You Can Ignore All Complaints About Price Because They Will Disappear As Your Service Gets Mature
I’m developing a Markdown editor called Inkdrop alone. Recently it reached $1,600 monthly profit. I’d like to quit my freelance career once it grew 2x~3x more.
It’s been 1 year since its official release. Thanks to a lot of feedback, the app successfully got evolved. I also got many complaints about the price as a part of the feedback. However, I noticed the fact that this kind of voices is gradually decreasing now. I’d like to share about this as I think it’d be helpful for your side hustles.
TL;DR
- Setting a price based on your complete product image
- People always see present works and determine the values
- Targeting people similar to you
- Paying for good services you love
Setting A Price Based On Your Complete Product Image
I’ve already written about pricing for several times before. In short, it’s important to make sure everything is sustainable and to ignore market values. You will get booing from many people if you increased the price after the first release, so you have to decide it very carefully.
Internet services are different from electronics. Because they can provide updates after the release. It means that the service value will be greater than the first release’s one. However, you have to set a price when your service is just born. It’s wrong that you decide it with the value estimated based on the current feature set which is incomplete yet. You are planning to improve it more and more. So you should set a price with the value of completed work you would imagine.
People Always See Present Works And Determine The Values
It requires a lot of courage to set a price based on your complete product image. You can’t say that you will certainly accomplish the work which will be much worth the price. Moreover, users always see your “current” product and try to determine if it’s worth paying or not. Few people would see future prospects in it. So, many people will feel that the price is expensive at an early stage of the product.
I got complaints quite frequently in the early days. I was often wavering on keeping the price. To overcome this, there was no choice but to believe in my app that improves people’s productivity, which is worth the price.
Targeting People Similar To You
Recently, I got two comments on my blogpost like below:
The first comment says it’s too expensive and the second one says the price is valid. As the latter case, it’s a rare case that a user took the trouble to tell me that the price is reasonable. So these comments were symbolic for me.
This fact suggests that there are people having the similar sense of money with you, and they will find you. So you can just believe in the value you provide and can go ahead.
People who persuade me to lower the price always add a reason that “others are cheaper.” In other words, there is no other big reason for that. You will notice that the market price is not cheap but they are just comparing it with only cheaper services. People who won’t use their money for tools only look at cheap services. So, you don’t need to listen to their voice because the request for lowering the price would ruin our market.
Paying for Good Services You Love
If I was stingy and didn’t pay for any services, I would accept the complaints and lower the price now. Because I don’t have reasons to keep the price. So if you’d like to make money with your product, it’d be good that you pay for other cool services you like. And that will make a basic model of pricing which would be sustainable and reasonable.
Once you decided a price, just keep improving it to provide the value. Then, complaints will disappear little by little as your product gets mature. You will feel uneasy at first but it’ll be ok. It’s all up to you. Good luck.
Inkdrop provides 60-day free trial. But there’re some people who purchased it instantly even though the trial days remains a lot, like Rhys above. I’m so excited about that because it never happened a year ago. Just believe yourself :)
Thanks for reading. I’m sharing my experiences regarding building my products and freelancing on my blog. If you enjoyed, please check out top stories from it:
- How to Price Yourself as a Freelance Developer
- How I Built a Markdown Editor Earning $1300/mo Profit — Inkdrop
- VSCode-like environment with vim + tmux
Follow me on Twitter to keep in touch!
