The Truth About SaaS Pricing | Expert Advice From Head of Product M3TER (EP# 52, Part 1)

James, so good to be here with you. We've, uh, we've gotten to know each other over the last like 3 years now. We met, uh, when I was working at an Insight portfolio company called Automox, and when you were working at Insight and helping us think through product-led growth and pricing and packaging and, um, all the good questions around those, those two big initiatives for the company at the time. So it's great to be here with you.

Yeah, same, uh, from my side. It's great to keep in touch and, and yeah, really excited to be here.

You, um, you're no longer with Insight. You're now leading product at, you know, one of the most interesting companies, um, in the space right now, Meter. Maybe you could just step back and tell us a little bit about your career and what are the steps that have, that have led you to leading product at Meter.

Yeah, definitely. And I think it's, it's interesting that kind of the interwoven strands of pricing and packaging and product have all kind of followed me all the way through, um, but with different elements in different, uh, parts of my life. So, um, started off at very much in the pricing space at a company called Simon-Kushner Partners, which is a consultancy, uh, at first being relatively generalist, learning the basics of pricing, the value-based pricing, um, how to think about kind of metrics and things like that, um, for everything from media companies to gyms to warehouses, etc. But really focused on SaaS about, uh, 10 years ago now, uh, and worked with a bunch of people in the Bay Area, moved out to the US, uh, from the UK, and, uh, then moved over to someone I'd been helping as a consultant, which was Segment CDP, uh, was working there from Series A to Series D, kind of really interesting pricing journey, really interesting growth journey, uh, really good to kind of get operationalizing. And I learned a lot of the pain points of how do you do pricing and product strategy and packaging well at scale as an operator. Um, and then I, I came over here to the East Coast in New York, um, and joined Insight Partners where we met, obviously. I was there as advisor to all the portfolio companies on pricing and packaging and product stuff with a pretty great team of amazing ex-operators, some of whom you've also met, and then really took that on and joined Meta, which is in the Insight portfolio. And we've, we've obviously talked about before because it's a really interesting company in a really good space, which is how do you operationalize all of the things you would like to do when it comes to pricing and packaging and making sure that these things work with the systems and the CRM systems, the billing systems, the AR systems that you have, and the product at scale. I'm sure you probably have some stories here as well, but it's so common to see a company that prices on usage-based pricing operating through Google Sheets and product pulls and manual billing and all of the kind of issues that come up, come up when you don't automate things and you don't build these processes around the way the pricing works. Our goal is effectively to make pricing, usage-based pricing, as easy to run as any other type of pricing. And we're really making strides for our customers in doing that.

It's going to be my next question is, you know, what does Meter do and why does it exist? But maybe we can even back up. I mean, usage-based billing, consumption billing is arguably a real inflection, well, in B2B SaaS, maybe beyond. What attracted you to Meter? And maybe you can go a little bit deeper in why do you think this company needs to exist?

Yeah, I think, and doubling down on that kind of gap between the strategy and the execution, obviously I was very in-depth in developing that strategy and then came to the point of how do we get to billing for that? How do we get to making sure that we can be flexible with enterprise deals and things like that and make sure they still get billed. It's a really, really hard challenge. And so this, this solution has been in my, my head for quite a few years by now. The data transfer is— and the data infrastructure is a big challenge here. It's all well and good to go and pull one data point or kind of a data point based on your product, but actually there's, for most usage-based companies, no matter whether you're in SaaS, cloud infrastructure, fintech, kind of anywhere, you'll usually have a giant list of transactions or events, API calls, no matter what your metric is, that go in there. And understanding what those numbers are is not a case of just kind of pulling one data point. It's usually a case of pulling many aggregating them, and then rating them against what that customer should be. Now, typically those processes break down in one of those steps, if not multiple, because your customers don't always have the same limits and things like that. Your customers don't always have the same, um, the same way of calculating. Sometimes your customers don't even have the same metric. You price on different metrics for different customers with different segments and things like that. And therefore these kind of, let's say, handmade or kind of unautomated systems, manual data pulls, manual processes for billing and things like that tend to break down in any of those edge cases. So we've seen a bunch of customers who have come onto our platform who basically can't bill for 5, 10% of their customers and they're leaking revenue endlessly on that kind of thing. But there's also the concept of these processes take a lot of time. It's hard work to do. And so you have kind of sleepless nights in the billing team at every month end. You have issues with reconciling, you have issues with auditing and compliance, all because there's like copy and paste in there. There is kind of manual data entry, like all of these things can be difficult. There's very difficult way of setting up an audit trail and usually not linked as well. And so we've talked to kind of endless finance teams, product teams, engineering teams who have been trying to set up these systems and have all of these kind of issues when they've built it themselves. So one of those things that you can see now, there's a good number of kind of entrants into our space. It's a very, very valuable solution for a huge amount of companies. And it's purely based on the fact that usage-based pricing is here to stay. And I think it will keep evolving and things like that. But I think a lot of companies are wising up to, oh, we need to probably build around this and build our systems to take account of the fact that this is our reality now as a pricing strategy. There's many, many benefits to usage-based pricing that we can step into anyway. It's not for everyone, but most certainly a lot of companies will find a massive benefit in doing so. And so in the answer of, do we make our systems adapt to that strategy, or do we change our strategy to the systems? In my past, a lot of the answer was, oh well, we can't build that, we can't do that, let's take this out of our pricing strategy, or something like that. Probably not the right answer. So, so unlocking that and allowing that pricing agility is something that I've been kind of very, very interested in expanding on, um, for throughout my career. And Meta is a perfect place to do that.

