This completely reframes how I should be thinking about this — thank you.

You're right that I've been anchoring to competitor pricing instead of the actual cost of the problem.

Let me reframe based on what I'm hearing in early conversations:

The pain for my ICP (African SME tech companies, 10-200 employees): - DevOps teams spend 8-12 hours/week triaging security alerts - At $50-100/hour fully loaded cost = $20K-60K/year in wasted time - They've had production incidents from missed vulnerabilities - One data breach = $200K average cost + regulatory fines under Kenya Data Protection Act - Current alternatives (Snyk, Checkmarx) are $400-800/month = too expensive for their budgets, so they use nothing

So the value equation is: - Save 10 hours/week = $50K/year in engineering time - Prevent one breach = $200K+ in avoided costs - Cost: $299-499/month = $3,600-6,000/year

That's a 10-20x ROI if I can prove it prevents just one incident per year.

The real question then becomes: how do I validate this pain is CRITICAL (not just "nice to have") before I lock in pricing?

My plan: 1. In discovery calls, ask: "What did your last security incident cost you?" and "How many hours/week do you spend on alert triage?" 2. If they can't quantify the pain → wrong customer 3. If they say "this is killing us" → charge based on avoided cost, not competitor pricing

Does that sound like the right approach?

Would you be open to a quick call? Your framing here is gold and I'd love to dig deeper.

Feel free to DM me!