
Failed SaaS post-mortem: validate your pricing model like I didn't - elliotbnvl
https://elliotbonneville.com/blog/validate-your-pricing-model-like-i-didnt/
======
cl42
> _I just spent about three weeks bootstrapping a SaaS as a solo founder. For
> context, you can read my description of it here, and I’ve talked about the
> inspiration behind it and motivations here and here._

... wow, that's crazy fast. I'd argue you didn't validate anything with that
time frame. It takes months to build a reputation or awareness around a
product to give people time to make a decision. As SaaStr says, give your
product/startup TWO YEARS.[1]

Three weeks isn't enough time to even pretend you're bootstrapping. That's a
vacation from work...

> _The basic concept was solid: provide an insanely simple way for business
> intelligence consultants to manage project data._

... ESPECIALLY IN B2B.

\---

[1] [https://www.saastr.com/if-youre-going-to-do-a-saas-start-
up-...](https://www.saastr.com/if-youre-going-to-do-a-saas-start-up-you-have-
to-give-it-24-months/)

~~~
elliotbnvl
Hmm, not sure on this. If the problem is solving is big enough, I would think
people would bite as soon as they're able to validate the software solves
their problem. Check out how Jason Cohen founded WP Engine as a counterpoint.

I mean, perhaps ALL of software is so saturated there are no places where this
can happen, but I'd rather spend a couple of years discovering that then spend
a couple of years learning that one solution I tried to sell isn't valid.

~~~
cl42
I'm not saying it's _impossible_ ; just because it _might_ have worked for
Jason Cohen doesn't mean you should expect such a short timeframe to work for
you. That was also his 4th startup, I believe...

As Jason says in his interviews, if it were that easy, then we'd all have 1000
customers and bootstrapped startups.

~~~
elliotbnvl
Conversely, because it _probably_ won't work, is that a good reason not to
try? Given the asymmetrical nature of the risk (three weeks is not a huge
chunk out of my life, unlike three years I spent on a previous startup), it
seems like a reasonable investment. If it does work, the payoff is worth the
risk imo. Or at least, it was in this case -- which is why I took the risk.

~~~
a13n
While drastically decreasing the amount of risk you take, you're also
drastically decreasing the likelihood of success.

~~~
elliotbnvl
Generally speaking, I agree... but does it really apply here?

Wouldn't I be taking a risk in not taking a risk, thus decreasing the
likelihood of success... which should then increase the likelihood of success?

I only say this for the sake of argument and I think there's something wrong
with this logic, but for the life of me I can't find it.

~~~
cl42
I think the point he’s making is that you didn’t take enough time to validate
either way. If you do this with every idea you can launch and shut down 12
companies a year and not give any one a real chance of validation.

------
optymizer
I get the impression that you're rushing - rushing to build it, rushing to get
a customer, rushing to get to some MRR. Why?

Why the 90 hour weeks? Why make critical business decisions without any
metrics after hearing some guy on the internet talk about $50/user? Because
he's famous?

Most experienced people know to have patience: patience to find the right
solution, patience to find the right users and patience to make the right
connections. It all takes time and you only gave it 3 weeks?

Sorry but you sound like you want to make a quick buck and retire early, or
maybe you need the money now. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not really a
"SaaS post-mortem", it's more of a "I don't have the time or patience to
invest in this SaaS".

All I can say is, have more patience, don't rush into things and don't throw
your hands up in the air and give up when it's not going as well as you
imagined in your mind. You have to persevere if you're going to run a startup.
Good luck!

~~~
satvikpendem
In the article they say they want to make 2k MRR in 2 months so it seems like
there's some external pressure present.

------
fourseventy
You gave up after 3 weeks dude? You will never succeed at founding a startup
with that attitude. I've been bootstrapping my startup for 2+ years and after
several pivots we are just now finding our stride with ~$10k MRR.

I also completely disagree on the assumption that pricing had anything to do
with your failure. Your startup didn't fail because of the economics, it
failed because your product didn't provide enough value to customers.

