Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We need to go back, look at the data of the cohorts of users that really struggled with the last pricing increase. Where did we see attrition? Where did we see downgrades? Where did we see complaints? Let's cohort, and then let's cater the messaging to each of these kinds of users.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Yo, Mike check. What's up, everybody? You're listening to the street pricing podcast, the only show where proven SaaS leaders share their mindset and mistakes in pricing. So we can all stop guessing and start growing. Enjoy. Subscribe, and turn. Tell a friend. Now, let's break it down with your host and sought after Slayer of bad pricing, Marcos Rivera.
[00:00:40] Speaker C: What's up? And welcome to the street pricing podcast. I'm Marcos Rivera, author, founder, and pricing coach, and today's guest really knows how to balance the product side and the pricing side of the equation. Ladies and gentlemen, I have Annie Schmidt, product lead at Stripe, joining us today. Annie, welcome.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: Thank you. Hey, everybody.
[00:01:01] Speaker C: For those of you, I have known Aunt Indy for quite a while, even way before stripe, and so you're in for a big treat today. She knows a ton about building great products, pricing them. She's been in the trenches. This is going to be a lot of good stuff. So, Andy, why don't you just quickly tell everyone a little bit about you and what you do?
[00:01:18] Speaker A: So I am product lead at Stripe. My team specifically is the terminal team, and I lead a group of product managers that are responsible for the software platform that powers our hardware for in person commerce. So it's a super interesting product space. It is both software and hardware, and so we have the challenges of both and the challenges of pricing both. So it's been a really fantastic product to be a part of. I've been at stripe for two and a half years, and it's been a fantastic ride so far.
[00:01:50] Speaker C: I bet they are, again, a tiny, not so well known company out there right now. Everybody knows these guys. Super cool culture, super great story and what they've done, and huge impact to the SaaS community, to the economy in general. So love to talk and unpack. And just in general, I think there's also a really interesting dynamic software hardware pricing that versus just purely SaaS software. There's some interesting dynamics that come into play, right? So I think folks out there who are thinking software hardware could listen in today. But what I want to do is also maybe dig and unpack a little bit more of some of the things that I think complicate pricing and to keep it simple, because one thing that stripe has done really well. Is it just kept things really simple and basic and transparent, which I think a lot of folks appreciate. So I am eager to sink my teeth into all this good stuff. Are you ready to get street with me?
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Let's go.
[00:02:43] Speaker C: All right, very cool. So, team, everybody, just a quick reminder, a roadmap for today. This show is based on the book street pricing. So we're gonna break it down into three sections. Rewind. Play. Fast forward. Rewind is a quick story. Success, struggle. We want to hear what happened. Let's unpack it. Play brings us back to today. What's working now, what's really effective, and then fast forward is tomorrow, what happens in the future? Let's talk about what's next. Does that sound good, Annie?
[00:03:09] Speaker A: Yeah, sounds great.
[00:03:11] Speaker C: Awesome. Then let's go ahead and start. Let's unpack a story together.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: All right, great. Well, we're going to rewind a little bit back to the days when I led fitness product at mindbody. I think it's a really good combo of sort of huge challenge, but also ultimately success. So I'll give you a little picture of where we were. This was pre Covid. So a few years back, we were already one of the market leaders for wellness software. So in a really good position, recognized as a leader. We were really growing and investing a lot in our product, had actually done quite a few acquisitions, and so we needed to raise prices so that we could continue to grow. I mean, as you grow and invest as a company, you have to continue to have that funding to be able to keep growing and keep giving your users more of what they need. And so we were at a place where we knew we needed to increase prices. We had delivered a lot of value. We weren't really capturing that value in our pricing yet. As I said, we had developed a lot. We had also acquired a few companies. And so our pricing had gotten pretty complex. So we already had that tiered pricing of sort of the traditional, good, better, best. But as we developed new products, as we acquired, we really just had whole bunch of add ons. And what that meant was that a lot of our most differentiating products were actually just add ons. And so the year before, we had done another pricing increase. And candidly, it had not gone well. We treated it sort of just as a going through the motions of, okay, we're just going to raise our prices by a percentage. Didn't really change. Our packages kept all the add ons. This resulted in a whole lot of complaints from our users, much more attrition than we wanted to see, and a behavior that we didn't want to see, which was a lot of our mid tier users responded to the price increase by just going to a lower tier. And because so many of our differentiating products were add ons, they could just cherry pick the one or two things that they wanted. And they weren't trying out some of these other great features that we knew were going to help them grow their business. But because they were super price sensitive, they were just cherry picking the couple of features they were familiar with. And I kind of think about it like your happy meal at McDonald's. If you get the fries along with your meal, you know you're going to love them. You might not have bought it if you had to buy it separately because you kind of think twice, but once you buy it, you know you're glad you did. I always love the fries. This was a little bit of that where we had people just kind of cherry picking.
