Some personal news: I’m joining Pricepoint Partners, an unbelievably talented group of consultants focused on B2B GTM & Pricing, as their newest Junior Partner!
I’ll get to leverage 100+ years of B2B SaaS pricing & GTM expertise to continue writing weekly emails but now with the ability to share the BTS of real clients.
This is the single best team I’ve ever seen so if you run a software company and are looking to improve your demand gen, pricing, or reduce churn I’d love you to book a call with me to discuss any questions and apply.
As an appreciation of all the support (this would never have happened without this audience), I want to provide as much value for free as absolutely possible. So, over the coming months I’m going to be open-sourcing several methods Pricepoint uses (& which most other consulting firms would charge $500k-1m for) that give startups an unfair advantage against competitors.
The first 5 spots for newsletter readers are 50% off, and I’m expecting this to sell out very quickly. For any newsletter reader that isn’t fast enough, simply mention you’ve come from the newsletter and you’ll still get a 20-25% discount if you sign up by the end of Wednesday.
With that, let’s dive into it!
The Problems Most SaaS Startups Have Today
It’s an unfortunate fact that every year running a successful SaaS company is getting harder and harder. Your company now has 16x the number of competitors, CAC is up 130% (220% if you’re a sales & marketing software) in the past 10 years, team tenure is down 34% over the past 5 years and is only becoming more expensive with tech wages rising 27% over the same period.
The problem just seems to be getting worse over recent years with AI. Investors seemingly won’t touch a non-AI company and it is such a transformative technology that it’s inviting competition from every kid in a Stanford dorm to potentially redefine the product you’ve spent the last 3-8 years working on.
The story continues to gets worse when you look at the customer & macro-environment side of things, with even great businesses struggling as YoY customer growth has slowed to a crawl.
And startups can’t do much to compensate by making more from existing customers who are looking to reduce headcount leading to net dollar retention falling off a cliff to the lowest point we’ve seen in more than 5 years.
The result? Payback periods are skyrocketing in a time VCs are expecting you to get to profitability.
This is in large part due to the concept of market evolution. Once something is working, there is always someone that will see it and copy you.
This is what has happened to every channel to reach potential customers. At the beginning Facebook & Google Ads were a couple of cents per click. Cold outbound email wasn’t deployed at scale yet so decision makers would actually read your emails and you’d have a decent chance of talking to them. But as more and more entrants flood the scene those same tactics lose effectiveness.
It happens the exact same way for startup markets. There was one successful b2b credit card startup and now there’s an infinite number including the likes of Brex, Ramp, Mercury etc. Same with consumer cards, project management tools, note taking apps, AI sales agents, marketing/email automation tools and countless other industries.
Now there are dozens, if not hundreds of startups, using the same methods to try and reach the same target market meaning your ability to differentiate is weaker than ever.
To retain current customers and profitably acquire more you need to adapt. Relying on the traditional methods of SaaS -- running ads, attending a conference and then sending people to your site where a small % will convert is not going to work anymore.
VCs have woken up and are demanding more. What does this mean?
Unfortunately, a reckoning is coming. A large number of startups are going to shut down because they can’t raise and they can’t become profitable. We’re already seeing the beginning stages of this…
If you want to simply survive, you need to know your competitor’s exact strategies to differentiate and build a better, more efficient business where for every dollar you spend you make more than they can.
Otherwise… growth will slow, you won’t be able to raise additional capital, your competitors will take the market and you’ll stagnate or go under.
But the top, best-in-class companies are still thriving. AI startups are providing magical experiences and see astronomical growth, and companies like Zoominfo continue to perform because they simply have a better funnel than the rest of their competitors.
How do they not only survive but grow in these times?
They buy access to the world’s experts to help build better products, marketing & sales engines. People who run rings around competitors because they know how to dig into competitors, and differentiate, whether that’s through product, GTM, or pricing.
If you can make 20% more per customer, increase the activation rate 15%, and convert people from opportunity to closed won 10% better then your funnel starts to make sense once again.
The reckoning & mass shutdown of software startups is coming for those who don’t know how to adapt.
The Great Thing about Experts & Consultants
Jeff Bezos famously said, “only do what makes your beer taste better”.
During the industrial revolution, some breweries were also making their own electricity. Since the quality of a brewer’s beer wasn’t affected by where the electricity came from, those that outsourced electricity generation, and focused on brewing, jumped ahead.
The lesson?
Stay focused on your core business, and utilise outside expertise for different areas of your business.
The idea of experts & consultants and how much value they can provide your business is immense. You get access to a leading expert for 3-6 months and they leverage 20+ years of experience to build best-in-class systems that you would otherwise never get access to.
This works because companies below $25m ARR can’t be expected to have experts in every element of business - pricing, virality, monetisation, GTM, sales -- the list is endless.
Instead of having to go through all the time and financial cost to hire experts as full time employees, pay them $200-400k, get them set up with insurance and let them go with months of severance if they underperform consultants are able to immediately drop in, fix the issue and not leave you with a liability at the end of the project.
The Crap Thing about Expert & Consultants
The problem, however, is that very few consultants live up to this fantasy.
Instead, you’ll spend 2 months going through a sales process to hire Mckinsey, Bain, or a second tier consulting firm, they’ll staff a 23 year old Ivy League grad with no real world or industry experience and come back to you in 3-6 months with 200 pages of “analysis”, nothing actually done, and no real way of knowing if the suggestions will sink your business or drive impact.
