Today, we’ll make pricing a bit easier on you.

A founder once told me that deciding on a price and asking customers to pay it felt like like what they’d imagine showing up at the pearly gates felt like. The ultimate judgement day.

Pricing is … emotional.

Founders tend to underprice their service because who the heck are they to charge you money for a thing they built? Also, what if that price offends someone? Or scares them off? And then you fail and everyone in your hometown finds out and your family disowns you? Again, pricing is emotional.

There’s a famous interview where Marc Andreesen is asked about what he’d put on a billboard that entrepreneurs had to pass on their way to work each morning and he answered, without hesitation, “charge more,” and I agree.

This might seem like it’s only relevant after you’ve got a product, but it’s incredibly important before. We have to test pricing to see what people will pay before we build anything. Price comes before product because it informs what we build.

We combat charging too little and getting to the right price pre-product through things like

Value Based Pricing, but there’s another approach that’s really helpful. And it involves just describing what you’re charging for in a way that isn’t terrible.

Roughly 99% of companies are horrible at introducing and articulating pricing.

Here are two examples - these are SaaS products for podcasters: