Fynn Glover and Ben Papillon argue that CTOs need to own pricing strategy in 2025. They point to Vercel's four transparent metrics and Linear's native billing as models, then offer six ideas: think about pricing early, design for iteration, decouple pricing from code, sync product and pricing roadmaps, use feature flags for entitlements, and outsource billing infrastructure.
Chapters
Hey everybody, 2025 in our opinion is going to be a year that separates great startup product and engineering teams from the rest.
Why do we think that?
Well, there's never been more pressure on technical founders, not just to deliver ambitious roadmaps, but also to meet customer demands for flexible software purchasing, pricing, and packaging. Founder CTOs are under more pressure than ever to deliver transparent, scalable pricing implementations. Implementations that flexibly satisfy the needs of two stakeholders: internal teams who are managing customers, managing pricing, managing packaging, and external customers who need to be able to see what they've used, manage their plans, manage what they're purchasing, understand their pricing. AI adds a totally new layer of complexity. Fuel costs are high, products are evolving rapidly, Competitive AI pricing remains totally uncharted. The best teams are responding with the most rapid iteration. Vercel has 4 price metrics and has transparently and confidently detailed all 4 on their pricing page. Intercom is transparently pioneering outcome-based pricing. Linear has built beautiful native billing experiences that go beyond vanilla Stripe. Calendly built first-class entitlements management to decouple pricing from code. This is the challenge and what today's post is all about. As a startup CTO or CPO or technical founder, how do you empower product and ops teams to control and iterate on pricing and packaging with flexibility and with agility without tying your developers up in ongoing billing and pricing initiatives? We spend all day thinking about these questions, and on January 9th, 2025, we're going to host a webinar, uh, with me— I'm Fynn Glover, the founder and CEO of Schematic— and Ben Papillon, uh, my co-founder and CTO. And we're going to talk about how CTOs especially can make pricing a differentiator and a growth lever for their startups in 2025. Rather than a bottleneck. We're going to cover a lot in an hour. It'll be interactive. People can come off mic, they can ask questions, but we're going to focus on 6 ideas. And the first is, how do you think about pricing early and often? How do you avoid waiting until you've launched to think about pricing?
We're going to talk about how you design for continuous iteration.
If there's one thing that's true in startups, it's that your pricing will change. It should. Pricing should evolve as fast as your product. We're going to talk about how you can decouple pricing from code so that you free your developers to build features, not spend endless hours on billing and pricing-related initiatives. We're going to talk about how you can sync your product roadmap with your pricing roadmap. They should move in lockstep so that everything you're building has an accountable impact on revenue. We're going to talk about how you can reimagine feature flagging, where you can use feature flags beyond traditional deployment and rollout to manage entitlements and drive monetization.
And we're also going to talk about how you can outsource the last mile.
You should not have to build all of the additional infrastructure around Stripe and your product to support your pricing and packaging implementation. Skip the custom build for metering, entitlements, billing UI, usage tracking, and the list goes on. All of this is obviously much easier said than done, especially if you've never done it before. And that's why we're hosting a free workshop for startup CTOs, for founders of any type, for product leaders on January 9th, 2025 at 12 Eastern. If you want to spend less time on billing and more time growing revenue through pricing and packaging excellence, this is a good session for you. I hope you'll join us and hope everybody has a great start to 2025.
