Raising and Setting Prices
Colleen and Michele talk about how to (and how not to) raise prices -- and think through how to set them in the first place for Colleen's new product.
Colleen Schnettler
Hey Software Social listeners! Colleen here. For their first time ever, MicroConf is putting on a SaaS podcast awards. Michele and I would be so honored if you would nominate us at saaspodcastawards.com! And here's today's show.
Michele Hansen 0:02
So I think I already know what the title of this week's episode is going to be.
Colleen Schnettler 0:08
Oh, that's funny, because I don't know, please tell me.
Michele Hansen 0:12
See, normally we don't decide on the title until I've loaded everything into Transistor and cleaned up the transcript and everything else. But I think today is going to be the pricing episode.
Colleen Schnettler 0:24
Ooh, that sounds fun.
Michele Hansen 0:27
Because you were saying last week, do you want to talk about pricing today? Right.
Colleen Schnettler 0:30
I did say that. But I don't know if I'm quite ready yet.
Michele Hansen 0:34
Well, it's been on my mind a lot this week.
So there's actually can't it kind of came out of a conversation I was having on Twitter yesterday. And just talking about specifically talking about what to do when you raise prices, and and how to treat customers who would win with you for a long time versus business needs to change pricing models or, or increased prices. And then, of course, something that happened recently, which is a company that many of us use, raising their prices on us. And so all of this got me thinking about ways of dealing with prices, and how pricing model itself can be an advantage over competitors, especially entrenched competitors. And then also how there's a lot of advice about pricing. And I think all of that needs to be couched in the specifics of your own business and your own understanding of your customers. So the context here is that stripe is raising prices on their subscriptions product. So basically, you can use, you know, stripe to create your payments. And if you have products set up as subscriptions now, previously, their subscriptions API was free. And when it was announced, I think in 2018, or so the announcement they sent out was basically that it was going to be free forever, and just included in the product. And then this morning, um, this just showed up on Hacker News. I mean, maybe it was yesterday that the post actually went up. And I just saw today that they're now going to be charging a point 5% fee on any subscription, which doesn't sound like a lot. But if you extrapolate that out to making, you know, 1000 hundred thousand a million a year like that, that adds up very quickly. And I think something that's really rubbing people the wrong way is first of all, they told people at the get go that this was going to be included and that they weren't going to charge for it. And second of all, that we never even got an email about it. And we're just finding out about it on Hacker News. Yeah. And so this actually ties into a conversation I was having with Simon Bennett of snap shooter on Twitter yesterday about this sort of idea of quote, unquote, grandfathering pricing.
And I say, quote, unquote, grandfathering, by the way, so I know this is the term that people generally use. But we stopped using that term this summer. Because the concept of grandfathering, that the term comes from, after the Civil War states instituting voting policies that said you could only vote if your grandfather could vote. So which basically disqualified former slaves and their descendants from voting, and I always thought this was just like, one, like, one way the term had been used and wasn't like the origin of it. And so like, you know, once we found that out, we we change the term, how we talk about it to be loyalty discount, which I also think really more communicates what you're giving the customer and makes them feel good about themselves, rather than thinking about relatives and stuff like that.
Um, so anyway, so So Simon was talking about this, because he's saying, you know, I've left so much money on the table by by giving these loyalty discounts by by not raising prices on on old customers, and we're sort of, you know, talking about, but you can get value out of that and other ways like, like as a SaaS company, it's so valuable to have long term, customers who will reliably renew like that, you know, they're already on boarded with your product, the support volume is much, much lower. They like you, they're presumably happy with your product. You know, those are the customers we reach out to when new customers are looking for our customer reference, which especially happens with bigger companies. So, so I want to bring like two different resources that kind of helps us think about this, but then also how we think about them differently. So one of those is an article by Amy hoy, which I feel like I referenced her so much on this podcast that like we have to have her on.
Colleen Schnettler 5:09
Aren't you guys friends?
Michele Hansen 5:11
Like Twitter friends? Yeah, I think we like met at MicroConf. Um, yeah, through the twitterverse. So this article, such a great title, One Weird Trick to Raising your Monthly Price Without a Customer Revolt, which is basically what Stripe is looking at right now. And you know, Hacker News is full of people saying, you know, should we migrate off of stripe like up like, all this kind of stuff. So in this article basically goes through, like, you know, you see a company raised prices, there is a revolt, it scares you away from raising prices. The problem with that is that companies may need to raise prices, especially the situation you're in right now, where you may pray something right now. And then it turns out as you learn more about your customers, and what their cadence of needs are, and, and how you know how their behavior needs to be matched with a pricing model, you may need to change things in six months, or a year from now or two years from now, whether that's the actual pricing model itself, or the price levels. And so how do you do that in a way without making people revolt. And so one of the key points she makes, you know, here is that it is possible to raise prices without a revolt, like you don't have to be afraid of that. And there's a good way to do this, I think the way stripe has done it is not a good way, which is raising the prices on something people are already using for free, and then not telling them about it, those are two strikes against you.
One of the most popular ways of doing this, which I think Bugsnag is doing. I think I think we're just talked about this a couple weeks ago, and we I mean, Mathias and I, is that you basically get locked out of new features, so you can keep your price for forever. And I think Basecamp does this as well. But you don't get new features, you don't get new functionality. And so you know, eventually, you know, the percentage of their actual product that you're using is lower and lower and lower. But if you're only doing simple things with a product, and you're happy with the price you're paying, and you don't need more, that can be a really good thing. Another thing is, you know, like designing new plan levels, so you change those those different levels. And, but I think the really important thing to hear, to think about here, you know, your job as a founder, whether that's one who is just starting out or, or like me, or someone who's been doing this for 20 years, your most important job as a founder is to know your customers better than anyone else. This informs the kinds of features you build, how you structure your products, and how you price them. And all of that informs, you know, the kind of service that you're delivering, and and most importantly, how you price that product. And so as you learn more about your customers, you may find there are more optimal ways to do things and ways that are they're ultimately friendlier to them. You know, for example, I think we've all been in situations where there's a company that's trying to make something a subscription when you really only need it once. And it's just super annoying. You're like, I only need this one, I don't need a subscription. Like why, like, why can't I buy this without a subscription? Or, you know, I only need 100 units of this, but I have to buy a subscription and the minimum level is 300. And like, why am I paying for more than I'm using like, like all those situations, like as a customer don't feel good. And so what we try to deal with pricing is to not put customers in those situations, but at the same time balancing that with the needs of the business and the fact that you know, if we gave everything away for free or priced at very, very cheaply, like we would go out of business and then we would not be serving our customers right so like there's a there's a give and take there.