That pricing increase was really not great from a user perspective and from a business perspective as well. And so we went into this next pricing increase with actually a lot of FUD from the team. So our support team, our sales team, was really worried about this and honestly questioning, like, hey, is this even the right time to be raising prices? Look how it went last time.
So. So we knew we had to do something different. We could not make this just sort of a check the box, let's just increase by a certain percentage. We had to take a different approach. And actually, this is where you came in. So we had a small but mighty pricing team. I think there was one team member. And so the great thing was we brought you in, you and your team, to really help bolster that. And I think the first thing we did differently this time is we really treated this as a product initiative. This was not just an operational task that maybe a small, the pricing person and one engineer was launching. This was a full blown product initiative where we brought together a cross functional team. And you might remember this, we had representatives from sales and marketing and support, more senior product representations. So we had the directors of each of the products involved, and then really senior executive sponsorship to make sure that we were looking holistically at this and really treating it like a product. Again, not just sort of a check the box, let's just increase by a certain percent.
[00:07:24] Speaker C: I do remember that, and it was a juicy one, I'll say that. It was a very juicy one. And you just outlined the real nightmare that a lot of folks worry about when they think about changing prices is like that attrition, the downsell, maybe a little black eye on your reputation and out there in the market, some other things like that. And so I could see a very clear direct line onto why the, when you talk about pricing again, people don't just shutter and run to the corner. They are really nervous about seeing that whole thing play out again. And so from my point of view, I'd wonder, there are probably some folks who really were not on board at first, probably even with the product approach, which I think, I love that mindset, because pricing is sort of like the product of the product in a way. So you have to kind of treat it that way, give it its due diligence. But some folks could just have those scars from before. How did you get them kind of over the hump and on your side?
[00:08:18] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, that was a huge part of this is there was really a lot of resistance on the team. And so I think, first and foremost, this cross functional team for all of us to work together and to really make sure that the sales and support and marketing teams had a voice, I think that was really, really important in getting them over the hump. And then I think we also had to paint the picture, we, as product and senior leadership, had to paint the picture of why this wasn't just, hey, we're going to increase our margins. That's not a super motivating thing for any of us. All of us are doing this job because we want to help our users. So we had to paint the picture of, hey, we're not just raising prices because we all want a greater margin. Obviously, that's part of it. But really what we wanted to be able to do was keep investing. And so we painted the picture of like, hey, look at what we've invested over the last year. Look at these additional marketing tools. Look at these additional tools that we've built to save our users time. I mean, in some cases, we were saving users thousands of hours a year in time with these products that we were developing. And we had to paint the picture that, hey, in order for us to keep really improving the lives of our users, we need to be able to keep investing in this product. And so our CEO, Rick Stollmeyer, at the time, really fantastic at painting this vision, and he did just a great job of kicking off this sort of pricey initiative by really sharing with the wider team. Here's why we're doing this again. Last time we had kind of done it as a check the box. It was just a we're doing it didn't have this whole wider arc of why that was a big part of it where we really actually went into this pretty excited about what we were going to do and what it was going to enable us to do for our users in the future.
