Your Startup Is Leaving Money On the Table

Use These 4 Rules to Maximize Profits

Joe Procopio
4 min readSep 13, 2021

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Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

Have you ever asked your paying customers how much your product or service is worth?

I do this a lot, and it’s not as scary as it might seem. Often, the majority say the product is worth more than what they’re paying for it. And that’s a good problem to have, right?

Well, yes and no. On one hand, it proves my business offers a lot of value. But it also shows that I’m leaving money on the table. In some cases, lots of money.

Undervaluing a product or service is a common startup pricing mistake. Once I understood why I kept making that mistake, I was able to break the pattern and make a lot more money per sale.

So let’s talk about why we entrepreneurs constantly sell ourselves short, using four pricing rules I run all new startups through.

Rule #1: Don’t price based on your competition’s price

Establishing a price model and setting proper pricing is one of the most difficult parts of developing a new product. And when it comes to difficult business concepts, we entrepreneurs tend to learn a lot of those concepts by osmosis — we analyze how established companies do things, and then we copy those things.

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Joe Procopio
Joe Procopio

Written by Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. AI pioneer. Technologist. Innovator. I write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More about me at joeprocopio.com

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