Will they pay us?

With that question, rubber meets the road

Photo by Kaitlyn Chow on Unsplash

I will be honest. As we slowly built the billing infrastructure for this product, I wasn’t entirely sure if people would pay. Every pricing experiment we’d done said the value proposition was there, but then you know how products with seemingly compelling value propositions fall out of favor once the free trial is over.

Over the past two years we had nailed down a known market need, built a functional prototype and ran a limited time ‘invite-only’ pilot. Our beta users loved the prototype.

But how do you really know when people love your product? How do you know that it really solves a problem that they really care about?

Try this. Ask for payment in return.

Everybody loves free things, but if you are paying for something in exchange for using it — it must deliver value. Enough value so the differential is in favor of the buyer.

So the question in front of us was

Will people really pay for our product?