Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot's former CTO, says startups should charge for their product immediately, even if it barely works. The real risk isn't building badly, it's building something nobody wants. Month-to-month pricing at low cost tests two things: whether people will pay, and whether they keep paying when they can quit.
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So I think the better advice is to kind of get something out there relatively quickly. HubSpot product in the early years, I will confess, I was CTO. I'm 100% responsible. The product sucked and we started selling it when it was in alpha, not even beta. And the reason we did it is that most startups that end up kind of not working out, it's rarely because you weren't able to build the product. That is almost never the case, right? Unless you're Elon Musk trying to put someone on Mars or something like that. It's usually the reason startups fail is you kind of build something no one wants. So your purpose here, the early thing is mitigate your highest risk, right? The risk is not, will you be able to build a product? Let's stipulate you'll be able to do that. But usually it's like this, there's no sustainable market. Since kind of time is your most precious commodity, my advice is to kind of flip those things on their head. And the only real way to know if there's an actual market is to actually charge people money. As uncomfortable as that seems. And the way we kind of reduced our guilt for charging for a crappy alpha product at the time is we were month to month. We had a relatively low price. They sign up for a month. If they hate it, they can cancel the next month. So there's 2 parts of the evidence of kind of true product market fit. One is, will people buy the product and actually pay you money? And number 2, will they continue to pay you money even when they have the option not to do so? That gives you a sense that you may not have the product exactly right yet. People had faith the product would get better. We're willing to kind of suffer suckage of the product, so to speak, because the price point was right and the pain point was acute enough.
