How to Price Your Minimum Viable Product
Let’s talk about how much you should charge customers for something when you’re not totally sure what that thing is yet.
A startup has to get its pricing right or the product will be dead at launch. The problem is, there aren’t a lot of hard and fast rules for pricing a brand new product. It’s an individual exercise, and the right answers are specific to your market, your company, and the as-yet-unknown value of the product to your customers.
Throw in the uncertainty surrounding a minimum viable product, and the pricing process usually generates more questions than answers. I know. I’ve been there. I’ve spent weeks there.
But having launched dozens of digital, physical, and hybrid products to market, I’ve developed a few general guidelines that have worked for me when pricing an MVP. So before we tackle the details of our specific market, our specific company, and our specific product, let’s take these MVP pricing rules into account.
Charge For What It Will Be, Not For What It Is
If we’re not comfortable charging the full amount we plan to charge when the product emerges from MVP, then we’re not ready to call what we’re about to release an MVP yet.
