Had an interesting call today with one of our advisors about pricing.
Pricing is one of those tough things to solve for in your solopreneur business because you can’t really get it perfect.
Over time you can certainly work your way towards having great pricing, but how do you ever know it’s the absolute perfect price?
You really can’t.
Because you can’t play out all of the prices, at the same time, and compare.
Anyway, I highlight that because maybe you, like me, sometimes struggle to figure out the right pricing for your business.
It can be for services, a tech product, a physical product, you name it.
And one thing we’ve learned over the years at Visto, especially for tech, is to actually start researching your pricing way before you build your product.
In fact, for any business, you should probably do pricing research to decide if it’s worth starting the business in the first place.
Here’s what I mean:
For most tech companies, the journey looks like this: think of an idea, spend months building a tech product, do research to come up with a price, try to sell the product and hope the market is willing to pay for it.
In reality, it should be more like this: do research (with potential clients/your target market) to determine if there’s a willingness to pay (and how much they’d pay), determine the key features and values these clients would pay for, build a tech product to solve those problems, go sell the product.
See the difference there?
If you’re like me, you probably have an experience where you (and maybe a friend) think of an incredible business idea, so you go set it up, maybe build a website, build or design that product, then totally flop when you go to sell it.
Instead, we should all be doing market and price research first!
Taking our idea, our solution, and the features we think we would include in our solution, and taking it to prospective clients to validate it. Talk to as many of these people as possible.
Do they have that problem? Would they pay for a solution? What would they want in that solution? How much would they pay for that solution?
And as I learn more about pricing, market research and sales, I’m realizing a big shift I’ll be making in my approach.
When most of us think about selling, we think about convincing and persuading people to buy our product or service.
There’s an element of that, but the more I learn from actual sales experts, the more I realize that it should actually be the opposite.
You shouldn’t be doing the talking.
You should be asking questions and listening to them do the talking.
Why?
Because effective sales isn’t about persuading people, it’s about discovering if someone has a particular pain point or desire, and positioning your product or service as a good solution (if it is one).
But the only way you can do that is by asking questions. Lots of ’em.
About them, their business, their struggles, their desires, their needs, etc.
And as we do some research around pricing for our new tech product, I have to take the same approach – ask lots of questions to better understand the target market, and also what value people attribute to different features so we can try to figure out a good price
Maybe by the end of this I’ll put together a short guide or share the sales script I end up crafting, if you think that might be helpful… let me know.
And lastly, one of my best friend’s got married over the weekend, and as a groomsman at the wedding, I didn’t have much time or energy for email drafting Sunday night so I missed one of my (extremely popular, highly valuable) daily emails last week.
And to be honest, as some of you may also believe, content creation can be tough.
I share a lot of my solopreneur journey, especially related to trying to build a brand, social media presence and more.
I don’t think it’s that “hard”, but it certainly can be time consuming. Especially if you try to put out actual, valuable content.
And as you know, I spend most of my time building my immigration tech company, Visto, so sometimes this Solopreneur Grind content suffers as I prioritize that other work and sometimes just get too busy.
But it’s okay.
What I’ve realized over the years, is that growing a following on social media takes time and consistency, but taking a little break here or there won’t kill you.
Missing one Monday email won’t kill me either. Heck, most of you probably didn’t even realize until I blatantly pointed it out (like a moron) right now…
So take that for what it’s worth. Growing a quality following takes time and effort and consistently posting, but missing a post or two won’t kill ya.
I’m actually flirting around with an idea for a community to help us content creators. Something like a discord group to share what’s working best for me on social (where to post, how to post, how I come up with ideas, etc.) and also have some daily accountability so we can all push and motivate each other to keeping posting consistently (on the platform of your choice).
If this sounds interesting to you, let me know.
That’s it for me today – make sure to sign up to get my daily emails here, and keep grinding.
