The Pricing Page Tune-Up service was an interesting experiment for us at Sixteen Ventures. We've been transparent about its progress and the ultimate shutdown of it. Like any good startup, we took what we knew to be true – that SaaS & Web App vendors, especially small or early-stage ones, need help with their pricing pages – and tried to figure out a way to build a scalable and sustainable offering around that.
The most logical idea seemed to be to offer a stand-alone service around the process of tuning-up Pricing Pages – something we had been doing for a long time for retained or project-based clients. This is the idea of productizing expertise – something that SaaS (or the web in general) allows subject matter experts, consultants, etc. to do in ways packaged software never would have. We still believe in this and will continue to advise non-software, service-oriented companies to look to SaaS as a way to productize their expertise. We now have even more "what not to do" ideas to go with that recommendation.
Some of the issues we ran into with the Pricing Page Tune-Up revolved around scalability. Initially we made some assumptions that most of the processes could be automated - data collection, page scoring, etc. Early customers can see where that was heading based on the format of their reports. Well, we found out as early as our beta testing phase that automating the process would require a lot more work than we expected. But we were on track to announce this service and figured it was something we'd tackle later.
Now, if you read our statement we published when we shut down the Pricing Page Tune-Up service you'll note it was really the lack of a market for the service that kept us from diving in deeper for a more automatable solution. But the distinction needs to be made - there is a lack of a market for the service, not the process of Pricing Page Tune-Up. Now things started to get interesting...
Let me backtrack for second. You need to know this part... In order to land a one-time $99 or $297 Tune-Up (these took more time to accomplish than I want to admit!) we spent a lot of time convincing people that they should use the service. We ended up giving away highly strategic advice just to land a $99 service deal. So much so that I would think after a "sales" conversation for the service "I literally just gave that guy $10,000 worth of advice and he might sign-up for a Tune-Up." Much of this pre-sales consulting was to build trust in a service that the customer would have no visibility into. Even though they "trusted" us already – having consumed our whitepapers, presentations, etc. - when it came time to plunk down some cash, that trust wasn't there. Here is yet another lesson, my friends.
We quickly found while both marketing (mostly to our captive audience of followers, subscribers, etc.) and performing the Pricing Page Tune-Up service for our clients that there is very deep interest in the process behind the service. For a "black box" service like this where you have an input (the pricing page) and an output (the report) this was often a point of contention. What happened in that box was our secret sauce and people wanted to have access to the recipe! Hello! There's the opportunity, right?
Obviously the big disconnect that ultimately lead to the shuttering of the Pricing Page Tune-Up service was this - we know how startup founders and entrepreneurs think. We know entrepreneurs, startup founders, and even corporate clients "in this economy" want to know how to accomplish things way more than just the result or the outcome. So ultimately we created a service that went against that very clear and deep understanding that we already had internally, but chose to ignore!
We also know that the cost of training (in its various forms) is more palatable since it can be leveraged over and over, shared internally, etc. This is true for companies of all sizes. I can't tell you how many times a big company will reach out to Sixteen Ventures looking to bring us in for retained or project-based consulting after they have already brought in (read: paid a lot of money to) the well known SaaS analysts.
Of course, most of those guys just regurgitate canned research, only providing a 50,000 foot overview. When the company realizes it still needs help executing they call us... but then we have to negotiate and make the hard sell pitch because they already dropped a ton of their budget on "analysis" and "research." So, yeah, there is a big market for analysis, content, training, etc. And we fundamentally know that.
The story about "analysts" not withstanding, the willingness to consume training is really in-line with our own philosophy – that of learning to do rather than having it done for you. That means, even from our point of view, having a "black box" service like this doesn't make sense. I mean, how can we say that the Pricing Page is the most important page on your marketing site and then not tell you how to continually ensure your pricing page is optimized?
So we took a step back and realized we already had the right "product," we were just packaging, marketing, and selling it the wrong way. So we pivoted...
In an effort to leverage our experience and provide it in a way that is scalable for us and accessible for even the smallest companies - a key initial element in the creation of the Pricing Page Tune-Up service - we're going to start doing workshops. Our first one is called SaaS Pricing Page Design & Optimization. It is basically us spilling our guts on the processes behind the Pricing Page Tune-Up service.
That's right, we will now present what goes into tuning-up and optimizing your Pricing Page - in its Entirely Transparent Awesomeness - as an interactive online workshop on Wednesday 10/20/2010 from 8:00PM - 10:00PM Eastern. This is a live, one-to-many workshop. Its not one-on-one and it is not recorded. There will be a live Q&A and the first 5 participants that volunteer will have their Pricing Page used during the workshop.
Following the event, participants will be able to join our new community to interact with others, talk about their pricing pages, and share results/progress. We're also working to have some discounts on some great products (A/B testing, value framework, etc.) to announce very soon.
The bottom line is, we think teaching companies to do this on their own – and knowing that they will use the process many times over - is much more valuable than having us do it for them one time.
Author: Lincoln Murphy (@lincolnmurphy on Twitter)