Ask HN: Should I drastically increase my pricing (grandfathering included)?

Yes, you probably should increase prices, but just increasing prices isn't going to get you instantaneous credibility to make sales with more qualified clients. It is difficult to point to things you could do to improve perceived credibility without seeing your site, but examples would include a) making sure the English is flawless (only mentioned because of the country with lower expenses -- your writing here is very good), b) displaying social proof such as logos of credible existing customers and/or media mentions and/or vanity stats, and c) generally having a design and experience which screams Credible.

You'll note that your situation is seen over and over and over again by folks who build business tools, by the way. At low prices you get pathological customers. This is exactly what Spreedly and Chargify reported on HN previously, and it comports with the experience of many other companies which have not said so publicly.

Hello Patrick,

Our landing page is actually converting pretty well, at >5% conversion rate (visit-to-trial signup). The problem is that I'm not sure if the right people are converting. We have no indication on the quality of those signups.

If you are willing to help me out, I'll send you an email with my website, so that you can give quick thoughts. I would say the things you pointed out are generally fulfilled, but I may be wrong and biased too.

Drop me an email and I'll give it a quick once-over.

I"m not in any way involved with the OP but:

Thanks for being awesome Patrick. :)

If your intial costs are very high, and that is causing the issue, just wrap people into a contract - maybe 6 months up front (with a 30 day trial) and then you can go month-to-month after that.

It's becoming bad form to charge 'registration fees,' because everyone thinks that with IT you can do all of the paperwork for free. Especially in business-to-business when you're dealing with tightwads quite often.

Figure out what your minimum contract duration to break even (t) would need to be at your current prices. Multiply t * 1.25 and round to the nearest 4 or 6 month interval. That's your new initial minimum contract length.

I think you need to consider how this will impact your bottom line. Is your cheapness (excuse the pun) your major selling factor i.t.o competitiveness?

Is your 'market share', only the cheap clients? Generally businesses carve out a niche inside their market.

If that above statement is true, you'd probably lose almost all your business.

If you want more money (without losing your client base), add functionality and give them the option to use it (at a price).

I'd say if you already have all or most of the el'cheapos, then cater for them. Make it easier to setup shop and for you to manage them.

Unfortunately, it is possible that both the questions you posed are answered in the positive. We are grandfathering existing customers, so hopefully if we ever hit a brick wall with new customers, we can just rely on existing income from existing customers for the time being.

But we really want to take a bite at the enterprise/corporate segment, since we believe that what we have is even better than what our premium competitors offer. We have a couple of those now paying a lot of money but are succeeding in making profits, perhaps because their higher fees make them treat their business more seriously.

A relevant HN'ers blog post and the HN discussion:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/Double+your+price+%28and+no%2C+I%...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639712

And another one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781156

A quote from JangoSteve that really resonates with me: "There are ways your users tell you your product is too cheap, without actually having to tell you. One good indicator is when you have a lot of people signing up, and then not using it, in which case your product is so underpriced that it attracts indifference."

Our product attracts a lot of indifference. This is good in the short-term (free money), but ultimately we don't get to provide the value we want to provide, garner feedback from their regular usage, and they also eventually cancel and not even switch to a competitor.

The first thing you must do is find out why your customers are abandoning your product. I think increasing the price without fixing the core problem will not help much.

Talking to them, I realise that a lot of it is just, "Wow, it's taking up much more time and money than I expected." While we can abstract away some of this time and money investment through better features and better UI/UX, a lot of them are just gunning for building a passive income engine without even investing much money and time in the initial stages. They are the classic get-rich-quick-passive-income-work-from-home crowd, if you will.

Certainly, there are many aspects of our SaaS platform that can be improved, but we have been constantly learning from our customers who are still continuing their subscriptions with us. So hopefully we are indeed improving our platform over time and tackling some core problems (sample bias, of course, but better than nothing).

P.S. Out of 39 people whom we surveyed over a few months (mostly people who continue to upgrade after the trial), 26 said that they will be "very disappointed" if they could not use our platform again, so hopefully this says something about our product/market fit.

What is taking up most of their time? What can you do to help reduce that, if anything?

The nature of our industry (our customers' industry, to be precise) is that you need to have fresh products/offerings up every other day or so. So the process of adding content is time-consuming. But the same can be said for our competitors. This is one aspect that is very difficult to abstract away.

We have tried: letting them create copies of content, letting them create drafts, and also letting them appoint other users to create content on their behalf.

I think you have answered your question. If your customers are telling you "adding content is time-consuming" you should ONLY be focusing on solving THIS particular problem.

"Should I increase my prices?" is a "vanity question" ( just like "vanity metrics" (E Ries Lean startup philosophy) >> They do not help you build a better business, they take you away from what is REALLY important) Finding why your customer do not want to spend more time adding content and/or why they consider spending more time adding content is not worth it definitely help.

Good luck.

Not sure if you've tried this because you didn't mention it...

How about letting them schedule and set future publish times for the items? As a small biz owner, if I'm in the groove of adding products, I would love to just spend 4 hours straight on a Sunday night adding all the products for the week and have the system publish them on a schedule I set. It's much harder (and more annoying) to do this fresh every day for 15 minutes than doing so in a large block of time.

If freshness of the content is a real concern, I'd pay for something like that to make my site appear more fresh.

"Wow, it's taking up much more time and money than I expected."

You need to ask 5 Whys here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys):

1. Why are your customers abandoning your product?

.. because it's taking up much more time and money than they expected.

2. Why is it taking up much more time and money than they expected?

and so on.

You can certainly increase the price, but it's a dangerous proposition, that can be counter-productive without knowing what's causing your customers to abandon the product and how can you improve the overall user experience first & foremost.

Can't you do A/B testing on it?

why not add a 'platinum tier' with an easy to give away service that you know most customers already don't use, and charge extra for it?

or add incremental charges to existing plans to push customers towards the new platinum tier?

and, btw, if you don;t know the lifetime value of your customers by source and date, you should do more tracking