[00:10:07] Speaker C: I love that. I love that. Starting with the why piece here because I think there's the natural, well, we want to make more money, of course. I mean most businesses want to grow. I run into very few who don't want to grow. Right. But the idea behind it is then what happens with that extra money while we reinvest it, we're able to then do much more for our users. Maybe that saving 1000 hours becomes 2000 hours one day based on that's like the whole year. But I mean the idea is there is an improve, sort of a line of sight to improve the lives of the users that you serve in the market that you serve. And that's where that capturing the value of what you're doing is a big part of that reinvestment. And so I think people kind of have this negative connotation, right? Oh, we're going to raise prices, you're going to change prices and you're just kind of sticking it to them and gouging them. And listen, that happens out there, I'm not going to lie, some folks do that. But I think for the grand majority of them out there who are really trying to do something more than just survive, I think for those particular businesses the story is clear. We need to do more for our base. At the end of the day, there's a raising bar of expectations that happens in the market today. Competitors, customers, things change. You got to keep up. And if you don't have the money to do it, makes it really hard. Right. So let's now walk a little bit further. So now folks get the why they're in it, they're like, okay, you know what, I will do this pricing thing again. Let's unpack on how you're able to pull it off.
[00:11:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So we really took a grounds up approach, which I loved and have since applied to other projects, of really looking at what is the value that we deliver. So rather than kind of taking a tops down of like, hey, what's our pricing and how much more revenue do we need? Now let's look at it from the customer's perspective of what's the value we deliver. And we really did a lot of work to try to talk about, hey, what are table stakes, foundational capabilities that we offer that hey, our competitors offer too. There are a lot of, we are very aware that there are other competitors out there that offer similar products, maybe even good products. Of course, we believe ours were best, but so we talked about what are our foundational products that serve some really important needs, but they're table stakes. And then where do we have differentiators where we're pretty unique? We stacked that on top. And then even on top of that, where do we have products that just deliver really significant value, where you can really prove that additional value? And then we actually did an exercise where we actually tried to put some dollar values on this for a certain size user. And we had to think of different cohorts. That was one of the complexities of mindbody and also stripe. We serve a massive spectrum of types of users, everything from really huge enterprises for mindbody. They were these huge franchises or groups with 1000 locations, all the way down to your tiny entrepreneur, maybe a fitness professional who teaches classes just individually. So you can imagine the spectrum of needs that we had to meet and the spectrum of pricing that we had to cover. So we talked about cohorts of users and stacked up what do we think is the value layer cake. And I actually still have this great visual of what that whiteboard looked like. And again, imagine this is a room with probably 20 of us, with marketing, with sales, with support, and they're all bringing in this perspective of, hey, here's what I'm hearing from users, here's what I have in terms of data on how we can validate that this is the value we're delivering. And we started to get a really clear picture of kind of those three categories. And that was a really good foundation for us to build our good, better, best tiers. And so we really rethought the tiers. Mindbody, like many companies, had grown pretty organically. And so in the past, a lot of our tiers were sort of like, here's the capabilities we've had for a long time. And then the newer tiers just have newer capabilities. First is looking really at value and differentiation and actually saying, okay, maybe some of our longer term products actually are differentiators and should be in a higher tier. So we just took more of a value approach versus sort of the organic way that we had created our tiers in the past.
[00:14:34] Speaker C: I think that's a huge lesson for a lot of folks listening here, because you did. I mean, it sounded really scrappy where you were able to get some data. No one has perfect data, but you had something right? You're able to pull that in, get people in a room. And the key also was you got a, a customer success in their marketing and their product and their sales, right? So you have different points of view, and then you're really trying to drive alignment on, okay, what's table stakes? You know, what, what's something that differentiates us from the rest? And it doesn't necessarily have to be old features and new features, right. You just have to really think about how the customer is using them. And that tam that you're addressing is the other big one, too. If you're, if you're addressing a very small slice of the market, then the use cases are pretty direct, pretty clear for that market. You can go pretty deep. But then when you try to broaden that, and now you're serving, like you said, like the lifestyle, fitness, all the way to these big chains, lots of different needs, lots of different willingness to pay, complexity, all those big things. And that adds a lot of, you have to think through all those key things when you're breaking down your tiers. And so for me, there's a, the spectrum and how simple you keep it. The way I think about it is the broader the spectrum, the harder it is to keep it simple.
[00:15:46] Speaker A: We're kind of, I would say midway through this process, we've already done a lot of work, but we've only just kind of begun. So we had a rough perspective of what we thought those tiers might be, and we had sort of some ideas of what the pricing might be. And it was both value, but we also, of course, had to look at competitors. We can't go in and be three times the cost of our competitors. We did, again, believe we had enough value to justify some premium pricing, but it had to be within.
