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Comment by csmattryder | Hacker News Reader

> And if all your discussions tend to span weeks or months before someone even signs-up you probably need to do one of these three things:

> You should increase your price, by a lot

I've seen this point written a few times by a handful of people, and it seems to be true enough, but it also seems unconventional to me.

What's the rationale behind this?

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When my start up spawned 8 years ago, our initial price included a $2000 setup and a monthly user-fee. We had managed to find a fair few willing to pay, which funded development and ensured we would survive. Within 6 months we were able to drop the setup fee completely and solely rely on a monthly fee.

At the time I was morally objected to it as I did not feel justified charging that amount of money for a product still in development, but I am glad my business partner had more sense.

Increasing your price can be used to filter out people who are considering your "only kinda seriously". When you're at the beginning of creating a product, you want to talk to people who are really feeling the pain and really need a solution (and thus are willing to pay more).

Sure, you're going to lose a lot of people if you post a high price, but they were going to waste your time anyway. The goal isn't to get as many paying users as possible, but to start getting the most important users to pay anything at all.

This means that your cost of sales is high; not tens of dollars, but potentially thousands or tens of thousands.

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