Very, very cool. I mean, I think that what's so fascinating about your career is you've spent time on the consulting side, you spent time operating, spent time on the consulting side, many different companies. Now you've moved into a company whose product is trying to solve many of the problems that you've personally experience. One thing that you said is that usage-based is here to stay. And, you know, that is in the wake of and in the context of major inflections and tailwinds like AI. So could you, could you maybe comment on how you think about the most consequential inflections that you see for B2B SaaS companies especially, but more broadly enterprise software companies that are trying to support multiple go-to-market motions, multiple products, hybrid billing. Can you just talk about how you think about the inflections over the next few years?

Yeah, and I think especially, and I'll kind of maybe take a step back from there and just contextualize some of the past as well, because how that relates to multi-product and hybrid billing is super interesting. A lot of my past has actually been correcting some of the mis— missed assumptions around usage-based pricing. It's like either people just being like, oh, usage-based pricing sounds great. I've seen these companies with great NDR. Should we go do that? Well, if you're a workflow automation software and all you operate is on, on giving users seats, probably not. It doesn't make sense to. But so there's always been that assumption of, oh, maybe usage-based pricing is a big hype thing and things like that. No, it's, it's to boil it down, it's effectively opening the opportunity to have many more metrics. Than you used to in the past. You used to be able to do, well, do we do a device? Do we maybe, if we're really advanced, do like cores or something like that, but fixed cores rather than usage-based, or do we do seats? Now, if you look at the huge swathe of companies, especially in kind of areas like SaaS and things like that, those three metrics don't cover everything. You need to expand. You need to pick something that has more value. I think it's been interesting to then see a lot of companies where it's not the right answer come and ask me personally as an advisor, hey, should we do this? I think it would be really cool to do this, etc. It's like, well, actually probably going to lose you quite a lot of money, so let's not do that. But the flip side to that is I think we're starting to get to the point where usage-based is maturing as a concept. And the nuances— it's no longer, oh, we're gonna throw together usage-based pricing no matter what, and it sounds like great, but like we're just gonna like use it as almost like a blunt instrument. You're starting to see the variety of best ways of using it come out. And this is where hybrid comes in. So maybe your, your core pricing makes sense to be a fixed subscription, but there's this one element which would be really good to be usage-based. You can now build together that so you get the best of both worlds there. And I think the other elements of that are things like usage-based subscriptions. The number of times I've had companies come to me and say, 'Look, I think usage-based is the right answer, but I'm really scared that we'll lose all of our AR. The answer is you blend both. You have a usage-based subscription. The metric is usage-based, but the pricing and the way of operating is on a committed upsell, and you kind of continue to upsell basis.' All of these things are, I think, the nuances of usage-based pricing come out. And as you look at the future of technology, AI being the absolute kind of one of the most critical ones here, because not only does AI have probably a lot of usage-based components, it also has a, in many cases, relatively high cost to serve because of the amount of compute that's behind it, the amount of, like, if you're using LLM tokens as an input, you're paying by usage. And quite possibly, you need to understand how that tracks with cost. Like if you were to give completely unlimited free usage and people were to overuse, you could very quickly find yourself in a bit of a cost hole. It may also have unlocked new opportunities for value generation that aren't in the same place as your core product. Like, I think Intercom being the storied example where the ability for AI to resolve cases actually reduces the load on your core users. So you actually probably need to look at something because actually the AI is counter potentially to the way that you price. It's certainly not kind of aligned and it's often going to be counter. So you need to start thinking about multi-product and product portfolios in a world of, okay, let's unblock ourselves from always forcing the same pricing and the same pricing model on our customers. And what's the best way to price and package across a portfolio? And where does usage-based make sense? Where does fixed make sense? And I think we're starting to see the nuances come out there and it's actually leading to maybe a more logical adoption and more companies that you would expect to see are adopting it. And some of the companies who were exploring it but probably doesn't make sense, they're now quite happy with the answer that it's not always going to be the right answer. It's not, it's not the silver bullet. And I think through my history of kind of advising companies, I've always said there is no silver bullet in pricing. You have to work it out and it's going to be case specific. You're not just going to have one metric that's best for absolutely every company because it's depending on how your value gets generated. And this, I think, is where we're starting to see usage-based maturing. The interesting thing is the hybrid models and things like that. They're more of a tech challenge than other things. So it brings the importance of the right solution to automate that kind of those processes and make that the implementation of that strategy easy, because you can actually then have way more opportunities to really quantify the value of your product and monetize it.

