In The Process Of Getting Our SaaS Pricing Solution Ready For Beta Launch
I am Nikhil Kotcharlakota, Founder and CEO of PriceOps. PriceOps is an end-to-end pricing solution for SaaS companies.
Our flagship feature is our Pricing Engine. We provide a framework to help choose a pricing strategy and price model and once your pricing is live and start getting customers, we ingest the data and suggest the best price model or strategy to maximize your revenue or profit.
Our other most important feature is packaging. With this feature, we are going to help companies quickly be able to publish a pricing page and integrate it with a payment gateway. All of this will be low-code/no-code so it will be much easier to execute.
We are also working on a few cool things to include AI in some of the other steps in the pricing process such as Pricing research and Value modeling, but more to come on that in the future.
We haven’t launched our product yet, so no real growth numbers, but we have about 25 customers/users signed up for the beta.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
I just stumbled into pricing after my MBA. Never thought or even knew pricing was a career path. However, I just fell in love with pricing and have been in pricing for the past decade.
One thing that I did the most during my time in Pricing whether I was a Pricing Analyst or Senior Manager or Head of Pricing the thing I enjoyed the most was making Pricing more accessible within the organization so everyone understood the importance and the impact of pricing.
This mindset is what led me to explore how pricing works in SaaS. The way I did this was actually through a lot of interviews with a lot of SaaS companies while I was in the US. This helped me learn a lot about their current pricing maturity and how important different companies consider pricing.
During these conversations, I realized that there was a gap in pricing expertise and more importantly lack of standardization or tools to help with the process. I have seen how impactful pricing tools are in other sectors such as manufacturing and retail.
I actually moved back to India in 2022 and was still working at my old company remotely for a few months but eventually took the plunge and quit as the Head of Pricing and launched PriceOps. We initially started as a consulting firm and started talking to clients about their pricing requirements. However, I quickly realized that a tool can solve some of the major pain points I have heard from SaaS companies as well as consultants. This led me to pivot into creating a product that can solve the problem.
Since pivoting into a product company I talked to more than 30 different companies to understand where they are in their pricing journey and the challenges they are facing The feedback I have got has been overwhelmingly positive, a product that can help with the pricing process will be amazing.
I had enough funds to tide us over for a year.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
The first step was to outline the main pain points of the customers. So I started doing customer interviews. The main users of our product will be Pricing, Product and Marketing managers, Founders, and CFOs. So one of the ways I started connecting with Pricing folks was by posting pricing-related content in the LinkedIn Professional Pricing Society group.
I also shared my content in other LinkedIn groups, Reddit, and Twitter and got traffic and connections as I posted more content. This gave me some credibility when I did cold outreach to Pricing and Product managers at different SaaS companies.
The good part was since I was in the space and my experience in pricing I already knew of the pain points from my perspective but it gave me an opportunity to listen and understand what others in my similar position were facing when it came to SaaS pricing.
After about 25 customer interviews and customer surveys and validating the need for a tool, I outlined what such a solution could look like. The next big step was to find a co-founder. I was lucky enough that one of my best friends and batchmates since undergrad was a full-stack developer and a technical architect-level person.
Once the team was in place, that is when we started building the platform. I used Balsamiq to draw wireframes so I could put my thoughts on how the product should look like, and Confluence to communicate and document the technical details of Pricing. My CTO and tech team used React JS to build the UI, and Github, Kotlin and Java languages to build the backend, MongoDB to store the data.
The team built the product ready for scaling. So everything that was done was done so that it can scale, minimizing tech debt as much as possible.
As we continued to do customer interviews and understand their different processes in different companies it gave us a good idea of how to build our tool.
Setting up or incorporating a company in India and the US took us a while. One of our cousins has an accounting and company secretary firm in India that helped incorporate in India.
We used Firstbase.io to incorporate a Delaware C-corp in the US.
Have a very clear idea of the problem statement and how the product you want to build will solve the problem.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Once we started working on the product and continuing our customer interviews, my main focus was the GTM strategy. Since we really did not have the product ready yet, I started building an audience.
I did that by sharing my expertise in pricing in the way of LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter and podcasts. Interacting with other experts in the industry and responding to any issues that people have asked for regarding pricing.
