Episode 706.5 | Rethinking My Most Common Advice

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2024

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In episode 706.5, join Rob Walling as he reconsiders some of his most common advice. He explores why lowering prices might make sense and discusses the benefits of a B2C business model. Rob also walks back his prior advice on bootstrapping two-sided marketplaces and launching multiple products to see what sticks. Topics we cover: 1:04 – What would happen if you lowered prices? 3:56 – Benefits of a B2C approach 7:05 – Two-sided marketplaces allow to reach two audiences 8:47 – Launch a bunch of products to see what sticks 10:52 – This episode was released April 1, 2024 Links from the Show: The SaaS Playbook Rob Walling (@robwalling) | X 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 | Google

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to another episode of Startup for the Rest of Us. As always, I'm your host, Rob Walling,
0:05.1	and in today's very special episode, I'm going to be walking through some advice that I've been
0:10.9	giving over the past 10 plus years on this show, in conference talks, even in some of my books,
0:17.5	that I've really started to rethink as new evidence has presented itself recently.
0:23.5	The more conversations I get into on Hacker News and Twitter around these topics of being a founder,
0:31.6	launching a startup, rules of thumb, and things that I've made recommendations on where, look,
0:35.9	I'm not the person who says always, never, but I will admit, with many of these, I've said 90%, 95%, 98% of the time, I believe that this advice is sound.
0:47.0	And in today's episode, I'm going to talk about how I'm rethinking that on a few key points.
1:04.0	Thank you. I'm rethinking that on a few key points. The first point that I'm rethinking and want to maybe offer different advice than I have in the past is around pricing.
1:14.0	And you've heard me say that pricing is the biggest lever in SaaS, and I still believe that.
1:18.7	And I know that if your annual contract value is $500 a year, you have maybe five or six
1:26.3	B to B marketing approaches that you can do.
1:29.4	And there's a bunch you cannot because you just can't afford to do them.
1:32.9	And if you're charging, I don't know, it's in the $5 to $7,500 a year,
1:37.9	then you probably have 10 or 12 that you can do.
1:40.5	And if you're charging $30,000, $40,000 and up,
1:46.4	then all 20 of the B2B SaaS marketing approaches that I talk about on the show and in my book, the SaaS Playbook, are available to you.
1:51.9	And all that's true. And I stand by that. But what I've realized is I think myself and the rest
1:58.6	of the microcomf community have gotten a little too hung up on increasing prices.
2:03.9	And feeling like raising your prices, A, that it's the solution to everything, but B, that it's always good.
2:10.9	And I've started to take the other side of that argument pretty seriously.
2:16.7	Like, what would happen if you lowered prices? A lot of good can come out of that argument pretty seriously. Like, what would happen if you lowered prices? A lot of
	...

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