

Ask HN: Help me price my product. What's the most you would pay for this? - cdvonstinkpot

Hi,<p>I'm toying with pricing on my dedicated server offerings, detailed here: http://superspeedyservers.com/Our_Product.html<p>The hardware configuration is as follows:<p>Single Intel E3-1290v2 3.7GHz - 4.1GHz (Turbo) Quad Core (8 core HyperThreading) CPU<p>32GB RAM<p>1x 228GB 10k RPM 6Gb/s SAS Drive (3x3 HW RAID10 w/ 2GB Writeback Cache)<p>1x 64GB 6Gb/s SATAIII SSD (1x1 HW RAID1 w/ 2GB Writeback Cache)<p>1x static IP on a 1Gb NIC/Link, bandwidth in your choice of 20, 30, 50, 75, or 100 TB tiers.<p>Daily onsite backups<p>Thanks,<p>-c
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acesubido
As the kalzumeus blog would say about pricing, base your pricing not on how
much it would cost you, but on how much value your product gives to your
users.

Based on your recent post about your specific target market (Wall St.), talk
to them. Based on your recent post it seems that you're doing high-volume B2B
transactions. If you ask HN about how much we would pay for that, you would
get lesser value from our answers since we would compare your hardware
offering to EC2 instances, which I guess, isn't the type of market you're
after.

Talk to the Wall St. guys you're targeting, call them up or send them an SMS,
grab 30 minutes of their time and treat them out for coffee. Don't ask them
how much they'd pay for it, instead, spark up a conversation about what
they're currently using and if you're lucky they'll tell you how much they're
spending for it. Watch out for keywords on what they value. You can charge
more by offering what they value.

If they value SLA's, high-level support and a specific amount of latency,
charge based on that.

After talking with them, tell them and their IT team to subscribe to your
mailing list which will not spam them, but educate them about handling
financial data coupled with your hardware.

Gain their trust from your expertise, close sales from that mailing list once
you launch.

~~~
cdvonstinkpot
Thank you for your detailed reply. After reading it I went & found a finance
forum online & applied to join, so I can ask them some market research
questions.

Another thing I might do when I have some spending money is spend some time on
the train just taking trips to & from NYC on the Metro-North commuter railroad
& see if I can talk to some of the Wall St. guys in the bar car.

Entrepreneur magazine had an article not too long ago about how that bar car
was amongst the most influential business places around. Maybe I can have some
luck there.

I have my work cut out for me to seek out the use cases there would be for
this particular server I'm building. For example, I was able to tell from some
Google searches that World of Warcraft gamers are after the particular model
of CPU mine has because it's the fastest on the market, and their game servers
are CPU intensive. I was able to learn that they in particular need high CPU &
about 200GB storage to hold their game maps, so I reworked my storage strategy
to offer more storage & accommodate their needs.

I have to dig in to each of the potential use cases & learn what exactly their
needs are apparently, then I can target my marketing for what they're after.

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smartwater
When people Google your website and see all of these amateur posts, it's not
going to look good for you.

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timoconnor
Whatever the price, you'll be headed down a rabbit whole of pricing as a
commodity. Anyone can copy the above. I suggest you add in some differentiable
points, otherwise it will be tough competing against AWS to any Tom, Dick or
Harry who sets up a server.

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monkeyspaw
On first glance, I'd say somewhere around $500-700 per month.

~~~
cdvonstinkpot
Thanks, that's similar to what I had in mind.

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cateye
Take a look here: <http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex10>

~~~
cdvonstinkpot
There's no way I can compete against that. It's less than the cheapest colo I
could find.

~~~
proexploit
If you can't compete on price, you better be a genius marketer or have some
sort of wild value add. Ask yourself from the perspective of your customers,
why would someone choose you over other options? If your price is more, why
would the choose to pay your price?

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srom
Hi there, I may have missed the point but what is your competitive advantage
compared with PaaS like AWS ? You should also consider adding a bit of CSS to
your website. Bootstrap is your friend ( <http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/>
)

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timmm
I don't really know what any of that means. Compare yourself to other
companies and show the value that way.