The thing that caught my ear there, and that I feel like I'm talking to operators about all the time at this point, is the fact that when you are selling this product, you effectively moved away from a world of zero marginal cost software. You're now selling something that has material Yeah, yeah, I'd agree with that.

And I think we've had a, like, let's say, relatively over-the-top or cloud-based user software has existed in that vacuum of, well, the cost is to serve is pretty minimal. Like, you've seen places like cloud infrastructure and where we were at Segment, for instance, like data management and data infrastructure, you had to start thinking about usage-based pricing earlier, because actually, there's a material cost to that usage. And a lot of companies didn't have that. But then now AI is bringing that as an additional question. And I will always and forever repeat, your pricing shouldn't solely be based on your cost because that doesn't always track with value. But if there's something that tracks with both value and cost, then that's something that you should be considering in, in your pricing, um, because otherwise you can very easily find yourself in a margin hole. And one way of doing that is to price according to that metric. The other way is just to set fair use limits and make sure that you do that. But in order to enforce those properly, you still need to do the same job. You need to track it, you need to rate it, and you need to understand whether your customers are using more or less than the allowances you've given them.

Consulted with many companies, and it feels— I wonder if you agree with this— but it feels to me that increasingly more founders, more operators are aware that pricing is a critical skill that is often underutilized. Maybe that comes from books like Monetizing Innovation, literature from VCs. And I'm curious, in your opinion, if, you know, if that awareness, it's actually increasing, does that mean that companies are broadly getting better at building pricing and packaging practices? Or would you, would you say that we're still working towards building pricing practices in aggregate that are really effective across growth stage companies?