~~~
elliotbnvl
> You gave up after 3 weeks dude? You will never succeed at founding a startup
> with that attitude.

Well, I've also done it the other way where I spent three years at a startup
and couldn't find traction. I'm just trying to hit the other extreme as well,
and so hopefully land somewhere in the sweet spot in the middle.

> you failed because your product didn't provide enough value to customers.

Hmm, this is another great way of putting it -- value translates into pricing
pretty directly, so if you can't charge enough there's probably not enough
value. I think that's another way of saying the same thing.

~~~
carlosdp
> Well, I've also done it the other way where I spent three years at a startup
> and couldn't find traction.

There is a massive space in-between those timeframes =P In this case, it
doesn't seem you even actually built out a real MVP (not just the front-end)
and tried to sell to customers. You hadn't actually validated whether people
actually wanted the product for real, and just killed it because of one
person's experience delivered in a talk?

If you're taking PG's essays to heart, your _only_ concern at the beginning
should be building the thing and finding customers that really want it. The
pricing stuff is the easiest thing by far to change (checkout patio11's stuff
on this, if you haven't).

Maybe this one really would have been a bust. But if your goal is to reach $2k
MRR in 2 months, there's little chance you're gunna get there by building 3
week projects and gaming it out in your head instead of just selling to
people. Choose 1 thing that you have a customer lined up for that really
really wants it, and spend those two months building that out and making them
happy.

------
arthurofbabylon
This is... bullshit. The insights are forced – the rules for new businesses
aren't so fixed that the advice from an internet persona and a brief
questioning of the business model would kill a business.

And to call it a post-mortem? Forgive me, but post-mortem analyses are
valuable when slow – these insights come too quick, without enough chewing
going on.

~~~
fatnoah
For some reason, this article really aggravated me.

The conclusion about the pricing model feels the most forced to me. What he's
really saying is that he wanted to limit the number of customers to 25 or so
and achieve a $2k MRR within 2 months. The reason for this was to have more
time for other pursuits, such as homeschooling the imminent child or other
pursuits. Implied there is some amount of time required that is << 40
hours/week.

Reading his initial blog post, he doesn't mention the pricing model at all. He
does mention taking a week to build a POC that his dad can show to his co-
workers as well as contacting a few hundred BI folks via LinkedIn. That
doesn't seem like a terrible approach. Build something, see what resonates,
etc.

Reading the article, what really seems to have happened is that he spent a
week creating a UI POC, shopped it to 30 BI folks on LinkedIn over two weeks,
and didn't get traction. I'm not sure what happened to the 20-30 reach outs
per day.

The real reason for the failure wasn't the pricing model, it was that the
developer wanted something that would earn $2k/month with little to no effort
on his part. The main reason the project failed was because he did no research
in building it, and then decided not to continue it. The "pricing model" comes
in when he decides what # of customers he can support in whatever amount of
time he was willing the spend. He then extrapolated a number from that to get
$2k MRR. Then, and only then, did he actually look at what comparable products
on the market charge.

