A YouTube presentation (by Jason M. Lemkin) describing how the speaker tested market willingness to pay by asking users to actually pay, and a brief anecdote about making an early pricing decision without formal business training. The speaker emphasizes that real transactions are the ultimate market test and narrates a quick conversation about setting a price.
And the only way we kind of knew to test the market is like, oh well, market means transactions occur. A transaction is when someone pays someone else money. We're from the east coast, we're old fashioned that way, right? And so like, okay, how do we actually establish the fact that people are willing to pay money? Ask them to pay you money. That's like the best possible way to test it. So the product, even in sucky form, in I'll say generously late alpha, we started asking people to pay, right? And one of the challenges with that, like one of the requisites in order to start charging money is you have to come up with a price. It's one of those little details like you have to know what it is you're charging. And at the time we had to make the pricing decision, we didn't have the six MBAs yet. It was just me and Brian in a house plant trying to decide because, ok, both of us are going to start selling this thing and I'm going to give you the answer here. The answer is three minutes and I'm going to tell you the entirety of the conversation. Pretty much parents.
