but he's dealing with physical products as well. And so you'll hear me just try to dive in and kind
1:06.8	get my head around his business and then try to explore options for him. He was specifically
1:11.2	wondering if he was missing anything on the pricing front. And so we looked at his pricing and
1:16.4	kind of tried to analyze it, look at it from different angles and figure out what other type of options
1:20.6	he has. But before we dive into that conversation, I got a couple emails with feedback on
1:24.8	episode 525, which is where I read on air an email that I had sent
1:30.1	about 15 years ago around the time that I acquired dot net invoice, and it was to a friend of mine
1:35.5	who was asking to be a co-founder. And I got a couple pieces of feedback on that episode. The first
	...

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