Colleen Schnettler 8:55
So how do you think a company like Stripe, which has some of the most competent developers and marketers screwed this up so badly?
Michele Hansen 9:05
I I don't know. You know, I I will say you know, having some been someone who has worked in larger companies that have raised prices with varying levels of customer communication I mean it's a difficult thing to to message and certainly being the one responding to the customers is not a fun situation to be in so I do commend Patrick Collison for like jumping in on this Hacker News thread and just opening himself up to the firing squad that is Hacker News commenters because let's be real like Hacker News commenters are mean the the most brutal commenters out there like if you're gonna destroy someone send Hacker News comment there's after them. Um, you know, so I mean, it's it's tough, like raising prices is always tough, but I can talk through how We think about it because we raised prices last year.
Colleen Schnettler 10:03
Yeah, I would love to hear that I, especially in my situation where I'm just kind of making up a price when I start that seems reasonable. And I may have to change it down the line, depending on my customer needs and my business needs.
Michele Hansen 10:17
So actually, I guess I should start with in the beginning, so. So from the launch point, we got our pricing model, basically by copying it from competitors, because they offered 2500 for free per day. And we're like, okay, that's just, that's the baseline. So that's what we have to offer. Like, why would anyone switch from a competitor to us when we were less generous, though, actually, one of our competitors does have a less generous return. But anyway, so we took that, and then we're like, what our problem is, is we need to be able to pay for 5000 a day rather than just 2500. So we gave it a pays you go model. And I don't remember how we actually set the price for pay as you go Come to think of it. I think we originally set it as $1 per thousand, I have no idea how we actually came to that price, I should look through my notes and try to find that. I don't even know if I did some back of the envelope math on Okay, we've got these two tiny little digitalocean servers, you know, one server with one database server for $20 a month. And you know, this is how many customers we would need. So then, so we did that for a while. And then but I think the real The thing that really kicked off our growth was introducing the unlimited plan in May of 2014. And it's funny and I say Unlimited, because one of the go to resources on pricing that basically everybody should reference is Pricing Low Touch SaaS from Stripe Atlas guides written by Patrick McKenzie, which is just probably one of the most referenced pricing articles for bootstrappers, along with Amy Hoy's writing. And in that article, he says never sell unlimited anything, which I find so interesting, because we actually do sell something unlimited. And I think, and this is one of those things where you know, your job as a founder is to know your customers better than anyone else. And it's also to know your business better than anyone else. And if you have competitive advantages that other people don't have, like, you've talked about how you're switching and storage providers, because they give you an operational cost advantage, rather than using AWS, like if you have those advantages using them. And so in May of 2014, we had a customer come to us and say, you know, I love your product, but with your pricing model, like that doesn't really work for us, like we need to do a ton of geocoding Is there any way you can give us something that's like, that's higher volume. And what we ended up doing was like, you know, we can just, we can just allocate one server to you. And then you're going to get your own instance of the platform, and we manage it for you. But your API key, rather than talking to the public cluster, is just only going to talk to that server. And then you're just responsible for basically not DDOSing yourself, you know, using DDoS in a very broad term here, but basically not, you know, not overwhelming the server. And so your limit is the capability of the hardware. So we introduced that unlimited plan. And I and we set it at 750 a month. And I think we set it there because at the time, one of our major competitors enterprise plan was $10,000 a year for I think 100,000 a day. So you're still getting a lot more, but they had a much better quality product. And so we wanted to price it below it. Because again, I think we didn't have very much confidence in the beginning in terms of what also was somewhat realistic that our product was really not very good. And so we wanted to price it accordingly. It's much better now. So, so once we introduced that we you know, we learned how much companies love flat pricing, like they just they larger companies really don't like variability and pricing. And that was a huge, huge engine of our growth was introducing that plan. But that price stayed at 750 a month, for a long time, even when our competitors were charging much more for it. And we actually had customers say like you guys should really charge more because it makes you seem not as legitimate that it's so cheap. Like it seems suspicious. And we're like that's really weird. And then we had other people say it too, and we're like, I guess maybe we should figure out raising prices. But something it was really important to us was those customers who've been with us for a long time. We wanted to make sure that they were Still getting the best price for it. And I think that really comes out of my own experiences, you know, you know, talking about the stripe situation like being on that side myself in the past and having to defend a pricing decision, maybe even when that I didn't make personally but having to be on that side of messaging it like, I saw just how destructive it was for people's belief in a company. And, and their opinion of it and how they're like, you know, I've I've been a subscriber for 20 years, and I'm not getting the best price, the new people coming in the door are like, Whoa, like, What is this, and we got that all the time. And so I really didn't want to replicate that experience. And so we decided was that people would, we're gonna raise the price to $1,000 a month. And, but people who had an active subscription, they could keep the 750 price as long as they had an active subscriber subscription. So that meant that if anybody who was currently an unlimited subscriber as of November of 2019, was this 2018, I think was 2019. We did this feels like forever ago now. So they would keep that price as long as they had an active subscription. But talking about like cadence, like, sometimes we have people who are, for example, academic researchers, who like need to do one really big batch once a year. And so they'll just use it for one month and then cancel, they would pay the higher price because it wasn't a continuous subscription. And that's also really why like framing it as a loyalty discount, because we're rewarding them for seeing with us. And if they stay with us, then then they will continue to get the best price. But nobody, you know, nobody who comes in new is going to get that price. And I think it's just really important, psychologically to reward that, because when people see that new customers are getting a better price. And then for a product they've used for a long time. People get really upset, they get justifiably upset. But it's it's a tough thing to message. Absolutely.
Colleen Schnettler 17:16
So are you guys gonna move off of Stripe, what's your take on the whole situation for your business?