The cost for this recent grad’s recommendations with <50% chance of success? $500k-1m or rates starting at $150-200k a month!
The market has caught on and started trying to democratise this. Platforms like Intro.co help you chat with experts on every possible topic & charge up to $12k/mo for 90 mins of calls (no disrespect to Nikita, he’s brilliant and easily worth the cost in my opinion if it increases the chance of success by 5-10%). Despite all this they still only offer recommendations for the most part and at a very high cost.
What Makes Pricepoint Different?
Corny I know, but Pricepoint is genuinely different and I believe we have just built the strongest and most client-aligned value prop I’ve ever seen.
One, they’re focused. Like weirdly focused. Everyone here at Pricepoint is a nerd on pricing, churn reduction, competitor research or GTM. That’s all they talk about, it’s the only topic over lunch and there’s no desire to increase fees by taking on any gig from restructuring mining companies to industry analysis of car manufacturers. They simply help do one, niche, and specific task REALLY well but are not suited for anything else.
And this week we’ve built out a new value prop and membership plan with insane value.
Candidly, the idea of this isn’t to make a huge amount of money. I’ve fought to make this as cheap as absolutely possible and for the amount of effort going in it will be fairly low margin or even unprofitable for us.
The idea, however, is twofold:
Commoditise and devalue the least valuable work provided by other consultants and experts (calls & 200 pages of recommendations) by making it 10-100x cheaper with a better value prop
If we can provide incredible value on the analysis side we’ll get to build deep, enduring relationships that will turn into larger implementation contracts where we build you software & best-in-class systems for competitor research, GTM and pricing.
Breaking Down Pricing
With that let’s break down what each tier of membership gets you.
Cheapest Plan - $2k/month
1:1 Chat (Unlimited): Looking for intros to VCs, other CEOs who have gone through something similar, or advice from me on a piece of your strategy - you’ll have my personal phone number. If I don’t know the answer to something I’ll send you great articles or tell you someone to reach out to.
1:1 Video Calls (2 x 30 min / month): Run me through your problems or show me upcoming designs for your product and I’ll provide as much value as possible on topics like reducing churn, improving monetisation, adjusting your pricing and how to increase top line revenue growth. Businesses on average grow an extra 90% over 5 years by doing this.
Membership Club: We’ll personally look through your business needs and you’ll get entered into a curated group chat with 3-6 other similar CEOs, product, sales, and growth experts that can help improve your business. This will be a place to find strategic business partners, potential acquirers, free software credits for their products and get any business help Pricepoint can’t provide. We think the value of one deal alone can justify the membership cost.
Free software credits: We’ve built a bunch of software for previous clients. If we analyse your company and think it’s relevant we’ll kick start you with $585/month in free credits ($7k+ per year!)
Total Value: Based on competitor’s comps, $15-24k/month
Medium Plan - $2.3k/month
Everything in Basic plus…
Design Work: Let us know your goals and our in-house designer will spend 3 hours a month building you psychology and data-backed designs with insights from our consultants.
1:1 Video Calls (3 x 30 min / month): Even more time with me, oh dear ;)
Free software credits: $1,250 / month or $15k/year in free software credits for whatever your needs.
Custom GTM Strategy & Segmented Lead Lists: Regular cold email databases like Zoominfo aren’t much help. Let us build you intent-based lists. Example: selling an AI sales agent? We’ll scrape LinkedIn for companies looking to hire an SDR to massively increase your open rates!
Total Value: $20-45k/month
Expensive Plan - $8.3k/month
Certainly more expensive but the way we’re thinking about this is that a fully loaded single engineer or Product Manager would cost $200k a year (health insurance, medical, PTO, equipment, training days etc.). We’ll bring in designers, engineers, and monetisation experts that can increase revenue by 45%+ all for half the price of a single engineer.
Embedded in your Org: I myself (or another consultant if you wish) will embed into your company 3 days a month. We’ll build and implement initiatives around competitive research, pricing strategy, GTM motions and lead qualification that should skyrocket your revenue.
Bess-in-Class Competitor Research: We’ll send unbranded surveys to your competitor’s clients asking for their happiness, most loved features and features that would make them switch. Low NPS? Great for an outbound campaign to try and get them switching over. Most loved features? Gives us a great idea of how to adjust your marketing copy and product roadmap. Features to make them switch? A powerful way to customise your outreach and demo to better close them.
Reinvent your Pricing Strategy: We’ll do willingness to pay testing + 3 other methods to make sure your churn isn’t unnecessarily high and that you’re getting the most out of every single client. Why make your pricing the same for a VP in New York and a startup COO in India?
Reinvent your Sales Process: Find out why you're not qualifying leads at a strong rate, why you're losing deals, and significantly increase conversion rates to closed won
Unlimited Apollo Email Credits: Ever need a list of leads from Apollo we’ll get it for you, for absolutely no charge.
Total Value: Based on consulting fees, $150-400k/month
The first 5 spots for newsletter readers are 50% off, and I’m expecting this to sell out very quickly. For any newsletter reader that isn’t fast enough you can use code “SUBSTACK” to get an exclusive 20-25% discount if you sign up before the end of Wednesday.
To apply to join or if you have any questions/concerns simply book a call with the link below:
If I've booked in a call for late next week am I guaranteed the 50% discount?
Glad to see your expertise being recognised. Could you share Pricepoint's website?