Comment by babuskov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by babuskov | Hacker News Reader

I read a similar article about 3 months ago and decided to give it a try. Raising price gave me less total income. Here are the details:

I have a product called Attic Manager (guacosoft.com/attic) which is a home inventory software with unique feature on the market - it is able to import database from all versions Quicken Home Inventory programs. Currently, it is only product on the market that does that (probably because it is not so easy to do, I spent months reverse engineering their custom file format).

I used to sell it for $19.99 and got about 30 orders per month consistently in the past 3 years. That's around $600 per month gross (my actuall earnings are lower, because of payment gateway cut, but that is irrelevant here because it's fixed percentage of gross price anyway).

After reading that "you should charge more", I upped the price to $29.99, a 50% increase. The experiment is still going on, but in the past 3 months I got only 42 orders. That's 14/month. 14*$30 is $420 per month, or 43% less than before.

So, all the "you should raise you prices" is just an idea to consider and maybe test, but I wouldn't trust it blindly.

I don't think your example contradicts this article vey much. Your program already had a relatively high price (compared with most items in the app stores), and it will obviously always be point where an increased price will hurt sales. The article was directed to those that priced their software peanuts, like $2, and should raise their price to $10 or $20.

I'm not an expert in this area, but I think you have a different opportunity than most. People who are maintaining Quicken Home Inventory data to the point that they need to keep the data are hardcore users.

They have data that is valuable and they are using software that really sucks. A better alternative has to be worth $30, but might need some marketing support or some bundling with other solutions that users who keep home inventories need.

The next step would be to test if lowering your price has any positive effect.

Also, instead of raising your price, create add-ons that people have to pay for. It worked great for our software product.

How do you know your monthly orders would have continued consistently this year? Were you adding features as fast as previously? How big is the market for what you're doing? Maybe you are now closer to what your particular market can bear and you'd have made even less at $19.99.

I don't. But, I haven't changed the product since march 2012, I believe 14 months of consistent range of 27-34 sales each month can be considered stable. Especially since the drop started the day I changed the price.

I want to leave it like this until the end of month 4. And then I'll revert back to $19.99 to see if number of sales go back.

Although, I'm thinking I might offer two versions of the product, one for $19.99 and other for $29.99 as someone suggested.

Kudos to you for trying the experiment, and reporting some findings.

As Lord Kelvin said, "If you can not measure it, you can not improve it."

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