The more I think about it, I'm pretty sure the whole exercise, including the
"pricing model" conclusion, was simply an exercise in content generation. If
so, well played, sir.

~~~
elliotbnvl
Hey -- very interesting that this article aggravates you. I'd really like to
know more about what resonated with you personally, even if that resonation
was negative.

You've given me a lot to chew on, and I really appreciate the unbiased,
perhaps even adversarial, response.

> _The conclusion about the pricing model feels the most forced to me. What he
> 's really saying is that he wanted to limit the number of customers to 25 or
> so and achieve a $2k MRR within 2 months._

I think this is an incorrect assumption. The idea going in is if I can get to
$2k MRR within two months, that'll free me up to quit my day job by extending
my runway significantly. Then I can spend all my time working on the SaaS,
working on the more time-consuming parts like marketing, organic content
generation and outreach, etc.

> _Reading the article, what really seems to have happened is that he spent a
> week creating a UI POC, shopped it to 30 BI folks on LinkedIn over two
> weeks, and didn 't get traction. I'm not sure what happened to the 20-30
> reach outs per day._

Well, I had started doing those 20-30 reach outs per day, but on like day two
I found Jason's video and it blew my mind enough to disrupt me from that
course of action immediately. I stopped doing outreach to think about it (why
would I want to bother people about something I may not even ship?).

After spending some time thinking about it and discussing whether or not I
should continue with a couple of my mentors and my dad, we all agreed that my
time could be better spent elsewhere.

> _The real reason for the failure wasn 't the pricing model, it was that the
> developer wanted something that would earn $2k/month with little to no
> effort on his part._

I hesitate to call this "failure" anymore after reading the other comments on
this post, which have been really helpful in shaping how I think about this
whole story.

Instead, it's a thought-through decision to put my effort in elsewhere.

If I can spend the same amount of time building a POC and getting 25 paying
users, with all else being equal, why would I want to spend that time building
a POC for which I can charge less? Isn't it natural to build a startup where I
can charge more, if that's within the realm of possibility?

Given the fact that I was only three weeks in, I wasn't suffering from sunk
cost fallacy of "well, I've come this far -- might as well keep going now!".

> _The "pricing model" comes in when he decides what # of customers he can
> support in whatever amount of time he was willing the spend. He then
> extrapolated a number from that to get $2k MRR._

Actually, the $2k MRR comes from picking a somewhat arbitrary goal that I
thought was slightly out of reach, and significant enough. I think there were
a couple of people that mentioned hitting $2k MRR within 6 - 12 months in
Indie Hacker podcasts, so I thought -- if they can do it that fast, is there
any reason I can't do it faster?

My thinking here comes from that quote Tim Ferriss likes to share, "why not
six months instead of ten years?"

So... why not give it a shot, ya know?

> _Then, and only then, did he actually look at what comparable products on
> the market charge._

Actually, those numbers came up in conversations I was having with the people
I reached out to on LinkedIn.

They started talking about price, and I watched Jason's video, at around the
same time.

The reason I didn't mention anything about price in my first article was
simply because I legit hadn't even thought of it at all.

Once I did think of it -- well, I'll end with asking this rhetorical question
again: if I could build something and sell it to 25 people for either X or 2X,
why would I build something I can only sell for X? It makes sense to go for
the 2X, right?

Cheers, and thanks again for taking the time to write up that comment. It's
been helpful to me in thinking about how I went about this and what I will do
differently next time.

> _The more I think about it, I 'm pretty sure the whole exercise, including
> the "pricing model" conclusion, was simply an exercise in content
> generation. If so, well played, sir._

Welllllll... about that. The articles I've been writing about this process are
definitely an exercise in content generation. The process itself, though, is
just me fumbling my way through this with few mentors and little experience.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_if I could build something and sell it to 25 people for either X or 2X, why
would I build something I can only sell for X? It makes sense to go for the
2X, right?_

Obviously, if you are presented with two options for things you can sell with
similar ease to similar numbers of people, you should pick the higher priced
one.

But you don’t have another product like that, do you? You have this one. Why
not try and sell this one, instead of worrying about some theoretical 2x
alternative.

If you find the 2x alternative, why waste your time with _that_ when you could
just find a 4x alternative and build that instead!

The end of this road is obvious: just build something you can charge one
customer $2k / month for. Presto!

~~~
elliotbnvl
> _But you don’t have another product like that, do you? You have this one._

You're describing the sunk cost fallacy, and the beauty of having spent only
three weeks on this idea is that I haven't sunk very much cost at all. I could
very easily go for the one that makes 2X.

> _If you find the 2x alternative, why waste your time with that when you
> could just find a 4x alternative and build that instead!_

It's a sliding scale. The higher the price point, the longer the sales cycle.
If you sell a $5 widget on your website, a consumer can buy that without a
moment's thought.