Michele Hansen 17:22
We had a conversation about it this morning. Um, I think the thing to weigh there is it's not just the extra money that we would be paying Stripe for this. There's also the opportunity cost involved. And as a two person company, our time is our most valuable asset. And to spend three weeks now migrating over to a new payment platform or simply migrating off of the subscriptions API and handling more of that in house, there's all that time upfront plus there is all the time on an ongoing basis, um, to to manage all those things that stripe is managing. So I think we're thinking about it, there also seems to be if you get to a certain volume, that stripe will negotiate with you on on the rates so I'm kind of unclear on what those levels are and whether they will actually negotiate with you. I'm not totally where I stand on it right now. Though, that is a very strange way of thinking about it. But this is my own personal mental accounting when there's a product that I pay a lot of money for and I actually like like the product or I recognize that there's this lock in there right because this is like you know the amount of time to switch to a new payment provider creates substantial moat for stripe and that's it that's a barrier to entry for you know switching off of some switching costs. That's the word I'm looking for. So I'm I sort of I comfort myself by buying their stock. So unfortunately stripe is not public yet. And neither is intercom those are probably the two companies were the most locked in with it wouldn't be the most hassle to switch off of them. They're not public yet but I will buy their stock when they're public. But it's kind of thing like you know Progressive Insurance for example, like you know, we buy Progressive Insurance and I also own their stocks I'm like you know what I feel like I'm like whenever I get a dividend notification I'm like I'm getting a little bit of my money back It's so weird. It doesn't make sense and and my friends who are into the psychology of finance will find that hilarious but that but that's how kind of how I think about things like even actually today I was looking at I was doing some analytics on payments. So I was trying to map out the path to becoming an unlimited customer and like you know how long are people pay as you go customers are most people pay as you go customers first or they jump right to it like just sort of figuring some of those things out. And, and I was also emailing people who should switch to unlimited because they will save money. And it turned out that one of those companies on the list was like a law firm that exclusively works with Virginia, local governments to make sure they're capturing all of their revenue. And I was like, This is hilarious, because I've been going back and forth with our local Virginia government on taxes, and it's like, okay, you know, and I pay them a lot in taxes every year. And I'm like, I'm getting a little bit of that money back, because this person is a vendor to them is paying us and it's this beautiful cycle of the economy, right? where, you know, money is kinetic and wants to be moving. And money moving is a beautiful thing. So, so that's kind of how I think about it. That's, I think that's where I will end up going with this. But it remains to be seen on Hacker News, it did seem like they were willing to negotiate with some people and at least extend the free nature of the subscriptions API until the end of 2021. So I think we will, we will reach out to them about that. Because I mean, it is a great product. Like it's a it's a really, really good product. And as someone who personally dealt with managing your own merchant account, and dealing with the banks, and and all that stuff at an old job, like that was such a headache. And stripe takes a lot of that away. And if you know, our most valuable asset is our time, stripe does give us a lot of our time back. And maybe I just have to suck it up that they are pricing for it after I mean, Patrick Mackenzie's whole thing is charged more in the works for them. So I can't really blame them. Yeah, I think that the communication on it is a you know, so some people say, you know, act as if your actions could end up on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow, or, you know, act as if they could be blowing up on Twitter or on Hacker News. I think that's the modern version of that.
Colleen Schnettler 22:12
To me, it seems like the real problem here is that it used to be free. And we we being the people who use it, were under the impression it was always going to get rolled up in the entire in the price. And that has changed. I mean, I think it's a great product, but I literally put someone on the subscriptions API three months ago. So that is frustrating.
Michele Hansen 22:34
Yeah, and then there's a whole thing about it was free, or you know, you were you were paying through through the other fees already paying stripe. And now it's something else on top of that, like, so when we launched our Geocodio Maps product. And I think this was 2018 or 2019. And we like we already had a free sort of like basic preview map that we generated for people for a long time. And then we made this more more advanced mapping platform that's sort of like you could call it like Tableau-light, specifically focused on maps. And we went back and forth quite a bit on how do we price this, how do we integrate it with the product, like, we really didn't want to take away that thing that was free for people. Because we didn't want them to exactly have that feeling of Wow, this used to be free, and now you're charging me for it, but it hasn't changed and, or even if it has like, I only wanted the basic thing like that was fine for me. Like we really wanted to respect that some people only needed the basic map. And people who wanted something more advanced could go somewhere else and pay for that. Now that's created all sorts of other headaches for us about integration of the products, and we'll probably be integrating it more into the product in the future. But still keeping some amount of free because I think once you release something, especially if it's free, it's really hard to claw that back. Which is why you know, we were talking about this last week or two weeks ago, you're talking about what your your free tier would be, and all that kind of stuff like that is a really, really important thing to get right in the beginning. Are you doing are you doing free tier are you doing free trial? Like what are those? What are those amounts? And also, what are you getting out of that right? Like basically what you get out of a free tier is not having to do as much marketing and sales as you would if you had to pitch everybody upfront before they can use the product. But being very deliberate about what those free tiers are because as as we're seeing with stripe if you make something free, and then you charge for the exact same thing later, or you charge for it plus a whole bunch of other people, features that people don't need. People are going to get upset? Yeah, rightfully so I think.
So you mentioned that you kind of have thought a little bit about pricing, but not enough to really talk about it. So let's talk about.
Colleen Schnettler 25:13
Okay. So I looked at a few players in this space, the ones I'm familiar with are upload care and cloudinary. cloudinary is one I've actually used before. And it's very popular in the rails community, they have a pretty generous free tier. So their free tier, you get 25 monthly credits, and a monthly credit is described as 25,000 transformations, or 25 gigs of storage, or 25 gigs of net viewing bandwidth. And I assume you can mix and match these three aspects of their service in any way you want to hit that 25 k number. That being said, it's really hard to know if you're going to go over that number or not. I mean, that is pretty confusing. If you look at that, like how are you supposed to have an idea of if you're going to exceed that with transformations? If you're allowing your users to do transformations and different file sizes? I'm not sure.
Michele Hansen 26:15
A combination of the How do you like Do they have examples. It's like your user uploads an image and then they decide to rotate it and and change the colors and inverted and everything.
Colleen Schnettler 26:28
They might, it's kind of hard to tell from this pricing page. And as I mentioned, at the top of the episode, I didn't really do my homework on this yet. So it might be somewhere in this documentation. But at first glance, it is challenging to see exactly how that's all gonna stack up when you actually put it in your application.
Michele Hansen 26:49
Like, do you know what your customers are actually paying for this like, like when you as a developer have built a website for people, you've said that you've used some of these services? Do you know what they're actually paying?
Colleen Schnettler 27:02
I don't, because I have used the free tier of cloud Neri but for file heavy applications. And I have worked there's one company in particular, and we were really file heavy, heavy. We rolled it ourselves. So our costs were the developer time to set up the system, the upload system, and then the cost of storage in AWS and then the cost of, you know, egress bandwidth, those kinds of things as users use the service.