And so we brought in that competitive data. We brought in kind of, again, our own perspective on value. And we started with some hypothesis of what these tiers might be, a couple alternatives. And this is where your team really came alongside and helped us. You helped us do a willingness to pay study, and I love these. It really is a good way to go out into the real world and validate those assumptions against real world users. And that's where the rubber really hits the road, because we could have beautiful pricing all day long, but if customers aren't willing to pay it, we failed. And so you and your team, you had some great data analysts and some great researchers who really helped us kick off a really data based evaluation of sort of willingness to pay on each of those tiers that we were mocking up, and that started giving us not only a really good idea of what the price level should be, but also a little bit of data to go back to those worriers on the team who were super worried that this price change wasn't going to be well received. And so I think that it had really both value from us, our working team. We had a really strong perspective and some data driven analysis to say, hey, we think this is the right pricing level and confidence that we were meeting users needs.
[00:17:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I love that. That was a lot of fun doing it, too, because when you see the differences between the size of the different parts of the tam, lots of what was influencing the willingness to pay, which is also super interesting, what they're anchoring against, which is also very surprising. It's usually not what you think it is, and how that changes over time, which is also important. All those really big ingredients to sorting out, okay, where we can really find the sweet spot and monetize those particular groups. I personally think that's a very valuable input. Not everybody gets their hands on it, though, I would say. Right. It's a tough thing to go out and get, and fortunately, we had good audience to go after there. Team, I want to take a quick pause here to ask you for a huge favor that'll mean a lot to me. Please review and share the show. Share it with your team, your friends, your peers. Not only will it help them stop the guesswork in pricing, but it'll also help you and increase the chances that you'll take action and change for yourself. All right, much love. Now back to the show. And so now that we are, you know, you got, you know, you know, you had to get people on your side. You did it. You know, you went down into the trenches, got some data, really a line that talked about table stakes and that layer, I love that value layer cake analogy. That was really good. And then thinking through a little more. Okay, well, what are these folks willing to pay? Kind of bringing all that together. Pricing is very much like putting pieces of a puzzle together, right? For the most part. And so you have to grab and spend the time to get these pieces. So now that you rolled it out, this is now your second pricing change, very different from the first one. What happened?
[00:19:17] Speaker A: Again, the work is not quite done yet. We also took a really different approach of rolling this out, and I'm going to give credit to our pricing lead here. She really took the lead to say, hey, we're not going to just announce this on the website. We need to go back, look at the data of the cohorts of users that really struggled with the last pricing increase. Where did we see attrition? Where did we see downgrades? Where did we see complaints? Let's cohort and then let's cater the messaging to each of these kinds of users. And so again, a lot of work we had, I can't even remember how many cohorts. I seem to remember somewhere around ten to twelve different cohorts that we were going to treat a little bit differently in terms of how we message this because, remember, these are users that are already using our software. So this isn't just net new users, this is existing users who rely on our software every day. And so for us to come to them and say, hey, that thing you rely on, it's now more expensive, we needed to make sure that we have some really good messaging. And so, for example, one of the cohorts where we thought there might be a little more risk of attrition, these kind of smaller, much more price sensitive users, what we decided to do was give them a, some of these features for free. We would essentially upgrade their package and give them additional features. Like I said, we wrapped in a lot of these add ons into some of the tiers, and so the tiers actually had a lot more capabilities. And what we decided to do was let's give them access to the features for three months before we actually apply the new price. We really believe strongly that as they use some of these features, they were going to see the value, and at the end of that they were going to be willing to pay for it. And so that was one thing. And we didn't do that for all cohorts. Some cohorts were like, hey, they're already using a lot of these features. Their price increase isn't that much, especially on the higher end. We just messaged that pricing for some of these others, we changed the messaging and changed the timing of the pricing, and that was really, really successful. So it took a long time, as you can imagine, months to plantain and then months to roll out. But at the end of that, as we went and back and analyzed our data, we really drastically reduced the attrition that we saw, drastically reduced that downgrading that we saw.
There were still some complaints, there were still some users that we lost much lower, definitely within that tolerance range that we had expected.