Selling a $100k/yr enterprise software subscription can take a year. Or two.
And require having been in the industry for three or four or ten, as other
folks in this thread have pointed out.

My goal is to find the sweet spot between pricing my product so cheap that I
can't consistently acquire enough customers on my self-funding budget and so
expensive that the sales cycle is too long.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
That's not the sunk cost fallacy unless sticking with it now is actually a bad
idea. I don't think you have enough info to determine that, and it's a lot
less work to do so than it is to build something else and validate it.

------
codegeek
" just spent about three weeks bootstrapping "

Great share but please don't call it "Failed SAAS". I respect what you did but
calling an experiment of 3 weeks a failed SAAS is unfair to real SAAS
businesses that actually fail. 3 weeks is not enough. You can call it "I tried
an experiment for 3 weeks and moving on".

~~~
elliotbnvl
Hmm, what do you think the cutoff that determines a "real" SaaS is?

~~~
codegeek
My point is that 3 weeks is not enough time to actually do the hard things:
marketing, sales and most important: listening to potential customers. Not to
mention all the other stuff that comes with running any business and not just
SAAS which are operational, customer support etc etc.

You will only know if the business was a failure until you have done all of
that and that takes at least 2 years in my humble opinion.

What you did was an idea validation that you tried for 3 weeks which btw has a
great summary in your writing but I would not call it a failed SAAS. You
haven't done the actual grinding. I say this as a bootstrapped SAAS guy who
has been grinding for 6 years :)

~~~
balfirevic
> You will only know if the business was a failure until you have done all of
> that and that takes at least 2 years in my humble opinion.

But why does that matter? The goal is not to conclusively prove that some
particular business is beyond hope of success, the goal is to find the one
which is successful.

I'm not necessarily saying that 3 weeks is just the right amount of time to
spend on a single idea. But if you want to maximize your chances of achieving
success in, say, 3 years, what _is_ the right amount of time?

~~~
elliotbnvl
Great point! That's the question I'm asking myself too.

I'm erring on the side of moving on too quickly, rather than waiting too long,
because I like to move fast and I've already made the mistake of spending way
too long on something.

I think it's really non-obvious, and there aren't a lot of good heuristics
that measure how long is long enough -- and it's my belief that most
heuristics simply aren't aggressive enough. One of my mottos is "most
limitations are conceptual and self-imposed," and I see a lot of self-imposed
limitations in the SaaS community, mostly because people have no idea what can
be achieved when you set really high goals... not sure why.

------
nakodari
As a fellow bootstrapped founder, you don't have to worry about drowning in
support requests. Simply offer two pricing models, a $10-20/month without
support (just work once on a good FAQ that answers the majority of questions),
and a bigger $49-$69/month plan that comes with email support. Just because
you're offering email support does not mean you're going to get lots of
emails, you will be surprised how much a good FAQ reduces support emails.

~~~
elliotbnvl
Great point! I've dealt with customer support for a SaaS in the past and a
good FAQ definitely helps.

I think I placed too much emphasis on the pain of dealing with support in my
article. The other motivation was really just that, having thought about
pricing, the whole idea of charging more and dealing with support less sounds
more appealing than the opposite, and given that I could elect to follow a
path that leads to that with little latent cost incurred, why not do it?

------
ryanwaggoner
Amazing job on building something, but you're giving up way too soon. With
respect to Jason, there's no guarantee that every SaaS charging less than $50
/ month is going to drown in support costs. Let's do the math, shall we?

Suppose you want to make $10k MRR with this. You need 500 monthly users,
right? Realistically, a good chunk of them aren't going to even use the
product very often, despite paying for it. This is even more true since it's
cheap. You could easily end up with fewer than 100 of the 500 logging in and
using the product on any given day. Of those, maybe 5-10 are going to actually
need support, and you could easily cover half of that with an FAQ, training
videos, etc. So on any given day, you might get 2-5 emails from your 500
customers. Even if it's 10x that, you could probably churn through 20-30
support emails in 1-2 hours just by yourself, or you could hire someone for
$500 / month to do it for you. And support requests are going to drop over
time as you improve the product, fix bugs, etc.

For the record, none of this is theoretical. I've run multiple profitable saas
/ recurring revenue projects and I've never had to deal with "drowning" in
ongoing support requests. Supporting _free_ users is a different question, and
freemium can genuinely be challenging in terms of support requests, but even
there it's not _that_ difficult to handle larger volumes of support requests
with automated methods to cut down 90% of it. And if you have a handful of
problematic customers who are a constant source of stress, you can fire them.
They're not worth your sanity, especially for $20 / month.

A better question might be: why are you giving up so quickly? Is it really
that you think it's not possible? Or maybe something else going on here?

------
bckygldstn
> you needed to be charging at least $50, closer to $100, per month, per user,
> in order to make it as a bootstrapped solo SaaS founder

Here's the lowest monthly price plan for the TinySeed 2020 batch companies
currently on the front page [1]: 950, 250, 159, 149, 49, 49, 29, 27, 25, 10, 9

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033623](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033623)