Michele Hansen 27:35
So it sounds like what you're competing with, then is the developers time to build something themselves plus whatever they would be paying s3 for the storage.
Colleen Schnettler 27:48
Yeah, I think that's reasonable. And I think that's a more realistic comparison to comparing them to these big players like the upload care or the cloudinary. Because I don't provide any of those extra services like the transformations in the AI and the filtering. So yes, I think it is more accurate to describe it as the developers time. And whatever the you know, current storage and CDN fees they're paying right now,
Michele Hansen 28:17
it is important to note that competitors can be as much companies as they can be processes. And, you know, a competitor can be the amount of time someone would take to do something themselves. So that talking about that pain reminds me of our ongoing segment here, which is calling read story brand. Yeah. And so talking about the pain the user faces and the problem they're going through, makes me curious for what you read and StoryBrand. This week, and how it relates to your nascent business.
Colleen Schnettler 28:57
Yeah, so this week, I read the chapter on guides. And so the author of this book talks a lot about how everyone is the hero in their own story, a lot of brands come in, and they position themselves as the hero, they're going to solve all your problems. But that's not what you should do. You as a brand should position yourself as the guide. So your customer is the hero, you are the guide, and you are showing them the way that's going to lead them to a solution. So the author talks about two characteristics of a guide. One is empathy, and the second is authority. And he says that three things every human being wants most are to be seen, heard and understood, which pretty much also sounds applicable to parenting and life. I think that's pretty reasonable. Right? So we talked a little he talks a little bit about empathy. Let's start with empathy, because that's the first thing you have to do. So how do you show empathy? Again, is this a course on business or a course on life? I don't know. Anyway, a few examples he gives an empathetic statements are we understand how it feels to, nobody should have to experience like you we are frustrated by. So first step is establishing empathy for me specifically for my brand, I think frustration might be one, like you, I am frustrated by having to do this annoying process over and over and over or like you, I am frustrated that this is just such a pain. And then he talks about authority. And he distinguishes between authority and competence. Because you don't want to come off as a braggart, you don't want to come off as a no at all. I don't want to position myself as well, you used your root API keys, that was stupid, you know, I don't want to position myself as a jerk, like, I want to position myself as competent, empathetic and competent. So you'd want just the right amount of authority, not so much that your customer feels belittled. So he gave four examples of how you could you could do this. One is testimonials. Two is statistics. And who doesn't love statistics?
Michele Hansen 31:09
Most people, but go on...
Colleen Schnettler 31:11
three awards, and four is logos of companies that have worked with you.
Michele Hansen 31:16
Yeah, like I mean, numbers are very convincing. Unless they're too good, though. Like, like our NPS score is stupidly high. Like, it's somewhere in the 90s. And at one point, we had it on our website. And people were like, I don't think that's real, like, Where is that and I can make sure we get like an NPS site that like people that actually like feeds it, and like it says it's clear. And then we're like, we'll just, we'll just take this statistic off, instead, do logos and testimonials.
Colleen Schnettler 31:47
So when the author talks about positioning yourself as a guide, he talks about the first impressions, both with people and with businesses. And he says, a great first impression is made by doing two things, the first thing someone is going to do when they meet you, or when they interface with your business is can I trust this person? or business? And can I respect this person or business? So the empathy we're showing early on in this process, leads to trust. And so our goal as a company is my goal as a company, I guess, is to guide the customer or the hero to the solution. So I am not the hero, I am the guide.
Michele Hansen 32:33
Yeah, your business is Mr. Miyagi. And your customers, The Karate Kid. It's already reading that book. Like after reading that book. I was like, Oh, my gosh, I'm seeing this whole, this guide, Hero motif everywhere.
Colleen Schnettler 32:49
Yes, I'm seeing it in movies. I'm seeing it in successful businesses. I'm seeing it everywhere. So something else I wanted to talk to you about is my software product, which has finally reached beta status and Heroku, which is really exciting, because now it's available on the general Heroku marketplace. But it's kind of sad, because it is not available for sale, the way it works is I have to get 100 users 100 before I can actually try and charge for it. So that is like a great milestone that I'm excited about. But what I want to talk about is what I should do now. And I'm going to give you a multiple choice test. Okay, so what should I do next, a more tech stuff. I want to build more stuff. There's another feature I want for myself that I want to build me make it available as a standalone product, like on its own website and its own world. See do marketing on Heroku. So focus on my Heroku marketing page d a lot of choices sorry, D make available on another marketplace like a CloudFlare or II II, II make a marketing website.
Michele Hansen 34:07
So I think those options were a focus on Heroku be focus on non Heroku plot like D platforming it entirely. Option C was further integrating with Heroku like something about Heroku right, and option D was putting it on cloud flares platform. And then option he was building a marketing website. Did I get that right?
Colleen Schnettler 34:38
Yeah, that's pretty close.
Michele Hansen 34:40
Okay, so stop building at this point. So I think like, at least at this point, you're focusing on you're focusing on distribution and marketing, which is really good.
Colleen Schnettler 34:50
I knew you were gonna say that.
Michele Hansen 34:53
Colleen, you need to do some selling first.
Colleen Schnettler 34:55
I know you're gonna say that.
Michele Hansen 34:57
Right and You know that this whole thing about Heroku not being able to charge for it until you have 100 customers, I think that could be dangerous for you, because it allows you to punt on pricing. So just to challenge you, I'm gonna say option B, or the C or D, whichever CloudFlare, right? Like, depending on how important you think channels are, like those channels are going to be for your distribution, like, do you think you can have your own distribution? Or do you need to rely on a marketplace, selling it somewhere else, which will force you to develop pricing, also to like, get people paying for it, which is both the most financially rewarding part about it and super motivating, which will encourage you to keep working on it. But I think it's time to step away from Heroku for a little bit and try to actually go out and sell the damn thing.
Colleen Schnettler 35:58
And I know that just because someone uses a free product does not mean they're going to pay for it. So is anyone actually going to pay for it?
Michele Hansen 36:05
Exactly. And you need to figure that out now before you spend more time on the tech.
Colleen Schnettler 36:12
Yeah, I think that is excellent advice. And you're absolutely right, because I've kind of been in this perpetual state of not being able to charge for it. I've really haven't had to sort out any of these issues like we'll be we'll pay for it. How do I find people all the normal issues when you're trying to sell a product? So all right, that's my goal. That's what I'm going to work on. And that's going to wrap up today's episode of the software social podcast. You can reach us on Twitter, at @softwaresocpod. Thank you for listening. Send me all your good vibes.
