Every stage of building a business demands a different maturity from the product. So, it would be futile to assume that we could always sell with a well-made slide deck and no real product to support it. However, the mindset about trying to gauge the pulse of the market before building anything is what we need to inculcate. How smartly can we figure out what our customers will pay for? Also, how can we figure out if we stop offering something, and will our customers continue to pay us?

At every stage of product building, we need to attempt to find the answers to both these questions, but our strategy to find these answers must evolve continually. For a well-matured product with a large customer base, it may not be possible to find out these answers merely by speaking to a few select customers (Chapter 11, Eliminate Waste – Data Versus Opinions, discusses the futility of doing this). However, we can introduce product feature teasers that can be rolled out to a large customer base and gather data from this. Pricing plans can be used to test which features or feature plans draw more interest from our target group.

In my start-up, we had, in fact, experimented with pricing quite a bit. In the early stages of product development, we didn't show our pricing plans on the website. We instead sent out customized product brochures to anyone who enquired on our website. This gave us ample leeway to try different combinations of features and different pricing sets. We also found out that our customers responded better when our price was not a round number. For instance, people responded better to a product priced as Rs. 67,700 rather than Rs 65,000. As we started getting repeat customers and referrals through customers, we figured out which pricing worked best. In the initial stages, we were talking only to small businesses and were dealing directly with the decision-makers. So, the impression that our pricing and product created on that individual mattered. However, when we started talking to bigger enterprise clients, some of these tactics didn't work. They had isolated teams that make product buying decisions, and we couldn't afford to be random in our pricing. We had to freeze on the pricing and feature bundles. We couldn't afford to waste time and experiment with pricing anymore. This is when we started to put up our pricing on the website.

Of course, these findings may have been quirky and unique to our product and market situation. Yet, the possibility that we could experiment with such aspects of the product excited us. The same mindset needs to be carried into what goes into our product at every stage of product building. Just because we have a larger customer base, it doesn't mean that we need to build a feature because we think it's useful for customers or because we feel it's a cool thing to build. Even when it is a feature that you need, you must ask if you really should build it. So if you're asking, "What should we build?", I'm going to respond with a counter question: "What would you rather not build?"