Open Startup Report - Feb '24

I pray at the altar of optimism. It could be the salvation or PriceWell's downfall...

PriceWell is on a plateau (in business terms) and I’m trying everything to get it out of the rut. Like a Jeep that’s got fat tyres, but they just keep spinning in the mud, I’m there with the shovel. I just can’t seem to quit being optimistic about it, every week I get new motivation from speaking to current and potential customers.

Someone who’s also going through something similar is Val Sopi of blogstatic. He recorded a great inner monologue of what he’s going through in his mind. To pivot the business or persevere. For PriceWell I constantly have this struggle. There are adjacent businesses that are doing very well (Memberstack for gated content, Launchpass for paid communities) but what keeps me coming back is that I have a niche that is under served, unique and I love the product.

Get them to talk

“I love it!“, these are the words that keep me coming back for more. I’m constantly talking to users about their needs and every week there are new insights, eureka moments and frantic coding to test an idea out. One book that’s been really helpful in guiding my discussions with users is Deploy Empathy by Michele Hansen (you might know her from Twitter or the Software Social podcast). This book taught me how to discuss problems with broader context, never to promote my solution and to let the other person speak for 90% of the call. These calls are different from sales calls of course, but at this stage in the business I’m not going for a hard sell until I know I’ve got a product that delivers $1,000’s of value for the meagre $29 price.

We’ve got something…

Pieter Levels (the broccoli 🥦 haired god of indie hacking) recently posted about a basic issue with Stripe Pricing Tables (the product I thought would kill PriceWell when it came out in 2022). They aren’t even offering a feature that PriceWell has had from the beginning.

It seems like Stripe aren’t really putting effort into their No-Code offerings. Pricing Tables seems neglected. This is an opportunity to update the marketing website and highlight why PriceWell is more customisable and build with SaaS in mind from the beginning.

PriceWell gets 1k visits from Google per month and the conversion to registered user is 4% (not bad in my opinion).

But… churn is massive so there’s something missing in between. A lot of our users tend to be just starting out with their business and I’d love to attract more established businesses.

One idea is to promote our A/B testing feature much more heavily. It should attract established businesses who aren’t sure they’ve got optimal pricing (who is really?).

More on this next time.

End stream of consciousness…