Hey Software Social listeners! Colleen here. For their first time ever, MicroConf is putting on a SaaS podcast awards. Michele and I would be so honored if you would nominate us at saaspodcastawards.com! And here's today's show.
Michele Hansen 0:02
So I think I already know what the title of this week's episode is going to be.
Colleen Schnettler 0:08
Oh, that's funny, because I don't know, please tell me.
Michele Hansen 0:12
See, normally we don't decide on the title until I've loaded everything into Transistor and cleaned up the transcript and everything else. But I think today is going to be the pricing episode.
Colleen Schnettler 0:24
Ooh, that sounds fun.
Michele Hansen 0:27
Because you were saying last week, do you want to talk about pricing today? Right.
Colleen Schnettler 0:30
I did say that. But I don't know if I'm quite ready yet.
Michele Hansen 0:34
Well, it's been on my mind a lot this week.
So there's actually can't it kind of came out of a conversation I was having on Twitter yesterday. And just talking about specifically talking about what to do when you raise prices, and and how to treat customers who would win with you for a long time versus business needs to change pricing models or, or increased prices. And then, of course, something that happened recently, which is a company that many of us use, raising their prices on us. And so all of this got me thinking about ways of dealing with prices, and how pricing model itself can be an advantage over competitors, especially entrenched competitors. And then also how there's a lot of advice about pricing. And I think all of that needs to be couched in the specifics of your own business and your own understanding of your customers. So the context here is that stripe is raising prices on their subscriptions product. So basically, you can use, you know, stripe to create your payments. And if you have products set up as subscriptions now, previously, their subscriptions API was free. And when it was announced, I think in 2018, or so the announcement they sent out was basically that it was going to be free forever, and just included in the product. And then this morning, um, this just showed up on Hacker News. I mean, maybe it was yesterday that the post actually went up. And I just saw today that they're now going to be charging a point 5% fee on any subscription, which doesn't sound like a lot. But if you extrapolate that out to making, you know, 1000 hundred thousand a million a year like that, that adds up very quickly. And I think something that's really rubbing people the wrong way is first of all, they told people at the get go that this was going to be included and that they weren't going to charge for it. And second of all, that we never even got an email about it. And we're just finding out about it on Hacker News. Yeah. And so this actually ties into a conversation I was having with Simon Bennett of snap shooter on Twitter yesterday about this sort of idea of quote, unquote, grandfathering pricing.
And I say, quote, unquote, grandfathering, by the way, so I know this is the term that people generally use. But we stopped using that term this summer. Because the concept of grandfathering, that the term comes from, after the Civil War states instituting voting policies that said you could only vote if your grandfather could vote. So which basically disqualified former slaves and their descendants from voting, and I always thought this was just like, one, like, one way the term had been used and wasn't like the origin of it. And so like, you know, once we found that out, we we change the term, how we talk about it to be loyalty discount, which I also think really more communicates what you're giving the customer and makes them feel good about themselves, rather than thinking about relatives and stuff like that.
Um, so anyway, so So Simon was talking about this, because he's saying, you know, I've left so much money on the table by by giving these loyalty discounts by by not raising prices on on old customers, and we're sort of, you know, talking about, but you can get value out of that and other ways like, like as a SaaS company, it's so valuable to have long term, customers who will reliably renew like that, you know, they're already on boarded with your product, the support volume is much, much lower. They like you, they're presumably happy with your product. You know, those are the customers we reach out to when new customers are looking for our customer reference, which especially happens with bigger companies. So, so I want to bring like two different resources that kind of helps us think about this, but then also how we think about them differently. So one of those is an article by Amy hoy, which I feel like I referenced her so much on this podcast that like we have to have her on.
Colleen Schnettler 5:09
Aren't you guys friends?
Michele Hansen 5:11
Like Twitter friends? Yeah, I think we like met at MicroConf. Um, yeah, through the twitterverse. So this article, such a great title, One Weird Trick to Raising your Monthly Price Without a Customer Revolt, which is basically what Stripe is looking at right now. And you know, Hacker News is full of people saying, you know, should we migrate off of stripe like up like, all this kind of stuff. So in this article basically goes through, like, you know, you see a company raised prices, there is a revolt, it scares you away from raising prices. The problem with that is that companies may need to raise prices, especially the situation you're in right now, where you may pray something right now. And then it turns out as you learn more about your customers, and what their cadence of needs are, and, and how you know how their behavior needs to be matched with a pricing model, you may need to change things in six months, or a year from now or two years from now, whether that's the actual pricing model itself, or the price levels. And so how do you do that in a way without making people revolt. And so one of the key points she makes, you know, here is that it is possible to raise prices without a revolt, like you don't have to be afraid of that. And there's a good way to do this, I think the way stripe has done it is not a good way, which is raising the prices on something people are already using for free, and then not telling them about it, those are two strikes against you.
One of the most popular ways of doing this, which I think Bugsnag is doing. I think I think we're just talked about this a couple weeks ago, and we I mean, Mathias and I, is that you basically get locked out of new features, so you can keep your price for forever. And I think Basecamp does this as well. But you don't get new features, you don't get new functionality. And so you know, eventually, you know, the percentage of their actual product that you're using is lower and lower and lower. But if you're only doing simple things with a product, and you're happy with the price you're paying, and you don't need more, that can be a really good thing. Another thing is, you know, like designing new plan levels, so you change those those different levels. And, but I think the really important thing to hear, to think about here, you know, your job as a founder, whether that's one who is just starting out or, or like me, or someone who's been doing this for 20 years, your most important job as a founder is to know your customers better than anyone else. This informs the kinds of features you build, how you structure your products, and how you price them. And all of that informs, you know, the kind of service that you're delivering, and and most importantly, how you price that product. And so as you learn more about your customers, you may find there are more optimal ways to do things and ways that are they're ultimately friendlier to them. You know, for example, I think we've all been in situations where there's a company that's trying to make something a subscription when you really only need it once. And it's just super annoying. You're like, I only need this one, I don't need a subscription. Like why, like, why can't I buy this without a subscription? Or, you know, I only need 100 units of this, but I have to buy a subscription and the minimum level is 300. And like, why am I paying for more than I'm using like, like all those situations, like as a customer don't feel good. And so what we try to deal with pricing is to not put customers in those situations, but at the same time balancing that with the needs of the business and the fact that you know, if we gave everything away for free or priced at very, very cheaply, like we would go out of business and then we would not be serving our customers right so like there's a there's a give and take there.