~~~
elliotbnvl
Very interesting! Thanks for taking the time to pull those numbers.

------
polote
Hum, that's not really why you failed in my opinion.

I feel like you think building a company is only about following the good
rules. This is wrong, there is best rules to follow to create a successful
company, you need to take risks and do new things. Following the 'best
practices' is the best way to no be successful.

Regarding your pricing, you are selling to individual developers, so, to
people who never buy any professional products, and as other have said, after
3 weeks you can only say that you have not waited long enough to know if you
are failing or not.

Also you are too sure about what you are doing. If things are that obvious for
you, it means you are very likely missing something

My advice to you, forget about money, build something which satisfies your
target users for free an when you will have several of them you will
understand what they are willing to pay for. Startup life is long, you need to
be patient and persistent, you have not failed, this is only the beginning ;),
good luck

------
davidgh
> At that rate, I’d need to get between 500 and 1,000 users in order to reach
> an MRR that would let me go full-time. With that many users, as a solo
> bootstrapper, I’d be spending all of my time on support.

Sure, maybe initially as you work out the bugs and missing features. But you
don’t go from zero users to a thousand overnight, so users 1-10 will probably
have more support requests than 990-1000 because you’ve worked the kinks out
as you go.

Also, if you’re able to find people that are willing to open their wallet _for
any amount_ then you have very engaged users. As they fully integrate your
product into their workflows, you can find ways to increase the value you
provide to them with upgraded, higher-priced plans, pushing your average
monthly revenue per customer up.

------
rmason
Your objective was to close a sale. If you closed a sale you could keep
learning. If you close a sale it validates you're solving a problem people are
willing to pay to solve. At that point you're already ahead of 30% of
startups.

Jason Cohen's essays are a major influence on me and I've been doing this SaaS
stuff for over twenty years. But you can always raise your price, especially
after doing a lot of learning with a handful of early customers. But it's very
difficult to lower your price after losing the sale the first time, I've got
first hand experience here.

Three weeks is a ridiculous amount of time to judge success of a startup, you
need to invest a minimum of two years and at times during that period it will
be an absolute grind. That's why you need to be absolutely in love with your
idea or you won't have the energy to continue.

------
ricardobeat
My opinion is that you don't really have a product here, hence it can't have
failed. Your site doesn't even have a landing page explaining what the product
is, why you'd use it, how much it costs, or user accounts (it's free access?).
It barely qualifies as an MVP. That means you didn't even had a chance to
capture any leads, which in turn means you can't take any conclusions about
_anything_ , especially pricing.

> you won’t find many BI developers who are keen on trying to expense a
> monthly $75 bill

You really won't, because $75 is way too low to bother with the expense
process in any medium sized business. Maybe start at $750 instead? If you
don't feel like you could charge that, is the product really offering value?