Yeah, I'd say, and specifically on that question, I'd say the adoption of a pricing team or something, or like dedicated people to pricing is still, let's say, teenage right now. It's, it's, it's a lot of companies are starting to understand it. A lot of companies are starting to build to it. But it's certainly not universal, and, and it's still got a lot of room to grow. And I think that depends on stage whether it's relevant. Maybe potentially someone who's, who's smart and knows enough in an early stage company is going to do the right job, and you maybe don't need a full team. Um, but certainly as you scale, the management of this, the revenue that you can get by just paying attention is actually like— the pricing team is going to be one of your best ROI levers, um, in terms of of hiring people who can make operational changes that will drive revenue. Um, but I think to come back to the, the importance is definitely something that is flying up in people's understanding. I've definitely seen much more people, and even a demand for me as an advisor, go up over time as more people realize, oh wait, there's probably percentage points of revenue out there. And especially as we get into a different market post-2022, um, both from the kind of funding and investment world, but also from the, uh, vendor world and the buyer world. Like, it's a different world. It's not as easy to sell stuff as it used to be. In many cases, people are having to be more cognizant of how their pricing affects deals, how their pricing affects revenue, how they can get maybe a good land and expand story. And a lot of that comes down to a pricing challenge. But what I think there's maybe something that still needs to be kind of grown into is to do pricing properly. And especially if you're doing a big change, like changing your pricing metric or changing your packaging materially and things like that. A lot of people think, oh, well, we got to do this by SKO and that's in January. And right now we're in mid, uh, kind of end of December, something like that. We can do pricing and ship it in a month, right? It's like, no, this is a massive fundamental change to your monetization, to your revenue strategy. You need to enable sales, you need to change your systems, you need to do everything. So maybe the, the understanding of the challenge and the operational difficulties of going and flip-turning this, um, it is, is massive but not always, not always fully understood. And that I think is something that is growing. There's probably someone at many companies who have had, who has had some war stories about pricing and packaging changes. And I think one element is hopefully technology and systems will make this easier. And I think the second one, as more people bring pricing teams on, as more people really think through that, as you just get more expertise, impricing from many people who have done it before. You're starting to— you will start to get the understanding of, okay, well, this is something that needs dedicated attention, whether it be people or whether it just be, hey, let's stretch this project out in enough time that we can do a proper job. But that's what I think is going to grow and will continue to grow, um, definitely, um, because it's something that is a big organizational change. You have to change pretty much everything about the way you go to market if you do a fundamental pricing change that if you rush it, you will see far, far worse results than if you take it and do it properly.

I know those war stories in that December to SKO example is, I felt that. So it sounds like we agree there's probably more awareness generally around the lever that pricing packaging can be and must be. Sounds like also, you know, the awareness of kind of how operationally difficult it can be to build and maintain a pricing and packaging implementation might be trailing a bit. So if we were, we were to try to shed some light on the most important constraints or practical realities that operators should be aware of when it comes to building and maintaining a pricing and packaging practice. What might you say to operators that have responsibility over that type of practice around the constraints they need to be prepared to address?

Yeah, and if I— and especially from the operator standpoint, your number one is pricing doesn't just kind of fly out to the customer and then just come back to you with results, right? Like no matter which channel you operate, but I'm going to focus mostly on, on that, so say sales-led, because I think there's more of an interesting like people challenge there, but making sure that sales is enabled to properly communicate the value and why it relates to the packaging and explain why the pricing and packaging looks like this now, um, and understand their opportunities to discount and understand the best way to, to feed in kind of smart ways of discounting, like potentially giving away free months in the first year rather than a lifetime discount that just persists throughout. All that kind of thing is going to help you get the most out of any pricing and packaging change. So number one is definitely sales enablement and kind of change management from a people side. I've rarely come to a company where everyone in the exec team is aligned on what pricing and packaging should look like. And if you just kind of bully through an idea without fully thinking about it, then there's going to be a missing link somewhere because not everyone's on board with the idea and things like that. So you just need to spend a good amount of time getting people comfortable, um, whether it be execs, sales, customer success, other people in, in finance and other areas with, here's why this is strategically important for us, here's the benefits that we can get. So modeling out, hey, what will this look like in the future, maybe doing market research and things like that. To allow you to kind of understand the impact of what's going to happen and sell it both internally and also by extension sell it to customers. Like, if not everyone internally believes that this is the right move, you're not ever going to kind of give that a convincing go of selling it to a customer. I think the second thing, and we definitely touched on this earlier, is systems and the ability to actually execute on that pricing, whether it be like putting in best practices, like allowing customers to view their usage and things as you, if you adopt usage-based pricing, all that kind of thing is super important, but is relatively hard to do if you were to build the systems yourself. How do you automate the billing process? How do you sort out month-end close? How do you, and in the packaging side, how do you make sure that the right entitlements are and whether it be features or limits are levied to that on that customer and making sure that they can use the right thing. And I think by extension of that, migrating customers from A to B, you don't want to go, okay, well, there's two bad answers there, which is the first one being you just force everyone onto the new packaging and you probably can't do a price increase or change the pricing on them. You just give them everything for free effectively. And then you've just developed a bunch of products that you can no longer charge for because customers aren't going to come back having used that and say, yeah, I'll now pay 30% more or whatever for that. If it's a game-changing product and you've signed a contract with a customer a year ago on what's effectively a totally different product, you have the right to go back and ask them, like, hey, do you want to upgrade to this new thing? But if you just give it to them, you've kind of lost that battle already. And then I think the second element, which is you force everyone onto new pricing and packaging, or you force them to take a price increase. Again, you'll probably annoy customers, you might churn customers, those that may be, for instance, a little bit more dormant or not using as much, generally poorer customer health, you'll probably force them into a churn event. So you don't want to do that either. The way to do that is by managing a staged migration over 18 months. But if you don't have the ability to systemize that, that will very quickly get out of control. It's very, very hard to do without some way of managing and automating that process.

