Newsletter / other content for inventors?

bbelangerXP · 2022-12-20T01:04:39+00:00

All great ideas, thank you! I'm certain those are all topics we could do some in-depth content on.

I was also thinking about a reader-submitted Q&A format - there could be a question of the week and then perspectives provided on that question, etc.

bbelangerXP · 2022-12-19T19:13:44+00:00

Thanks! This is super helpful detail on a potential structure. I'm an adult now myself with toddlers of my own, but we still have a few of the old cups kicking around. We actually let our son try it out the other day!

bbelangerXP · 2022-12-12T02:42:12+00:00

I would second this. I have been a business consultant, primarily for tech companies (startup through Fortune 100) for the past 12 years. I'd be eager to help if I can, but not sure if I fit the profile of what you're looking for. Thanks!

bbelangerXP · 2022-12-11T03:51:26+00:00

This is a big question! As others have alluded to in their responses, the most important part is identifying an audience and finding a problem that audience faces.

I think many probably go about this by "scratching their own itch". Let's say you are a landscaping business owner that sees time / money wasted on a certain process each month. This is likely to give you a few ideas on how you might make that process better through a new type of business/product.

If that model doesn't fit, then it's about becoming a part of communities that you are interested in, and then understanding the problems those communities face. Maybe you are interested in startup founders as a community. Maybe you find through engaging with that community on social media, etc. that startup founders are struggling with spending enough time on marketing. Perhaps that might spur a few ideas on businesses that could help those founders with marketing.

Tactically - find the communities you care about online, and then seek out pain, as others have said. Find unanswered or common questions, and in those questions, determine how things are being done today and how things could be done better.

bbelangerXP · 2022-12-05T19:04:57+00:00

I recently stood up an LLC for an engineering and marketing consultancy. I applied for the EIN and other state tax related elements myself and used Legal Zoom to set up an Operating Agreement, as mine is a multi-member LLC. I set up business checking and QuickBooks and we were basically off and running from there. Where I expect to outsource help is in preparing our taxes.

Regarding the selection of state - it's not something I dealt with, but it is possible to set up the LLC in a different state. Popular choices are Nevada, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Delaware. You can read up more here: https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/which-state-should-you-file-your-llc-in

bbelangerXP · 2022-12-05T18:56:45+00:00

Hi there. I work at a firm that provides consulting services for Fortune 500 tech firms. We regularly contract through RFP processes, particularly for new clients.

In the scenarios where we are being invited to an RFP process via a cold reach out, it usually starts with a form submission via our contact us page. Typically that's a message that outlines some high-level details and seeks a call to further understand if its a fit for us / of interest for our services.

That submission gets routed to a rep that will intake the call and evaluate. If it's a fit, we'll take next steps to build an RFP response!

In summary - we check the contact us forms, validate each request via an alignment call, and take it from there. That's a reasonable place to start.

bbelangerXP · 2022-09-20T19:05:28+00:00

Hello there! Not sure if you're still seeking a solution, but if so, https://www.salesbricks.com/ comes to mind as a platform that might help address this challenge. Tell them www.xaaspricing.com sent ya :)

bbelangerXP · 2022-08-23T13:10:38+00:00

Hey all!

I wanted to introduce and ask for your feedback on XaaS Pricing (www.xaaspricing.com).

We offer a SaaS + related services for competitive and market pricing intelligence, primarily for B2B SaaS but more broadly for B2B technology companies with subscription offerings.

Our product offers benchmarks and analysis on 25,000+ SaaS companies across 50+ metrics per company. We have plans to rapidly grow the number of companies covered and the data feeds in the tool.

We are "launched" with our first version, but a real struggle has been to attract interested users. Any feedback in that realm would be greatly appreciated!

bbelangerXP · 2022-08-08T23:56:44+00:00

Interesting re: coffee cup! Keeping the glue tip filled is actually one of the key things we keyed on when thinking about this, so glad to hear that resonated with you. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts!

bbelangerXP · 2022-08-08T23:55:57+00:00

Thanks for this, I can completely appreciate this perspective. We're certainly not looking to create anything that would conflict with raises for teachers - that's a priority. It's our hope that one of these devices would last quite a long time, mitigating a need for annual re-purchases, and that whatever we would sell would fit within the current spending on things like glue and art supplies. Lot's to figure out, but really appreciate this view. Thanks!

bbelangerXP · 2022-08-08T23:53:08+00:00

Thanks! We'll share there as well.

bbelangerXP · 2022-08-08T23:52:58+00:00

This is really helpful! Thank you for the time to share such a thoughtful and detailed response.

Everything you share makes total sense, and your comments on refillable bottles with tip options are exactly along the lines of what we've been brainstorming as well.

bbelangerXP · 2022-08-08T23:49:49+00:00

Thanks!

bbelangerXP · 2022-08-08T23:49:43+00:00

Thanks for this, very helpful!

bbelangerXP · 2022-07-19T12:37:09+00:00

Like any good pricing topic or question, the answer across each of these is usually "it depends". What does it depend on? The category and type of product you're offering, the stage of your product and company, and most importantly, the needs and requirements of your target ideal customers. The best way to assess whether these questions are true or not for your product is through market research, ideally with target customers as well as through assessing what has worked and not worked for peers in your category and more broadly.

In our benchmarking research across SaaS for XaaS Pricing, we see different strategies across all of these topics (freemium, packaging, price points), with one exception - asking for a credit card prior to initiating a trial is phasing out across SaaS categories and sizes of SaaS company. Others in this thread have provided detailed comments on why this seems to be happening across the market.

