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Startups For the Rest of Us

TinySeed Tales S2E5 | The Gamble of Raising Prices

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9819 Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2020

⏱️ 18 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On Episode 5 of TinySeed Tales, we learn about the success of their recent outbound email campaign. We also hear about their progress with raising their prices and transitioning away from Gather's solo pricing tier. The topics we cover [02:00] Checking in on the past few weeks A little bit of an emotional roller coaster We have definitely made some inroads with teams We haven't had the growth that we were hoping for Feeling a a little anxious about how it's all gonna play out. There's a time here where it's very uncertain because you're kind of leaving the solo practitioners behind, but you haven't quite reached product market fit. There's also a little bit of insecurity with the product It's a huge mind shift all together selling into these teams We were hoping for more of a spike and it's just been this slow, steady growth, which is not bad. It's growing as usual, but that's not helpful when you had to take all this risk [05:51] Patience can be dangerous Going forward Gather will be dropping their solar plan altogether. Half of their signups in the last month have come from their new cold email outreach campaign that's focused on larger teams. Had success from a customer development standpoint early on in the product before we ever even built anything. Brian was emailing tons of people and talking to them as much as I could We actually had quite a bit of traffic last month but the conversion rate was half what we usually have, so it just speaks to the fact that we aren't speaking to the right people right now. [07:31] Yet another pricing increase Currently they offer a tier at $99 a month and one at $159 a month, as well as a custom enterprise plan. That's way up from $39 a month, which was their lowest price plan when they joined TinySeed. My feeling is that price is not really an objection when we're selling to new people It'll be interesting to see, you know, if we do start getting price objections from at least the solo people, we kind of predict that we will. Next month we're planning on doing another potentially really big price jump. Raising prices is increasing the speed of learning and if it works, although it's a big gamble, the payoff is pretty In order to keep this up, like we would eventually need to hire some sales reps and some account executive types. But when we move into this double triple price thing, you know, like into the, let's say $250 average revenue per customer, Then the whole model shifts and changes and it looks way more interesting. [15:19] High points from last week We did have to literally within five minutes of each other team annual signups. Both of them were from our cold email outreach and they had both had demos and that felt really good We had an existing customer that's requested pricing for 20 teammates, so we provided a custom quote for them. But if they do decide to go ahead and sign on that, that will become our single largest customer, both in number of users in revenue as well. Links from the show Gather | Website Brian Elliott | Twitter

Transcript

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0:00.0

My feeling of being a startup founder is knowing the balance between just saying,

0:05.1

this is the decision we made, this is the plan we made, this is the hypothesis,

0:08.2

don't go off track, and knowing when to go off track because you need to readjust.

0:26.6

Welcome back to Tiny Seed Tales, a series where I follow a founder through their struggles, victories, and failures as they build their startup. I'm your host, Rob Walling. I'm a

0:31.7

serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Tiny Seed, the startup accelerator designed for SaaS bootstrappers.

0:37.9

We're back with Brian and Scotty, co-founders of Gather.

0:41.1

We've been discussing their efforts to take their product upmarket and all the ensuing

0:44.8

stress that comes with that.

0:46.4

Going up market is one of a few experiments that Brian and Scotty have been trying out,

0:50.2

in addition to cold email outreach and raising their prices.

0:53.5

Before we hear how these experiments are working out,

0:55.9

I checked him with Scotty about how she's been feeling.

0:59.0

Scotty, I'm curious how you feel about the last couple weeks and how things have been going.

1:03.8

The last few weeks have been a little bit of an emotional roller coaster, I'd say.

1:09.6

We had some wins. I think we last talked about

1:14.0

how we were changing our pricing and focusing more on teams. And we have definitely made some

1:22.7

inroads with teams. Half of our sign-ups this past month were team plans, a few of those being annual.

1:30.3

So a lot of positive signs there, but we haven't had the growth that we were hoping for, I think, when we switched.

1:39.6

We knew there'd be a little lag, but it's kind of going slower than we were hoping for.

1:46.3

So I think we're feeling a little anxious about how it's all going to play out.

1:51.5

And if our decision to focus on moving up market is actually, in the end, going to be a lucrative one and a good one.

2:00.2

Yeah, it sounds like you're in the trough. This is something

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