Pricing when you have no data

The pricing question solo founders ask the most is some version of how do I know what to charge. The honest answer is that early on you don't, and the elaborate spreadsheets founders build to answer the question are almost always a way of avoiding the only thing that actually generates the data, which is putting a price in front of a person and watching what they do.

The trap with no-data pricing is that you can spend two weeks researching competitors, building feature matrices, and reading SaaS pricing posts on the internet, and you'll end up with a number that feels defensible and is still a guess. The defensibility is the problem. It makes the guess feel like a conclusion, which makes you commit to a number you have no business committing to.

The version that gives you actual information is to pick a number that feels slightly too high, charge it to a small number of people, and learn from how they respond. Too high is the key part. If you pick a number that's comfortable, you'll learn nothing. Everyone will say it's reasonable and you'll still not know if you could have charged twice as much or half as much.

When the number is slightly too high, three things happen. Some people pay it anyway, which tells you the value is real. Some people push back and tell you what they'd actually pay, which gives you an anchor instead of a guessed one. And some people walk away, which is information you can't get any other way and which you can't interpret unless you saw it.

You can always lower a price. Raising one is much harder. Start where you can learn the most and adjust from there.

This connects to a question I answer in depth: How do I validate a product idea before building it and Why do people say they like my idea but don't buy.