Colleen Schnettler 8:55
So how do you think a company like Stripe, which has some of the most competent developers and marketers screwed this up so badly?
Michele Hansen 9:05
I I don't know. You know, I I will say you know, having some been someone who has worked in larger companies that have raised prices with varying levels of customer communication I mean it's a difficult thing to to message and certainly being the one responding to the customers is not a fun situation to be in so I do commend Patrick Collison for like jumping in on this Hacker News thread and just opening himself up to the firing squad that is Hacker News commenters because let's be real like Hacker News commenters are mean the the most brutal commenters out there like if you're gonna destroy someone send Hacker News comment there's after them. Um, you know, so I mean, it's it's tough, like raising prices is always tough, but I can talk through how We think about it because we raised prices last year.
Colleen Schnettler 10:03
Yeah, I would love to hear that I, especially in my situation where I'm just kind of making up a price when I start that seems reasonable. And I may have to change it down the line, depending on my customer needs and my business needs.
Michele Hansen 10:17
So actually, I guess I should start with in the beginning, so. So from the launch point, we got our pricing model, basically by copying it from competitors, because they offered 2500 for free per day. And we're like, okay, that's just, that's the baseline. So that's what we have to offer. Like, why would anyone switch from a competitor to us when we were less generous, though, actually, one of our competitors does have a less generous return. But anyway, so we took that, and then we're like, what our problem is, is we need to be able to pay for 5000 a day rather than just 2500. So we gave it a pays you go model. And I don't remember how we actually set the price for pay as you go Come to think of it. I think we originally set it as $1 per thousand, I have no idea how we actually came to that price, I should look through my notes and try to find that. I don't even know if I did some back of the envelope math on Okay, we've got these two tiny little digitalocean servers, you know, one server with one database server for $20 a month. And you know, this is how many customers we would need. So then, so we did that for a while. And then but I think the real The thing that really kicked off our growth was introducing the unlimited plan in May of 2014. And it's funny and I say Unlimited, because one of the go to resources on pricing that basically everybody should reference is Pricing Low Touch SaaS from Stripe Atlas guides written by Patrick McKenzie, which is just probably one of the most referenced pricing articles for bootstrappers, along with Amy Hoy's writing. And in that article, he says never sell unlimited anything, which I find so interesting, because we actually do sell something unlimited. And I think, and this is one of those things where you know, your job as a founder is to know your customers better than anyone else. And it's also to know your business better than anyone else. And if you have competitive advantages that other people don't have, like, you've talked about how you're switching and storage providers, because they give you an operational cost advantage, rather than using AWS, like if you have those advantages using them. And so in May of 2014, we had a customer come to us and say, you know, I love your product, but with your pricing model, like that doesn't really work for us, like we need to do a ton of geocoding Is there any way you can give us something that's like, that's higher volume. And what we ended up doing was like, you know, we can just, we can just allocate one server to you. And then you're going to get your own instance of the platform, and we manage it for you. But your API key, rather than talking to the public cluster, is just only going to talk to that server. And then you're just responsible for basically not DDOSing yourself, you know, using DDoS in a very broad term here, but basically not, you know, not overwhelming the server. And so your limit is the capability of the hardware. So we introduced that unlimited plan. And I and we set it at 750 a month. And I think we set it there because at the time, one of our major competitors enterprise plan was $10,000 a year for I think 100,000 a day. So you're still getting a lot more, but they had a much better quality product. And so we wanted to price it below it. Because again, I think we didn't have very much confidence in the beginning in terms of what also was somewhat realistic that our product was really not very good. And so we wanted to price it accordingly. It's much better now. So, so once we introduced that we you know, we learned how much companies love flat pricing, like they just they larger companies really don't like variability and pricing. And that was a huge, huge engine of our growth was introducing that plan. But that price stayed at 750 a month, for a long time, even when our competitors were charging much more for it. And we actually had customers say like you guys should really charge more because it makes you seem not as legitimate that it's so cheap. Like it seems suspicious. And we're like that's really weird. And then we had other people say it too, and we're like, I guess maybe we should figure out raising prices. But something it was really important to us was those customers who've been with us for a long time. We wanted to make sure that they were Still getting the best price for it. And I think that really comes out of my own experiences, you know, you know, talking about the stripe situation like being on that side myself in the past and having to defend a pricing decision, maybe even when that I didn't make personally but having to be on that side of messaging it like, I saw just how destructive it was for people's belief in a company. And, and their opinion of it and how they're like, you know, I've I've been a subscriber for 20 years, and I'm not getting the best price, the new people coming in the door are like, Whoa, like, What is this, and we got that all the time. And so I really didn't want to replicate that experience. And so we decided was that people would, we're gonna raise the price to $1,000 a month. And, but people who had an active subscription, they could keep the 750 price as long as they had an active subscriber subscription. So that meant that if anybody who was currently an unlimited subscriber as of November of 2019, was this 2018, I think was 2019. We did this feels like forever ago now. So they would keep that price as long as they had an active subscription. But talking about like cadence, like, sometimes we have people who are, for example, academic researchers, who like need to do one really big batch once a year. And so they'll just use it for one month and then cancel, they would pay the higher price because it wasn't a continuous subscription. And that's also really why like framing it as a loyalty discount, because we're rewarding them for seeing with us. And if they stay with us, then then they will continue to get the best price. But nobody, you know, nobody who comes in new is going to get that price. And I think it's just really important, psychologically to reward that, because when people see that new customers are getting a better price. And then for a product they've used for a long time. People get really upset, they get justifiably upset. But it's it's a tough thing to message. Absolutely.
Colleen Schnettler 17:16
So are you guys gonna move off of Stripe, what's your take on the whole situation for your business?
