<aside> 💡 Responsible for pricing, or trying to figure out your business model? Conduct willingness-to-pay interviews with your core customers to help light the way.

- Merci Grace

Use Merci's advice to fill out the grid of answers and find your price range.

</aside>

Table of contents

🎯 Goal

Discover the correct bundle of customer pains to address as well as a per seat/per unit price range.

⚙️ Process

• Email a thank you to the participants of your prior customer development interviews.

  Thank you email draft

  • Share the top 5-10 pain points that you’ve taken away from your customer development conversations so far.
  • Ask for a 20 minute followup discussion to discuss & stack rank these pain points.

• Generate a grid of answers (see below) during that conversation. Be sure to also ask the pricing questions.

🌱 Articulate the top pain points

• Rephrase your potential product features in terms of pain that the customer has with the current process. From this you’ll get the “list of pains”.
  • You’re not asking people, “Do you want Advil or aloe vera?” You’re asking them: “What’s worse, the headache or the sunburn?”
• Then with that list of pains, go back to the customers and say “I’ve polled you and peers in similar roles/companies. Here are six pains that you and your colleagues have surfaced. I’d love to get on a video call to stack rank them in order of most to least important.”
  • During that call, also ask these pricing questions.

🔍 Ask the right questions

• For each pain point, starting with the most painful, ask pricing questions: What would you pay to solve this pain? Don’t mention a specific solution, but just imagine if that pain was solved.
  • What’s the price at which you think this would be so cheap that you would question the quality of the product that solved this pain?
    • Ask about the metric they imply or state: Per seat? Per site?
    • What made you pick this price/this metric?
  • What’s an acceptable price?
  • What would feel expensive?
  • What’s a prohibitively expensive price?
• IF they say, I’m not the buyer:
  • I’d love to meet the buyer. :-)
  • I’m still curious for your qualitative feedback. You’re not committing to anything by suggesting a price.
• For #2 pain point and on, ask them to share the price as if it were bundled with pain point #1. “In order to solve both [1] and [2], what’s a price so cheap that you’d question the quality of the product?” and so on…