Great point about asking pricing questions to customers:
They’re going to lowball you. Also, they have no idea. Instead, infer what they’d pay based on what they’re already paying for. Or try to get them to put a dollar amount on the value it would add to their life (could they make an additional $5k/year with their new job? $20k/year? Now you have something to base your price off of.
Having been on both sides - I couldn't agree more.
Another way to ask the pricing question is to phrase it as follows:
"What do you feel is a fair and reasonable price for this product?"
For some reason using the terms "fair" and "reasonable" in the question helps eliminate the lowball offers you'll get with a generic "what would you pay" question.
(source: have done well over a thousand customer interviews in the past ten years and seen this work very well)
People use radio-button questions to reduce the effort required by the mass to take the survey, thereby increasing the number of responses. In my own experiences, lesser people fill in text boxes. I find that asking open ended, non loaded questions works when talking to them face to face or over a call, but not over an online survey. I'd like to know how text based online surveys fare.
Anecdotally, awful. Especially at the very early stages of customer discovery, you lose so much resolution in the answers.
I didn't go into it in this article because it was out of scope, but stories are much better than simple facts. I always tell Startup Weekend teams I'd rather they talk to 10 people than get 10,000 survey results.
4 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 12.1 ms ] threadThey’re going to lowball you. Also, they have no idea. Instead, infer what they’d pay based on what they’re already paying for. Or try to get them to put a dollar amount on the value it would add to their life (could they make an additional $5k/year with their new job? $20k/year? Now you have something to base your price off of.
Having been on both sides - I couldn't agree more.
Keep rocking guys!
Jason
"What do you feel is a fair and reasonable price for this product?"
For some reason using the terms "fair" and "reasonable" in the question helps eliminate the lowball offers you'll get with a generic "what would you pay" question.
(source: have done well over a thousand customer interviews in the past ten years and seen this work very well)
I didn't go into it in this article because it was out of scope, but stories are much better than simple facts. I always tell Startup Weekend teams I'd rather they talk to 10 people than get 10,000 survey results.