Michele Hansen 17:22
We had a conversation about it this morning. Um, I think the thing to weigh there is it's not just the extra money that we would be paying Stripe for this. There's also the opportunity cost involved. And as a two person company, our time is our most valuable asset. And to spend three weeks now migrating over to a new payment platform or simply migrating off of the subscriptions API and handling more of that in house, there's all that time upfront plus there is all the time on an ongoing basis, um, to to manage all those things that stripe is managing. So I think we're thinking about it, there also seems to be if you get to a certain volume, that stripe will negotiate with you on on the rates so I'm kind of unclear on what those levels are and whether they will actually negotiate with you. I'm not totally where I stand on it right now. Though, that is a very strange way of thinking about it. But this is my own personal mental accounting when there's a product that I pay a lot of money for and I actually like like the product or I recognize that there's this lock in there right because this is like you know the amount of time to switch to a new payment provider creates substantial moat for stripe and that's it that's a barrier to entry for you know switching off of some switching costs. That's the word I'm looking for. So I'm I sort of I comfort myself by buying their stock. So unfortunately stripe is not public yet. And neither is intercom those are probably the two companies were the most locked in with it wouldn't be the most hassle to switch off of them. They're not public yet but I will buy their stock when they're public. But it's kind of thing like you know Progressive Insurance for example, like you know, we buy Progressive Insurance and I also own their stocks I'm like you know what I feel like I'm like whenever I get a dividend notification I'm like I'm getting a little bit of my money back It's so weird. It doesn't make sense and and my friends who are into the psychology of finance will find that hilarious but that but that's how kind of how I think about things like even actually today I was looking at I was doing some analytics on payments. So I was trying to map out the path to becoming an unlimited customer and like you know how long are people pay as you go customers are most people pay as you go customers first or they jump right to it like just sort of figuring some of those things out. And, and I was also emailing people who should switch to unlimited because they will save money. And it turned out that one of those companies on the list was like a law firm that exclusively works with Virginia, local governments to make sure they're capturing all of their revenue. And I was like, This is hilarious, because I've been going back and forth with our local Virginia government on taxes, and it's like, okay, you know, and I pay them a lot in taxes every year. And I'm like, I'm getting a little bit of that money back, because this person is a vendor to them is paying us and it's this beautiful cycle of the economy, right? where, you know, money is kinetic and wants to be moving. And money moving is a beautiful thing. So, so that's kind of how I think about it. That's, I think that's where I will end up going with this. But it remains to be seen on Hacker News, it did seem like they were willing to negotiate with some people and at least extend the free nature of the subscriptions API until the end of 2021. So I think we will, we will reach out to them about that. Because I mean, it is a great product. Like it's a it's a really, really good product. And as someone who personally dealt with managing your own merchant account, and dealing with the banks, and and all that stuff at an old job, like that was such a headache. And stripe takes a lot of that away. And if you know, our most valuable asset is our time, stripe does give us a lot of our time back. And maybe I just have to suck it up that they are pricing for it after I mean, Patrick Mackenzie's whole thing is charged more in the works for them. So I can't really blame them. Yeah, I think that the communication on it is a you know, so some people say, you know, act as if your actions could end up on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow, or, you know, act as if they could be blowing up on Twitter or on Hacker News. I think that's the modern version of that.
Colleen Schnettler 22:12
To me, it seems like the real problem here is that it used to be free. And we we being the people who use it, were under the impression it was always going to get rolled up in the entire in the price. And that has changed. I mean, I think it's a great product, but I literally put someone on the subscriptions API three months ago. So that is frustrating.
Michele Hansen 22:34
Yeah, and then there's a whole thing about it was free, or you know, you were you were paying through through the other fees already paying stripe. And now it's something else on top of that, like, so when we launched our Geocodio Maps product. And I think this was 2018 or 2019. And we like we already had a free sort of like basic preview map that we generated for people for a long time. And then we made this more more advanced mapping platform that's sort of like you could call it like Tableau-light, specifically focused on maps. And we went back and forth quite a bit on how do we price this, how do we integrate it with the product, like, we really didn't want to take away that thing that was free for people. Because we didn't want them to exactly have that feeling of Wow, this used to be free, and now you're charging me for it, but it hasn't changed and, or even if it has like, I only wanted the basic thing like that was fine for me. Like we really wanted to respect that some people only needed the basic map. And people who wanted something more advanced could go somewhere else and pay for that. Now that's created all sorts of other headaches for us about integration of the products, and we'll probably be integrating it more into the product in the future. But still keeping some amount of free because I think once you release something, especially if it's free, it's really hard to claw that back. Which is why you know, we were talking about this last week or two weeks ago, you're talking about what your your free tier would be, and all that kind of stuff like that is a really, really important thing to get right in the beginning. Are you doing are you doing free tier are you doing free trial? Like what are those? What are those amounts? And also, what are you getting out of that right? Like basically what you get out of a free tier is not having to do as much marketing and sales as you would if you had to pitch everybody upfront before they can use the product. But being very deliberate about what those free tiers are because as as we're seeing with stripe if you make something free, and then you charge for the exact same thing later, or you charge for it plus a whole bunch of other people, features that people don't need. People are going to get upset? Yeah, rightfully so I think.
So you mentioned that you kind of have thought a little bit about pricing, but not enough to really talk about it. So let's talk about.
Colleen Schnettler 25:13
Okay. So I looked at a few players in this space, the ones I'm familiar with are upload care and cloudinary. cloudinary is one I've actually used before. And it's very popular in the rails community, they have a pretty generous free tier. So their free tier, you get 25 monthly credits, and a monthly credit is described as 25,000 transformations, or 25 gigs of storage, or 25 gigs of net viewing bandwidth. And I assume you can mix and match these three aspects of their service in any way you want to hit that 25 k number. That being said, it's really hard to know if you're going to go over that number or not. I mean, that is pretty confusing. If you look at that, like how are you supposed to have an idea of if you're going to exceed that with transformations? If you're allowing your users to do transformations and different file sizes? I'm not sure.
Michele Hansen 26:15
A combination of the How do you like Do they have examples. It's like your user uploads an image and then they decide to rotate it and and change the colors and inverted and everything.
Colleen Schnettler 26:28
They might, it's kind of hard to tell from this pricing page. And as I mentioned, at the top of the episode, I didn't really do my homework on this yet. So it might be somewhere in this documentation. But at first glance, it is challenging to see exactly how that's all gonna stack up when you actually put it in your application.
Michele Hansen 26:49
Like, do you know what your customers are actually paying for this like, like when you as a developer have built a website for people, you've said that you've used some of these services? Do you know what they're actually paying?
Colleen Schnettler 27:02
I don't, because I have used the free tier of cloud Neri but for file heavy applications. And I have worked there's one company in particular, and we were really file heavy, heavy. We rolled it ourselves. So our costs were the developer time to set up the system, the upload system, and then the cost of storage in AWS and then the cost of, you know, egress bandwidth, those kinds of things as users use the service.
Michele Hansen 27:35
So it sounds like what you're competing with, then is the developers time to build something themselves plus whatever they would be paying s3 for the storage.