------
brainflake
Good post - pricing is so very critical (although I do agree with others here
that three weeks is such a _very_ short timeframe). It's interesting to think
about pricing from a "what's my per-user cost so I can reasonably bootstrap
this myself", but it's usually more reasonable (and profitable) to think about
it the other way around - "what value am i providing to my user?".

The book "The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing" was a real eye opener for me as
I don't come from a business background. The crux is that don't think about it
in terms of costs, but how much value (e.g., time saved, leads generated, etc)
you are providing and if the price is worth it from the user's perspective.

------
soneca
> _" I just spent about three weeks bootstrapping a SaaS as a solo founder"_

> _" Plus, my goal is to hit $2k MRR in the next two months"_

Why that fast? Is that the right pace?

I wonder what's the right balance between validating things fast and
persisting until you make it work.

I am more inclined to the position that he should/I would have worked to make
his $20/month product grows into the value of a $100/month product.

People are never keen to spend $75 a month, unless is an investment in
something that will make them, for example, earn $500 more a month.

At the same time, there were signs that it could be an idea that he would keep
trying for an year and a half, and end up in the same place (I've been there).

How to make this decision?

~~~
elliotbnvl
> Why that fast? Is that the right pace?

My timeline is determined by my wife's due date currently. I have no idea if
it's the right pace, but I also have no idea that it's not.

Unless somebody comes along and points out why I should spend more time in a
really convincing way, I'm going to set an unreasonable and if I hit it,
great! If not, I'm probably still progressing more quickly than other people
with more modest goals.

> People are never keen to spend $75 a month, unless is an investment in
> something that will make them, for example, earn $500 more a month.

Very true. I'm just not sure the value I can deliver with this product was
ever going to be sellable at $75/mo, given the pricing the rest of the market
exhibits...

> At the same time, there were signs that it could be an idea that he would
> keep trying for an year and a half, and end up in the same place (I've been
> there).

I've been here too (3 years on one startup, never got off the ground). I'm
trying to land in the other extreme now -- moving TOO quickly. Hopefully doing
this will help me find some middle ground that's not where my preconceptions
paint it to be.

------
pier25
I'm working on my SaaS solo and I expect to work on it at least 1 year before
releasing a beta. And after that I don't expect making some profit for at
least another year, probably two.

Working 3 weeks on something and expecting it to have some value is totally
unrealistic. Yeah, maybe someone somewhere pulled that off, but it's one in a
million chance and the lowest hanging fruit has already been taken years ago.

~~~
elliotbnvl
Why did you decide to spend a year building something before releasing it?
Wouldn't you want to validate the value your product brings to the table
before spending that long on it?

> Working 3 weeks on something and expecting it to have some value is totally
> unrealistic.

Agreed -- the conversations I was having based on that were more about
projected value it might offer rather than the current value. I wanted to see
if I could people invested in the idea and my capabilities to deliver it, more
so than the actual product as it existed at that time.

~~~
pier25
> _Why did you decide to spend a year building something before releasing it?
> Wouldn 't you want to validate the value your product brings to the table
> before spending that long on it?_

One year is not that much for a one man band but a) I believe I know the value
it brings and b) even with a valuable idea you're still _very_ far away from a
successful product/company.

------
throw20200501
I am a solo founder with over 900 customers, and I get bored because they have
very few issues or support requests.

You should at least give it a try...

I have a public slack where people help each others most of the time, and I
also handle all support requests on the chat.

------
manishsharan
As a solo founder, what if I were to flip the pricing model on its head.

Let us assume I need $100 per month to survive, my Google adwords budget is
$40, my AWS /bill is expected to be $45, my overheads are $50 -- how do I
price my product ?

~~~
elliotbnvl
I think the $50-$100 figure is a rule-of-thumb, and Jason goes into some great
detail on how he arrives at those numbers in the video.