From our perspective as a working team, it was really, really a successful, I would argue it was the most successful pricing change we had done. And so we were really, really happy with how that ultimately played out. But I will say this was a lot of work, I think, end to end, probably six to seven months of work with a lot of some of our most senior folks, but absolutely worth the investment. And I think certainly from my perspective, changed my view of pricing from, hey, this is sort of the last thing you do before you launch to now. This is an intrinsic part of your product. Pricing is a huge part of your product. You need to be investing just as much time in getting the pricing right as you do in getting the product right, the design right, the stability right. All of those other things.
[00:22:44] Speaker C: I cannot agree more. And by the way, what a night and day comparison, right? From the first one to the second one, and you're keeping it real. I mean, six to seven months of hard work, probably multiple people on this thing full time, or just a lot of their time driving it forward, data reviewing, making sure that you're making the right steps. I think that that's the reality of this. And for those who think that pricing can happen in two days and just go ahead and throw something out there, I think you should really listen hard to what Annie is trying to say. Like, the diligence that she did and the steps that went, that her and her team went together was a big part of the big success in that second one. And you know what to. The rolling out is just as important as, as the pricing, the new model itself. Right. And how you communicate it and frame it. And I love what you just said. You said, you know, you got them into. Yeah. Cohorts, you catered and then you comped them. Right. I think you. Are you coming up with a framework? Right. On my show. Is this going on?
[00:23:40] Speaker A: This sounds like it. I got to start my own book.
[00:23:43] Speaker C: This is cool. I know that's. But it makes a lot of sense, though. Break them up. Not every customer is the same. You got to break them down. And then once you break them down, you're able to then cater to the right messaging and framing to them, and then you can comp them. Like you said, I think three months of free access to some features, and that way the value perception starts to build up, and then they start to pay. Not pay now and then you'll get the value later. So there's a very, it's a nuance. I know it sounds like it, but it's a very big difference in how the customer would feel or the sensation of the price increase. It just changes the whole dynamic. So I think those are really smart. Takeaways for any, any SaaS operator leader listening right now. If you're thinking of pricing change, we talked about the wrong way to do it and then the right way to do it and then the drastic difference in all that, the one big takeaway. And if you had to like look at all the great work that mindbody did and getting all that out, what would be the one takeaway for someone listening?
[00:24:36] Speaker A: I mean, I think the takeaway is deep empathy for your users. I think in the end that that is what really drove that whole process and I think it helped us make the right decisions and doing those willingness to pay user research, bringing in the experts from our team across the team that talk to our users day in and day out, that's really what it was all about.
[00:24:59] Speaker C: I love that. I love the deep empathy piece. Really getting that close to the customer and yeah, having folks by your side who know what they're doing, whether they're in house or outside, folks coming in or both, typically, that's going to take you a long way there and I love it. So thank you, Andy, for sharing that big story. So let's take it from rewind now to play. So today's world, I know you're at stripe today, but I'm really curious to know what do you see as something that's really working well in pricing, packaging or just monetization in general?