Migration bring back nightmares. And I've had conversations with larger companies where they'll describe truly nightmare situations where there are hundreds of cohorts of one. They've never successfully found ways to migrate customers as the business, as the product has evolved. —as billing has evolved.

Yeah, and I think one kind of symptom of that that you can see in a lot of companies today is in lieu of doing, okay, we're launching new functionality, we're going to repackage and we're going to sell this in the most effective bundles that we can. Everyone's just launched every new product as an add-on SKU. And so you have this giant menu of potential things that you can buy. But then you're not taking advantage of any impact of bundling effects and things like that. You're not, you're not getting people to buy more than they would otherwise. You're literally just letting them pick from a menu. A lot of those menus that I've seen as a buyer of things— overwhelming. I don't even know what I want to buy. The whole goal of pricing and packaging is to package the functionality in a way that speaks to value, speaks to use cases, speaks to solutions. And if you just have 300 SKUs on size 6 font on a big list. No one's— no one, no buyer. The buyers would need to know more than the sellers in order to effectively buy anything, and that's not the case usually. So you— it really does hamper your ability to make the most out of your product development if you do that.

That image of the long menu list, I'm thinking of like an IHOP or something, but how brutal the experience that is. So How, you know, many companies have what I would describe as an aspiration to experiment and iterate on pricing and packaging. How do you think about that aspiration?

I think it's, it's very effective when managed effectively, right? And to go deeper there, there are some ways that you could— there are many ways that you can test pricing and packaging where you are doing so in a logical way that makes sense. But you can't necessarily go and say, hey, Customer A, I'm going to charge you 100, and hey, Customer B, for the exact same thing today, I'm going to cost you— charge you 150. That's very unfair. You probably won't get the best because Customer A and Customer B might be very different. It's, it's not the way to do it, just going out and kind of live pricing, A/B testing and things like that. Is, is challenging. And I have seen companies who've done it more effectively than others. And it certainly helps to be in like a sales-led environment where you have a little bit of deflection. But generally speaking, just going and rolling out pricing, seeing if it works and coming back isn't the way to do it. There's also a huge risk in many pricing changes, especially if you're doing something like changing metric from A to B, that you have customers who that benefits and will pay you less, rather than more. And you therefore have a risk, you have a risk of your revenue actually going down as well as up. So if you just launch stuff, it's pretty dangerous. I think there's a couple of elements there. And especially as you go through different growth stages, don't see pricing as this one thing that needs to be changed every 2 or 3 years. Try and set some of the real kind of tenets of pricing, usually your core pricing model,, and usually like the core structure of your packages, those shouldn't change that much. Your core pricing model should be hopefully driven around what best reflects value, for customers. Your core packaging should be driven around different types of customers in the customer journey. And then how do you add in onto that and iterate? That should be a question of, okay, we're moving around features rather than we're ripping and replacing our entire packaging structure, every year. But you can do things like iterative price increases as time goes. Like, as you add more things to the product, your product gets more valuable. As inflation happens year on year, your product— like, the price you charge should be changing. So you can kind of— and as you grow as a company and your brand grows and things like that, and then the market— the vendors see more value in the market— all of these— like, your pricing should be iterative. It should be kind of going up over time. And then see, look for areas that you can tweak. So the easy wins, the not structural wins, whether that be certain areas of your customer base have a little bit more willingness to pay, you can do differentiated price increases in some places, or whether that be, hey, let's move from this kind of per-user model that never scales and never has a volume discount. Let's think about tiering it at high volumes and things like that, getting people to commit. Like all of those smaller changes slightly behind the— like slightly under the radar changes can actually drive double-digit percentage points of revenue for your company. Like the small changes can be big impact in pricing. And it doesn't necessarily need a 6-month project every time to do an iteration that proves value, but continuously monitor, be agile, be ready to iterate. That's number one. And then the second one is when you do want to test things out. A little easier if you have, for instance, a sales lead, and you can actually say, hey, this sales team, or in this region, we're actually going to test out the new pricing first. Limit the, limit the group, understand the impact. It's not necessarily an A/B test because you might have different markets. You might have to— I wouldn't necessarily go necessarily A/B, but you can test with that team. Has that— have— has the new pricing had impact over the old pricing. And that's the way I test it. So you compare that team, um, use it effectively as a, um, as a, as a testing group and use that to understand the impact. And if we were to roll that out wider, what might the impact be? And similarly, if you are a product-led growth type company, if you have kind of mostly through self-service and things like that, try a region that closely represents other regions and potentially start changing your packaging and pricing there first and then roll that out to other places because it's much, much easier to do that than it would be to try and kind of change the way that all of your pricing works or some of your pricing works for a different set of customers every time.