Something else which might seem more appropriate in that case is to determine
your price based on the value you deliver rather than the cost it takes you to
deliver that value.

If your value delivered is less than what it costs you to deliver that value,
you have a broken pricing model and there's no way to make it work.

~~~
manishsharan
>> If your value delivered is less than what it costs you to deliver that
value, you have a broken pricing model and there's no way to make it work.

You raise a good point. The challenge is how do you quantify the value. Should
I be using the cost of alternatives or substitutes ? Or do you evaluate the
actual value delivered by improved efficiency or revenue etc. This could turn
into a very deep rabbit hole.

------
corkill
Do they pay for other software to solve this problem?

What are the painful problems of the people with purchasing power in that
market?

At the initial stage I would be looking for them to pay you anything or agree
to pay and optimize the pricing model later.

------
blobbers
It seems like maybe you gave up a little early.

Also, 150 users seems like a ridiculously small number for any type of company
doing custom software (non F500).

...but perhaps I'm just not very learned?

~~~
zomglings
I agree that it sounds like he gave up too early, but I just wanted to say: It
is difficult for any early-stage product to get even 1 paying user, let alone
150.

------
PaulWaldman
It's challenging to develop a product without having first-hand domain
knowledge. Kudos for taking on the challenge.

------
bronson
> My goal is to hit $2k MRR in the next two months, before my first child is
> born in July.

You're about to go through a crazy experience. Instead of choosing startup
life, consider making your wife and child the most important things in your
life right now. You can spend 90 hours prototyping a startup idea any time but
you only get one chance at this.

------
elliotbnvl
tl;dr: I didn't run the numbers to understand how to price my bootstrapped
SaaS as a solo founder, and after building an awesome tool, I had to throw it
out.

Key learnings:

\- You need to include pricing as a critical failure point from the very
beginning when vetting your startup ideas.

\- You should be charging somewhere between $50 to $100/mo per user as a
bootstrapped startup founder.

\- Don't bother trying to bootstrap / self-fund enterprise software.

~~~
vermorel
Disclaimer: CEO of a midsize enterprise software company.

Frankly, I just disagree:

* Pricing is mostly irrelevant at the beginning. Even Google didn't figure out its business model and pricing long _after_ they were created. The only thing that matter initially is to gradually converge toward something the market want (it's a journey).

* Charging per user is only one of the many many options. It does not have to be that way. Many very successful software businesses don't charge that way.

* Enterprise software is (comparatively) the easiest to self-fund. Most companies in this area are bootstrapped. It takes a single client to achieve ramen profitability for a team of 2 or 3.

~~~
elliotbnvl
Yeah, that makes sense. I don't think I have the enterprise experience to land
an enterprise client, though, and the iteration length on closing a successful
sale where I could learn which tactics work and which ones don't is super
long. I imagine it would take many more years of experience than I have to
pull that off.

Response to edit: I think you make some great points, but I'm not sure how
applicable they are to a self-funded solo bootstrapper... how did you launch
your company?

My goal is to reach $2k/mrr in the next two months so that I can go full-time
on the startup and apply all of my time to making it better / marketing it
better, in order to hit escape velocity where my books are completely in the
black without having to work a day job.

~~~
vermorel
I launched my company as a self-funded solo bootstrapper straight out of
university. I took some love money, that I mostly didn't use, and bought half
of those shares back at ~4x the original price a decade down the road.

2k USD per month is nothing to a large company. Forget about the _per month_
part, just charge a flat 100k USD package with 2 or 3 payment milestones over
a quarter or two. You can give away IP too. You don't really care, you're not
going to build your end-game software product on top of a rushed prototype
anyway.

However, you have to meet with prospects (executives). Lots of them. It's
tough to even get one call, but once you get there, the one question to ask
is: what's your biggest problem? and then improvise. After many meetings, you
will see patterns emerge, both in types of problems and potential solutions.

