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Comment by LeonM | Hacker News Reader

You need someone with sales experience.

Without knowing what business you are in, $10/month/seat sounds _way_ to cheap. You are working with businesses here, not consumers.

At this price point you would have to sell about a 1000 seats just to pay for yourself and your co-founder. If you want to bootstrap and hire 4-6 people, you would need to sell a whole lot more.

If you can really 'automate pretty much any business process' as you claim, than your product is worth much, much more than you are currently charging.

See if you can sell it at $1000/month/seat. Yes, sales will be twice as hard, but you'll need 2 orders of magnitude less customers to stay afloat. If you can't sell for that price, rethink your product or ditch the bootstrap idea.

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The logic we followed when pricing it so cheap was: we are just getting started, this will help get some revenue in quickly, etc. Will think hard and perhaps reconsider the pricing model.

It's usually much more difficult to increase prices later after you've gathered more data. The Web is a much bigger, diverse place today than it was 10 years ago. Start at higher prices as a rule for [esp for non-technical audiences], measure, tweak and repeat.

Your first customers will be sold to in person. Let them tell you when something is too expensive (then discount to make the sale). If they aren't commenting on your pricing, you are charging too little.

Also reconsider your pricing model. Charging per user per month will place a limit on how many people use the service, limiting what you can learn. Get them focusing on the value you're adding more than optimizing price. What you learn from them will be hugely valuable.

One thought I have on your model is make your entry price some sort of bundle. Your product is designed for workflows and you can't really have a workflow with 1 user so already you are at 2 users to start.

I am sure you can play around with this but it feels like this product would benefit from getting into as many users hands as possible when you are establishing yourself in a client business. Atlassian is an example of this where all of their products (or almost all of them) are $10/10 users and once you hit 11 users, it goes up quite a bit. That might seem like quite a jump but imagine what you are paying in salaries at 11 people vs. what your JIRA subscription now costs?

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