Rustam Lalkaka explains SaaS pricing with a concrete metaphor: lock in your pricing structure too early and you stop learning, too late and chaos sets in. The trick is finding the right moment for your product, then using tools like Schematic to stay flexible as you adjust based on what customers actually need.
Chapters
Anyway, and so I think having rational SKUs and units of measure and things that you can measure and not just like yelling random things in a contract makes a lot of sense and is important. I think the really, really hard thing in general, especially when you're moving quickly and building new products quickly and evolving things quickly and trying to learn from customers quickly, is you need to figure out the right time to pour concrete. Like if you do it too late, you end up with a mess. If you do it too early, you really stymie progress. The problem is you never know when the right time to pour concrete is, even if you've done this a bunch of times before, right? Like every product's a little different. Every buyer base is a little different. There's real nuance and art to all this. And when I say pour concrete, I mean establish units of measure and like concrete SKUs and exactly how things fit together and like the price sheet that goes out to your customers. How will you sort of resolve that challenge as you build Firebase? It's a great question. I mean, in all seriousness, I think tools like Schematic help there, right? Like I think one of the reasons skewing early on formalizing this sort of stuff is so painful is that making changes tends to be really hard. And so if the sort of cost of doing business there and sort of, uh, operating a price book is lower, then that increases flexibility and optionality and maybe means that you can sort of be opinionated early and then, and then have flexibility to change things as you go.