Colleen Schnettler 27:48
Yeah, I think that's reasonable. And I think that's a more realistic comparison to comparing them to these big players like the upload care or the cloudinary. Because I don't provide any of those extra services like the transformations in the AI and the filtering. So yes, I think it is more accurate to describe it as the developers time. And whatever the you know, current storage and CDN fees they're paying right now,
Michele Hansen 28:17
it is important to note that competitors can be as much companies as they can be processes. And, you know, a competitor can be the amount of time someone would take to do something themselves. So that talking about that pain reminds me of our ongoing segment here, which is calling read story brand. Yeah. And so talking about the pain the user faces and the problem they're going through, makes me curious for what you read and StoryBrand. This week, and how it relates to your nascent business.
Colleen Schnettler 28:57
Yeah, so this week, I read the chapter on guides. And so the author of this book talks a lot about how everyone is the hero in their own story, a lot of brands come in, and they position themselves as the hero, they're going to solve all your problems. But that's not what you should do. You as a brand should position yourself as the guide. So your customer is the hero, you are the guide, and you are showing them the way that's going to lead them to a solution. So the author talks about two characteristics of a guide. One is empathy, and the second is authority. And he says that three things every human being wants most are to be seen, heard and understood, which pretty much also sounds applicable to parenting and life. I think that's pretty reasonable. Right? So we talked a little he talks a little bit about empathy. Let's start with empathy, because that's the first thing you have to do. So how do you show empathy? Again, is this a course on business or a course on life? I don't know. Anyway, a few examples he gives an empathetic statements are we understand how it feels to, nobody should have to experience like you we are frustrated by. So first step is establishing empathy for me specifically for my brand, I think frustration might be one, like you, I am frustrated by having to do this annoying process over and over and over or like you, I am frustrated that this is just such a pain. And then he talks about authority. And he distinguishes between authority and competence. Because you don't want to come off as a braggart, you don't want to come off as a no at all. I don't want to position myself as well, you used your root API keys, that was stupid, you know, I don't want to position myself as a jerk, like, I want to position myself as competent, empathetic and competent. So you'd want just the right amount of authority, not so much that your customer feels belittled. So he gave four examples of how you could you could do this. One is testimonials. Two is statistics. And who doesn't love statistics?
Michele Hansen 31:09
Most people, but go on...
Colleen Schnettler 31:11
three awards, and four is logos of companies that have worked with you.
Michele Hansen 31:16
Yeah, like I mean, numbers are very convincing. Unless they're too good, though. Like, like our NPS score is stupidly high. Like, it's somewhere in the 90s. And at one point, we had it on our website. And people were like, I don't think that's real, like, Where is that and I can make sure we get like an NPS site that like people that actually like feeds it, and like it says it's clear. And then we're like, we'll just, we'll just take this statistic off, instead, do logos and testimonials.
Colleen Schnettler 31:47
So when the author talks about positioning yourself as a guide, he talks about the first impressions, both with people and with businesses. And he says, a great first impression is made by doing two things, the first thing someone is going to do when they meet you, or when they interface with your business is can I trust this person? or business? And can I respect this person or business? So the empathy we're showing early on in this process, leads to trust. And so our goal as a company is my goal as a company, I guess, is to guide the customer or the hero to the solution. So I am not the hero, I am the guide.
Michele Hansen 32:33
Yeah, your business is Mr. Miyagi. And your customers, The Karate Kid. It's already reading that book. Like after reading that book. I was like, Oh, my gosh, I'm seeing this whole, this guide, Hero motif everywhere.
Colleen Schnettler 32:49
Yes, I'm seeing it in movies. I'm seeing it in successful businesses. I'm seeing it everywhere. So something else I wanted to talk to you about is my software product, which has finally reached beta status and Heroku, which is really exciting, because now it's available on the general Heroku marketplace. But it's kind of sad, because it is not available for sale, the way it works is I have to get 100 users 100 before I can actually try and charge for it. So that is like a great milestone that I'm excited about. But what I want to talk about is what I should do now. And I'm going to give you a multiple choice test. Okay, so what should I do next, a more tech stuff. I want to build more stuff. There's another feature I want for myself that I want to build me make it available as a standalone product, like on its own website and its own world. See do marketing on Heroku. So focus on my Heroku marketing page d a lot of choices sorry, D make available on another marketplace like a CloudFlare or II II, II make a marketing website.
Michele Hansen 34:07
So I think those options were a focus on Heroku be focus on non Heroku plot like D platforming it entirely. Option C was further integrating with Heroku like something about Heroku right, and option D was putting it on cloud flares platform. And then option he was building a marketing website. Did I get that right?
Colleen Schnettler 34:38
Yeah, that's pretty close.
Michele Hansen 34:40
Okay, so stop building at this point. So I think like, at least at this point, you're focusing on you're focusing on distribution and marketing, which is really good.
Colleen Schnettler 34:50
I knew you were gonna say that.
Michele Hansen 34:53
Colleen, you need to do some selling first.
Colleen Schnettler 34:55
I know you're gonna say that.
Michele Hansen 34:57
Right and You know that this whole thing about Heroku not being able to charge for it until you have 100 customers, I think that could be dangerous for you, because it allows you to punt on pricing. So just to challenge you, I'm gonna say option B, or the C or D, whichever CloudFlare, right? Like, depending on how important you think channels are, like those channels are going to be for your distribution, like, do you think you can have your own distribution? Or do you need to rely on a marketplace, selling it somewhere else, which will force you to develop pricing, also to like, get people paying for it, which is both the most financially rewarding part about it and super motivating, which will encourage you to keep working on it. But I think it's time to step away from Heroku for a little bit and try to actually go out and sell the damn thing.
Colleen Schnettler 35:58
And I know that just because someone uses a free product does not mean they're going to pay for it. So is anyone actually going to pay for it?
Michele Hansen 36:05
Exactly. And you need to figure that out now before you spend more time on the tech.
Colleen Schnettler 36:12
Yeah, I think that is excellent advice. And you're absolutely right, because I've kind of been in this perpetual state of not being able to charge for it. I've really haven't had to sort out any of these issues like we'll be we'll pay for it. How do I find people all the normal issues when you're trying to sell a product? So all right, that's my goal. That's what I'm going to work on. And that's going to wrap up today's episode of the software social podcast. You can reach us on Twitter, at @softwaresocpod. Thank you for listening. Send me all your good vibes.
