A talk warning founders and operators about the risks of over-customizing pricing to individual customer demands. The speaker recounts an entrepreneurial experience of agreeing to complex, customer-specific contract and billing terms that scaled into many divergent pricing models (cites Gainsight and Atlassian as examples) and calls this situation a “trap” while allowing that some flexibility is appropriate.
Chapters
So you will have a customer, maybe you have one now prospect and they'll say okay, I get your pricing is 200amonth, right? And it's like you have a one year contract. What I'd really like to do is have a three year contract with the one year opt out in the beginning and pay you on quarterly terms and not pay you in the actual users you've signed up for, but the computed users based on consumption and actually have a max and a minimum. And you're like this entrepreneur that's kind of desperate, which I was. You're like sure, we'll do that, right? It's like one customer and the one customer turns into three or four and then you have like gainsight where like 1300 customers, I don't know, 1200 different pricing models, something like that. And I would just say it's a trap, right? It is totally a trap. And now that doesn't mean you shouldn't be flexible to customers. You should. But I remember some of you probably know Atlassian, like one of the greatest software companies of all time. Somebody from Atlassian here. Go, go. Atlassian. What's that?