[00:25:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I'll talk specifically about my space. So you mentioned that stripe has very transparent pricing. Absolutely do. And that is one of the important parts of what stripe does. We talk a lot about growing as our customers grow. And so a lot of the pricing, certainly that list pricing you're going to see on the website is really designed to be pegged to how much you as the user grow. And so if you're a tiny startup, you're just going to pay a tiny bit and then, you know, usage as you use it, it's going to grow over time. So that's very much our list pricing. I think what's important to know is that as with any large company, we have both that list pricing that you see and then there's negotiated pricing and you'll see it on our website. There's custom. I spend a lot of my time thinking about that negotiated pricing. And so what's interesting, couple challenges that we face specifically in my team. As I mentioned, we have hardware and we have software. And so one of the challenges we saw in the past was that different software is available with different hardware. And I'm going to show you a couple, we have this tiny little puck reader. People are probably familiar with it. It just does a card read, very simple, does all the basic payments capabilities that you need, pretty low cost. And then we've got these much more advanced smart readers. So it's Android based, it's got a beautiful screen. You can do all kinds of great things on that screen, all kinds of consumer interactions. And so as you can imagine, the spectrum of software that is available with that simple device is much narrower than what is available with that far more advanced device. Just naturally, the capabilities of the hardware we had originally sort of sold the devices and then, oh, also buy some software packages. And we got a lot of confusion even from our salespeople of like, hey, the customer wants this low cost device, plus they want this feature. And we'd be, oh, no, that only goes with the more advanced device. And so we had a lot of confusion. And what we did and what I think has worked well is we created packages that combined the software and the hardware. And based on our user research, what we found is the users actually first chose their hardware and then their software. And you have different use cases. You're going to often choose this if you want something mobile or maybe you have a tiny little counter space. You're going to choose this one if you have maybe a little bit more space or if you have really important interactions you want to do with the consumer. And so we built out these tiers, and again, empathy for the user. We really thought about the key value of each of these. And so originally we called this the m pause and the spos, but users didn't really know what that meant. That was our own terms. And so after quite a lot of research, a lot of work with our product marketing team, we really renamed these two. This tiny little guy is in the compact package because that's the value of it. It's compact, it's light, it's mobile, and this is the smart package. Again, just, even, just naming it based on the value to the user instead of our own internal terms really started making it easier for our salespeople and then ultimately our customers to understand the value. And then within those packages, we listed all the software features that came with each. And so that way it was very clear, oh, if I'm going with the compact package, I get this compact reader, plus I get this list of software. If I'm going with the smart package, I get a much longer list of software because there's all kinds of things you can do on this device on reader tipping collect a signature, all of those great things. And so that I think has been really successful to simplify and again, try to talk to value instead of our own kind of jargon that we know these devices by.
[00:29:27] Speaker C: I was a little bit embarrassed because I didn't know what impos man, actually. I was like, what does mpos?
[00:29:30] Speaker A: It's okay.
[00:29:31] Speaker C: Am I supposed to know?
[00:29:31] Speaker A: Most people don't. A mobile point of sale.
Spos's smart point of sale. But again, we shouldn't have to teach you that. If I just say compact and smart, you instantly sort of know what the main value is on those.
[00:29:49] Speaker C: I love it. Especially for somebody like me who likes to cut through noise. The plain English and something that people can just understand goes a really long way. Packaging and how you're framing. Like the. The big mistake I see is a lot of companies put these feature lists in there on their pricing page or in their package and their quotes, and don't even know what a lot of them mean. Some of them, right, are a little bit internal or things like that. But if you can reframe it to something that's meaningful to the customer, even just, you know, by changing some type of unit that is made up internally. Right. Like some kind of processing unit, I. To something the customer can understand, like the outcome of processing that unit, right. Like more, you know, paid invoices or more safe data or whatever it is, could really go, I think, ways to frame the value and shift that mindset to, oh, this is what I'm getting for the money, versus trying to make that connection themselves. And it's just hard to decrypt, you know what I mean?
[00:30:50] Speaker A: Right, right. And honestly, payments on hardware are complex enough as it is. We don't need to throw in our jargon into that. Let's just talk about, hey, what's the reason you would choose this device versus this other? And both have value. I think that was the other thing we wanted to make sure. Hey, it's not that only more advanced businesses would choose the smart devices. There are a lot of cases where you have a very advanced business, but you have a reason for a compact reader. And so we also didn't want to try to somehow imply that this was a basic device versus an advanced device. They're both advanced devices that are very secure and collect payments. There's different use cases for why you would choose either of them.
[00:31:30] Speaker C: Yeah, that's another key one too. I think a common tiering is small, medium, and large, or basic and advanced. And if you really have that deep customer empathy. You really kind of know what they're after and why they choose one or the other. You don't need to go down that route. You can really hone in on the use case you're solving for and then create that again. That connecting the dot between what you're giving them and the use case they want. Compact so much, I think talks so much more than just basic and sends a whole different signal than that. I think that's super smart. You guys are smart over there.
[00:32:03] Speaker A: Stripe, a lot of work went into it and a big team. I think I took some of those lessons that I learned from previous and really made sure that this was cross functional. So again, I had product marketing, I had a product salesperson, really key working team to work together to come up with this pricing. And we continue to iterate. That is the spirit of Stripe is we continue to make it better but really feel like we've got a good anchor in these value based names and packages that combine software and hardware into a really clear package.
