

How should we price our startup? - inprogress
http://www.redline.cc/welcome
Hello Hacker News,<p>We need some help!  We launched our startup Redline, http://www.redline.cc, into private beta a few months back.  We are about ready to make it public and as part of that we want to introduce a pricing model.  We have had some lively discussions about what to price it and how to determine if that is the right price but all our solutions feel like we are just guessing.  The only thing we can agree on is that we have a free tier, a qa tier and a production tier.  Beyond that, what should we set as the initial prices and how should we run pricing tests after that?
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mixmax
Some time ago I wrote a blogpost about how you can maximise the profit in your
pricing using a bit of hacking.

<http://www.maximise.dk/getting-product-pricing-right/>

If you use the idea I'd love to hear about it.

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inprogress
Cool, we will take a look and give you some feedback.

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cocoadev
This is an interesting problem for a number of startups. Revenue generation is
a vexing problem and one that I assume you will iterate over numerous times.

When thinking of online services there seems to be a few ways in which to
generate revenue. Advertising, Subscription, per-click or data selling are
pretty much the main revenue generation mechanisms. If we break them down and
assume that user experience is key above all else for your product and brand
then Advertising take a back seat. It doesn't seem as though your product
really allows in concept a good space for throwing an add or two in the mix.
Doing so would create an annoying an ugly experience for users. I don't think
that it is entirely out of the question, however, you have or will have a
group of users who are using your product as a tool. There is a good
possibility they might need other tools to help get the job done as well.
Sending weekly emails with possible tools a particular user might need would
help generate advertising revenue.

Charging Per click or per use would also be super annoying and I don't
recommend it at all. A low priced subscription model which allows unlimited
use gives the user the ability to interact with your product without the
unpleasantness of ads or paying "per-click". The actual price for the service
should be looked at closely and iterated over several times as adoption
becomes higher.

The last item on the list is data selling. You can track what your customers
are doing what they are interacting with and make some assumptions on why. I'm
sure that there are a number of people who are super interested in that data
and would be willing to pay for it.

I hope that helps answer your question.

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inprogress
That does help! What would you suggest that we start the initial prices at?

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fieldforceapp
Hi, for us, this would have been a great visual addition to the HTML preview
features built into Beanstalk...
<http://beanstalkapp.com/features/collaboration>

Maybe the Wildbit boys would be open to some affiliate program pricing for
you?

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duiker101
It seems interesting, unfortunately while trying I got a 404 after submitting
the test bug, I was really interested in seeing the part behind the scenes ...

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inprogress
Thanks for giving it a try! Could you give me a little more info about the
problem you saw? We just gave the system a quick test and everything seems to
be working. If you have specifics please email me at doug <at> redline <dot>
cc.

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duiker101
I dropped you an email ;)

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ainsleyb
This looks a lot like BugHerd (<http://www.bugherd.com>). Might be worth
looking at what they do?

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luvablerasta
i like the UI of redline better. Quick and easy integration. and free too :)

