Pricing is an ever-evolving topic for most companies. On September 17, 2020, Women in Big Data hosted a pricing workshop with Fergus O’Reilly as a part of our Entrepreneur series. Fergus is a Product Manager at Stripe. Prior to Stripe, Fergus was the Head of Product Management and Quote-to-Cash Solutions for SAP Sales Cloud, and he has led product strategy for high-growth SaaS businesses.

In his talk, Fergus spoke about when one should think about pricing and the various phases to go through in doing that. In the beginning of a startup journey, it’s much more important to think about the product and the value it will deliver to the target customers and to iterate to get to a product market fit. Eventually you’ll be able to use the leverage you have to decide how to monetize your venture. Once you have your first customer, it’s time to think about pricing and packaging. Iterating on feedback from the market is also an important part of the process.

Fergus mentioned that one of the easiest levers to move in a young company is pricing. Adding features is hard, adding distribution channels is hard, adding people is hard, but changing a price point (and through that getting more or better qualified users/customers of your product) is one of the easiest levers to turn early on in the process.

During the talk, Fergus also got into the details of:

• How to know what is it you’re monetizing
• How to know and sell your value
• How to think about pricing models, SaaS pricing & packaging, pricing tiers
• How to find and iterate on your price points
• How to choose your pricing metrics
• How to think about technical & feature add-ons, discounting and uplifts
• Revenue recognition gotchas!

For entrepreneurs thinking about this topic, Fergus recommends some great resources:

• Andreessen Horowitz – https://a16z.com/tag/pricing/
• Price Intelligently – https://www.priceintelligently.com/blog
• Blogs from many of the vendors of subscription billing solutions discuss SaaS pricing strategies – Stripe, Zuora, Chargify, Cheddar, Chargebee, BillingPlatform

See this link for Fergus’ presentation.

I would highly encourage you to watch Fergus’ talk.

Thank you for your time. Fergus!