[00:32:40] Speaker C: Super big lessons for a lot of folks. Let's go and move on now to the fast forward. What's next? You are iterating, you probably expect stripe does nothing strike me as a company that just stays still all day. Right. So let's think a little bit. What do you think is next from packaging or pricing or value like that?
[00:32:59] Speaker A: Yeah. So as I said, one of sort of our big hallmarks is pricing to prices as our customer grows. So, you know, as they grow, we grow.
We believe that fundamentally that everything we do to help our users grow, we want to continue to drive that. So we don't want to be charging them for something they're not using. That's a really big part of our ethos. At the same time, as we start to serve much larger users, we now process for the likes of Amazon and Hertz and Urban and these really big and important brands, larger customers often want more predictability.
What we're starting to really look at is how do we price for predictability along with this foundational value of we grow as you grow. And so talking a lot more about what does that look like for things like monthly subscriptions and those kinds of things and really across the board, including within our terminal product. And so that's really what we're spending a lot of time thinking about and making sure that we continue to offer that flexibility. And so certainly within my product, we have sort of this choice of like, hey, do you want to pay as you go? You know, our traditional per sort of per transaction or per device kinds of pricing, or do you want a little bit more of that predictability? Do you want something like a monthly fee? How do we make sure that we have that flexibility to, again, meet your need, meet the user where they are so very much trying to think how do we price this in a way that of course, we continue to capture the value. We're investing a ton in offering this, but also, how do we make it the right pricing for our customers business?
[00:34:50] Speaker C: Absolutely. And you're not going to figure that out unless you get super close with the customer. I mean, this pay as you go and predictability like that, there's a really interesting balance you have to strike there. And so giving options because you don't know where the customer is going to fall. And frankly, they might love the bit more of grow with you early in their life cycle, but maybe, maybe later, as they get bigger or things change for them, they actually may value predictability more. So it doesn't just stay still, which means you got to stay on top of it. Right. So that is huge lessons for everybody listening here. And honestly, I think I took so many notes, I can't, I don't have any room on my paper left. I'm like writing in like this tiny little scribbles on the corner just to get some wins. So thank you for sharing so much. Great stuff. I think a lot of folks can take back and really reapply to their own businesses. But I got one more question for you. One of my favorites, just to. Just to get to know Annie a little better, I got to know, what was that favorite jam, the thing you can listen to all day long? What was it growing up or even for today?
[00:35:50] Speaker A: All right, well, I'm going to date myself a little bit. But where the streets have no name from you two. Wow. They were my first concert way back.
First, like big stadium concert. I have since seen them through the years.
I'm still a huge YouTube fan. And you know what? They still bring all the energy to their show this many years later. I feel so lucky to have this band that I've loved since I was a teenager. They are still performing, still bringing all the energy. So, yeah, that anytime it comes on in the car or something, I focus on it. I'm gonna really kind of sing at the top of my voice to it.
That's my jamden.
[00:36:33] Speaker C: So no one's looking. Right. But I love that because that you just brought epic, timeless, like, all those key things. Right. And so love that you. Love you, too. I think hard to find someone who doesn't. But I love that you brought that to the table and the lessons you gave us today, from my point of view, are really hard hitting for our SaaS community. So thank you for coming on the show today. And would you be willing to come back later to give us an update?
[00:36:59] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. This has been fun. And Marcos, you know, we have a lot of fun collaborating together we have through the years, so it's always fun to talk about praising.
[00:37:08] Speaker C: Oh major, major, high five to you. Absolutely there. And team, team, listen. You just learned a ton from the product lead at stripe today. A lot of mistakes that are common, some that are really going to require some of that groundwork in order to make the smart change that connects with your customer and how they really want to buy and what they really want to value. So please take these lessons, start applying them on Monday as much as you can. Get that 1% better. And remember, stop guessing and start growing.
[00:37:38] Speaker B: Until next time, thank you and much love for listening to the street pricing podcast with Marcos Rivera. We hope you enjoyed this episode and don't forget to like and subscribe. If you want to learn more about capturing value. Pick up a copy of street pricing on Amazon. Until next time.
