Thanks!
How did Podia land on its pricing strategy in the early days? Do you have any advice on how to find a consistent, and non-negotiable, price that you can offer to self-serve customers? (we could A/B test, but unlikely to have quite enough traffic for this to be worthwhile yet!)
We’ve changed our pricing around a lot as the product has improved over the past 7 years. When we first launched, we had a single pricing plan that was low cost ($19/month) simply to get customers in the door and to start learning from them.
Trying to remember back to that time and I believe the reasoning for $19/month was that it was half the cost of our closest competitors, so we could slip in under their pricing to get more price conscious customers.
Definitely not a good long-term strategy, but it got us the early customers we needed to build off of.
Then as things progressed and the product got better, we raised the starting price to $29/month and introduced a 2nd $49/month plan. Then raised those 2 plans again to $39/month and $79/month respectively. And then in 2021, we introduced a 3rd higher tier plan of $199/month.
TLDR: We mostly went with our gut early on and adjusted when it felt right.
Surprisingly, we’ve never done any A/B testing around price. We just hire data lead so we’ll soon start taking on more projects like that.
Podia was your first VC backed business. A) What were the positives you experienced from raising from venture? B) What were the negatives / shocks of raising from venture? C) What would be the 1 or 2 pieces of advice or things to think about for a business that is about to flip from bootstrapped to VC backed?
Honestly, the best advice I can give you is to pick the right investor over the valuation. We definitely could have gotten a higher valuation in our first round than we did, but a smart friend of mine said that you can always optimize for valuation in later rounds, so focus on finding a VC you can grow with.
The most positive bit about raising VC is obviously the money hehe. The money bought me time. I was then able to use time to focus on our long-term strategy rather than fighting for short-term wins, which I’d previously done as a bootstrapper.
I haven’t had any really negative issues since raising, but that may be mostly because we’ve been successful for most of our company’s life. It may be a lot worse for companies who aren’t.
And lastly my advice on switching from bootstrapped to VC: as I mentioned above, focus on the investor, not the term sheet.