Link to my blog posts:
Creating a website was the first step, and for that I used Wix. I did a pretty bad job for the first version of the website but we continued to evolve and the current website is where we are. Still definitely a work in progress.
I went all in before I got started, meaning quit my job and then started doing market research, incorporating the company, and creating an audience. My suggestion would be to do all of this before going full-time so that will increase the runway for the funds you have.
Communicate the value you deliver at every possible step. Pricing pages should have a list of benefits, not just features.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
We haven’t launched yet, but I have been pretty successful with the content strategy to attract customers and get traffic to our website. What I mean by this is, that I try to publish some kind of SaaS pricing-related content based on my experience and expertise.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Today our focus is on getting the product ready for a beta launch. We are planning to launch our MVP, including pricing pages after a couple of weeks of beta.
Currently, our GTM plan is going to be PLG motion. We plan to provide customers with resources to understand the theory behind pricing strategies and models and along with it a step-by-step guide on how to use the product as well as product tours and demos.
We have potential customers in the US as well as in India who have signed up for beta. However, once we get some traction we plan to relocate a part of the team to the US to have some presence there, as the US is still the biggest SaaS market.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Having a clear product vision is important when developing a product especially when developing a product in a space that hasn’t been done before.
Initially, when we started building the product it was pretty much done on the fly, meaning I was coming up with different concepts or features and my co-founder was building a product based on that.
However, with this process, we did not get too far. There was a lot of work that had to be redone or thrown away.
I then realized, during the start of the year that the most important aspect is to have a very clear product vision, including wireframes. So that’s what I did, for a good part of two months at the beginning of 2023. Spent a lot of time talking to customers and building a vision of what the product should look like. It also allowed me to clearly define our value proposition and the problem we were solving.
So my advice would be to do exactly that before any coding or technical work begins. Have a very clear idea of the problem statement and how the product you want to build will solve the problem. Create wireframes and UX flows to see how that works and have an overall vision for where the product could evolve in the final version. Have a 5-year plan for the product.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
Atlassian suite of products is my favorite tool for helping with the entire product development process.
Even within the Atlassian suite, Confluence is something I use even more often. From product management or as a Founder bringing in the domain expertise to help shape the product, Confluence is a great tool to share your knowledge with your team.
Jira, also part of Atlassian, is a great tool for planning development activities, document bugs, and assigning activities to team members.
Balsamiq for wireframing. I am yet to figure out how to use Figma.
Google Suite and workspaces to collaborate with the team.
Hubspot for CRM.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Most influential books are
“Hard thing about hard things - Ben Horowitz” - why I love this is Ben talks about building a company and being a CEO in the worst bubble and 2023 was a similar situation with a downturn. So something to learn from.
Win, Keep, Grow - Mark Stiving” - An amazing book on subscription business model. A must-read for every company in SaaS.
“Stories that stick - Kindra Hall” - A very important skill for anyone building a business or a brand, storytelling. And this book by Kindra Hall is a must-read to be able to build that skill.
“Zero to One - Peter Thiel” - This is a well-known book for the impact it has on founders or entrepreneurs.
Most influential podcasts are
“Impact Pricing - Mark Stiving” - Mark brings in a lot of experts in the field of pricing and deep dives into their experience and suggestions on Pricing.
“SaaStr podcast” - this is a really good one to learn, especially because they bring in people from
“Getlatka - Nathan Latka” - Nathan Latka’s podcast is very interesting. His questions and the answers he brings out of his interviewees is very different and refreshing.
Newsletters:
“Growth Unhinged - Kyle Poyar” - A very amazing and insightful newsletter. Kyle covers everything that can help with growth and he brings the best of the insights.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Founders start working on having a very clear pricing strategy from the beginning. Just the same way you have a product strategy.
Price transparency is a real game change. It will help with better conversion rates or at least remove the friction that someone will have when they get to your pricing page and the only option is to talk to sales sometime later in the day or the next day. So publish your pricing pages.
Communicate the value you deliver at every possible step. Pricing pages should have a list of benefits, not just features.
Don’t give away your product for free. I.e. freemium pricing strategy. It works fine for certain types of products but in general not a great strategy. Even if you have a clear paywall and communicate the importance of features behind the paywall.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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