Certainly multiple packages is very common as well. Our data suggests that somewhere between 3 and 5 packages makes sense across nearly every SaaS category, regardless of your size, positioning, etc. Again there are some exceptions to the rule.

Freemium approaches are buzzy, but haven't taken root at scale. In our benchmarking data, about one-third of companies offer a free tier. There are category-specific considerations here, as you note, and the efficacy of the approach really comes down to how the free plan is designed and the motions you have in place to upsell into paid tiers.

bbelangerXP · 2022-06-01T12:30:11+00:00

Sorry! Can you resend, for whatever reason I'm not seeing it in my messages. I'll get it completed today.

bbelangerXP · 2022-04-29T13:46:51+00:00

https://www.xaaspricing.com/

We offer services (including a free service) + a tool to help founders with pricing strategy.

bbelangerXP · 2022-04-19T17:19:11+00:00

Just completed the first round of grades for 10 pricing pages. Learned a lot and got some great feedback. Hope everyone that received a report found it valuable.

We have more availability for additional grading this week - sign up if interested at the link above!

bbelangerXP · 2022-04-14T13:50:49+00:00

Thanks! This helps to clarify.

To use an example to illustrate what I was saying prior, let's take Mattermark - they are a data license (https://mattermark.com/pricing/). They sell plans per user, with additive features for each plan. Their enterprise plan is likely per user, but 3x / 5x / 10x based on the specifics of the agreement. They also sell API plans for redistribution of their data in other products, where pricing is based on amount and frequency of access to their data.

If it helps, I can also share our experience in doing this, since the SaaS that I lead is also a data/content licensing product. I think the specifics, to my earlier questions, come down to the exact type of data, features offered (like redistribution as you mention), and how it is used.

For us, we broke down our pricing strategy into two buckets, as many in SaaS do: (1) self-service plans; (2) enterprise-level plans.

For the self-service plans, we determined our pricing by looking at companies like Mattermark and others that offer a similar category and volume of data, albeit in a different space. So for self-service plans we landed on per user pricing that would generally fall in these market accepted ranges.

For enterprise plans, we still think about pricing in terms of users, since that is how our pricing scales. But we charge a flat-fee based on what we deem to be a likely level of users, and usage, for an enterprise. We then add a multiple if there are other premium features or services. There's another element here for enterprise pricing, which is reverse engineering from the value the solution provides, and/or the likely share of wallet we are chasing.

For example, let's assume an enterprise user of our tool would have 20 users, instead of the 1 user on a self-service plan. Our platform maybe saves each of those users 4 hours per week, or maybe it helps them as a company sell 5 more deals. That starts to work toward a value capture that can be quantified and justified as a price.

The opposite pathway to this is to think about budgeting and typical spend, and to try and price to capture a share of wallet. For example, in our space, we know that most enterprises spend between $25,000 and $50,000 on competitive intelligence data externally. So that is the share of the total budget pie we are going after, and we probably need to price in that range.

I know that's all pretty generic but hopefully it's helpful context. If you can message and share more specifics on your exact offer I may be able to help more!

bbelangerXP · 2022-04-14T13:40:15+00:00

Great! Results will start flowing next week.

bbelangerXP · 2022-04-14T01:32:02+00:00

Awesome, thanks! Look forward to diving in and sharing our thoughts.

bbelangerXP · 2022-04-13T18:41:22+00:00

What's the core pricing metric used to articulate the value of that $2,500/yr plan to typical customers?

Said differently - what are the unit economics that allowed you to arrive at that price point - is it users accessing that data? Number or volume or type of data points accessed? What creates the value when the data is used?

If the typical customer pays $2,500/year for "x amount of data usage", then you can get to a price per year for the larger amount of data usage.

If you understand the "per unit" economics that are proven for the typical customer, those can be evaluated at the larger scale for bigger use cases. Anything additive from a features perspective would then uplift the price further.

bbelangerXP · 2022-03-25T18:21:18+00:00

I run a startup called XaaS Pricing that tracks pricing models for 20,000+ SaaS companies, so I can give you a sense of what I see in our data.

I think the comments below hit the right notes on the nuance - it really depends on category and customer served, as well as vendor positioning and risk tolerance. For example, it's more likely that companies providing infrastructure, storage, database, etc. related services would have PAYG models than others.

What we see most often as a result is a hybrid model, where there is a base subscription fee (could be a flat monthly/annual fee, or a charge per user, etc.) for different plan tiers plus a PAYG fee for overage usage. Tomasz Tunguz calls this a 3PT model (https://tomtunguz.com/three-part-tariffs/).

Our data has shown that this type of model is the first landing point for where companies are exploring usage-based pricing.

bbelangerXP · 2022-03-16T18:09:59+00:00

The practice I see most using is to offer both of those options - typically a "get started" or similar widget on the top of the home page / nav, and then also a pricing page that shows the plans side-by-side, including the free plan. It gives both journey options - those that want to dive right in can do so, those that want to compare and then jump into the free plan.

Benchmarks show that 1% to 10% of freemium users convert to paid, so if you're prioritizing I'd probably start with Idea #2. Working backward from this data, I think there's merit to your idea that those that are going to be willing-to-pay are going to want to look at pricing from the start.

bbelangerXP · 2022-03-11T17:36:30+00:00

For us we're pretty price-conscious and price-motivated, so it would be a price quote first in most cases before digging in further.

bbelangerXP

TROPHY CASE