Complete sense. And just to play it back a little bit, it sounds like the aspiration that companies have to experiment and randomize in packaging, you know, in other words, it's a double-edged sword and people need to be really thoughtful around staggering any large structural changes with smaller ones. Definitely. Thoughtful around how they would do any type of testing so that they're avoiding any cannibalization or avoiding organizational thrash and kind of maybe most importantly ensuring fairness to the customer.

Yeah, and I want to double down on the point of organizational thrash, right? If you do a big pricing change, as I just said, as I just said a second ago, like, you've got to go and educate everyone. You've got to like re— almost kind of create an entire new pitch deck and sales enablement deck around a different way of thinking about the value. If you then go back, then you've got to do that whole job again. So the thrash is real, especially when you change pricing. You don't want to do it twice. You want to do it once and you want to iterate and make sure that every iteration is successful and lands. And maybe can be tweaked, but certainly doesn't structurally go from A to B to back to A again.

I wonder if you think this is true. I mean, in my experience, I think what I've observed is there's a desire to make structural changes, maybe kind of on a biannual or annual basis, you know, roughly somewhere in there. But there are often kind of daily changes that we're making at kind of an individual local customer level. As a product matures or as a customer's relationship with the company matures. Do you think that that's a fair way to instruct operators to think about pricing and packaging? You have large global changes that are more staggered and you have daily local changes. Do you think that that's a fair way for people to think about it?

Yeah, and it tracks with kind of everything in the history of kind of pricing through the world has been it grew up on a barter system. Your first customer is not going to pay them as the same amount and won't have the same willingness to pay as the customer that comes after. There's different areas of value, there's different needs, there's different usage, there's different customer journeys. All of those impact separately. Your ability to be flexible on a customer basis is actually a huge asset that you have. And there's certainly some customer— some companies I've worked with where operationally they want to really lock it down and have very limited discounting. You will— it will hold you back and you'll lose some deals because you're not hitting the price points that you could do if you were to discount. And maybe you could have won that deal if you did. Similarly, you're not necessarily extracting the most from, from winners to pay. There's some companies I've worked with who have intentionally had a very simple pricing that's very low so you can capture a lot of growth and capture a lot of the market. But that means that you could be charging kind of 2 or 3 times more in some cases than they can. Now, the advantage is they can always go back and increase prices over time, but you definitely do lose things by trying to simplify things too much and locking everything down, avoiding any form of discounting and all that kind of thing. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, sorry. Yeah, the next kind of element there is that you don't want this to be too much of a habit. You don't want every customer to be on a different, a wholly different pricing for the exact point of if you have customized pricing, fully customized pricing, I don't mean like, hey, a little bit more discount here and there or something like that. But like, if you've got many customers on totally different pricing metrics or tiers or things like that, operationalizing that is impossible. And actually, going back to the sales enablement point, and I've definitely seen companies that operate somewhere like this, the earlier stage is more common, but certainly even at scale, challenge is that you can't actually build a structure around that strategy, right? If you have every— if, if everything is flexible and you also can train kind of especially sales, or, um, that usually sales like into the bad habits of, well, we can be totally flexible, we can give every discount we want, we can over discount, we can change, we can sell product that we don't have right now, all that kind of thing that can be very difficult in terms of generating thrash within a company and avoid— and, and missing your point of focus. That is very possible if you were to have everything customized. A general rule of thumb is, hey, 5 to 10% of your biggest customers, you might want to price differently. You might want to have custom. They might not fit into your core strategy. If it's flying up way more than that, then um, you should probably reassess, hey, is the strategy right, or something like that. But what we've seen in the past, I think, or certainly what I've seen in the past, is that 5 or 10% will be priced separately. They'll have special contract arrangements and things like that, and then they're never billed for anything, or they're certainly not billed for any overages or anything else that they owe, or any packaging increases or anything like that, because they're on something that doesn't exist and isn't systemized and doesn't kind of actually track with the way that your business operates. And so the ability to have that flexibility and integrate it and manage the flexibility and complexity of that is something that's really interesting and is only kind of recently possible.

Interesting. I think a good segue, but maybe could you just share one or two stories of companies that you've helped with pricing and packaging and the impact that you've seen it have on those companies? Yeah, definitely.

And I'll pick a couple of the kind of big ones I've been involved in, but I'll start off with, with Segment. I think when we reworked pricing and packaging in kind of early stage, there was a massive hockey stick kind of effect on, on our growth path and things like that., um, from doing so. And I, I think that continued by gradually executing better and things like that, but there wasn't all that much change that needed to be done after that point. I think that was— we'd landed on a fairly good model, and, and that worked for a good portion of the, the company's growth. Um, and then it was a case of iterating from there, but you could kind of— we, we often looked at the graphs, and it literally just— there was just an inflection point in revenue, the growth was massive, massively faster, um, from that point onwards, from having switched metric and gone slightly more upmarket and things like that. I think the interesting kind of mirror image to that now in the market is you're seeing a lot of players in this kind of space and this kind of market look at the old— the models that Segment moved away from and things like that as a good competitive foil. So I think that's a very interesting case study into Pricing is not static. It changes with market dynamics. And we're talking kind of 8 years into the future now. It's probably kind of your pricing is going to— your pricing mechanics and the strategy and the structure of— maybe redo that one. Your pricing mechanics and the strategy and the structure of how your pricing should work will change as the market evolves. 8 years in tech is a long, long time. For any given market. And, and so you'll, you'll see that change over time, but you could see by the fact that it stayed a relatively effective pricing model for so long that, that we had kind of got something good in there, and there were good elements to it. Um, I think that another one that was an interesting, um, case study is I worked, and, and some of my colleagues, uh, at Simon-Kucher— I'll go back to this because I probably won't mention— I probably shouldn't mention Simon-Kucher, I, I did some work with Atlassian a long time ago, uh, and there were many, many kind of— it was a full assessment and a full change, but you could see that those changes gradually roll out. But even some of the smaller ones, moving away from these kind of tiers of, of per user and shifting towards per user pricing, uh, I think it really helped the company grow their kind of usage base and align customer incentives a lot better. Naturally, share prices is not kind of only going to be driven by pricing or things like that, but again, you could see kind of a big element of, uh, company success and earnings reports being driven by, by pricing. As you look back in some of those things, the pricing is reflected in, uh, some of those earnings calls and things like that, and you can see, okay, Yeah, these kind of changes, even these smaller changes at big companies where you can do it at scale, can have huge, huge results. And that can be something that you can think about as you go and launch pricing. Like, maybe big change is not always the answer. Maybe smaller changes are the answer because you, A, have far lower levels of organizational thrash, and you, and you, B, have the ability to then iterate and make multiple changes over a period of time. Going back to Atlassian, I know a few people who were there and further on that journey than I was. You could then see the impact of gradually rolling out multiple changes kind of tier together and accumulate benefit. So, launching freemium in Jira and things like that, I think, was the next stage on by doing that. But They did a really good job of phasing out those changes and getting incremental improvements at every stage.

Two fantastic examples. This has been so fun. Thank you for doing it. I've really enjoyed it. You've had a front row seat to pricing and packaging for a long time from a lot of different lenses. And so it's great to be able to talk about it together. Yeah. Where can people find you? Where can people learn more about Meter?

Yeah, so I think find me on LinkedIn and I'm sure we'll post it somewhere. And then find M3TR on m3tr.com, M3TR.com. And we're on LinkedIn and a bunch of other places as well. And feel free to be in touch if I can ever help with that.

Thank you again. All right, I'm going to press stop.