- by Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt
What is the Pricing Design Sprint?
The Pricing Design Sprint is an 8 week intensive program where you will join with 8-10 other pre-Series A, B2B SaaS startups to completely overhaul your pricing and packaging, supported intensely by me.
Then follows a 4 month 'pricing marathon' where you will validate your new pricing and packaging in the market, fine tune a data model to optimise your prices, calibrate and adjust as necessary while we hammer out any friction points that is keeping your from growing.
The pricing sprint will completely transform your business to the point where there is a definite 'before' and 'after'. I have done this for 50+ startups and not only has 0% failed - every single one has gone on to either further VC funding or a direct exit.
The Pricing Design Sprint costs €15K and is the only way to work with me as a pre-Series A startup.
After 8 weeks: your Pricing & Packaging 2.0 is launched
Jan 3rd - Sprint Starts
End of June: massive commercial accelleration & exhilaration of achieved progress
Sign up for the Design Sprint
Sprint starts on January 3rd and runs through June 2022.
Outcome
When we are done with the pricing design sprint you will have a well designed and functioning packaging and pricing model in the market.
The key outcomes of the Pricing Design Sprint will be:
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Packaging: we will have packaged your product to sell. And it will.
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Pricing Model: your customers will love it and it will monetize well.
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Price Optimisation: we will use our state of the art data methodology to optimise your prices
(And no: you don't need a huge, perfectly clean dataset to do this) -
Knowledge: you will understand the dynamics of pricing and packaging on a totally new level - why some things work while others don't and how to apply these powerful concepts for years to come.
I have designed the Pricing Design Sprint to maximize speed and forward momentum to ensure you execute and we resolve issues immediately. I will not only support you in this - I will be breathing down your neck to ensure you execute.
Being a group of startups going through this together ensures you understand every concept in depth, as you see how it is applied in 10+ cases. I will be there to help you with your packaging and pricing, but seeing it done 10+ times makes you understand why something works.
Very normal results for the startups I work with is to increase CLTV by several 100%, while having unaffected or even higher conversion rates, lower churn and shorter sales cycles.
Content & Program
This is a 6 month program comprised of an 8 week intensive design phase and a 4month validation and price optimisation phase.
For the first 8 weeks we will meet online weekly for 2 hours where each startup presents work done and we go over next weeks assignment. I give frameworks and we discuss the particulars of how to apply them to every startups situation. I'll review any amount of work and be available for questions and idea generation as needed during the sprint.
The program will have a dedicated Slack channel where we can share work and ideas and ask questions, both during the sprint and the marathon.
The 8 weeks are themed as follows:
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Kick-Off + Prep Work to start right now.
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Fencing & Jobs To Be Done
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Features: Functional, Services & Commercial
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Packaging & Expansion Journey
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Pricing Metrics
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Pricing Architecture
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Price Points & Optimisation
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Validation Plan
You will be asked to support the work with sales data, CRM data, customer surveys and/or interviews, as appropriate. I will assist you as necessary and my team will combine your sales data and survey data to build a bespoke price optimisation model for you.
This price optimisation model might give insights straight away in the design phase, but most likely will need to be calibrated with the new sale data that comes in during the 4mth validation phase.
The 4 Month Validation Phase:
When the 8 week sprint is over you are ready to test their your pricing in sales and we will check in on monthly calls to ensure accountability, questions are answered etc., especially covering:
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Feedback from sales - separating price push-back from structural push-back.
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Use (and misuse) of discounts.
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Negotiation with large customers.
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Rolling over legacy customers to new pricing (or not).
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+ I will still be available to answer any questions between sessions as necessary.
At the end of the 4mth validation phase, we re-calibrate your price optimisation model and review, change and tweak anything that needs to be.
But most importantly : I will hold you and every other startup accountable for keeping up with the program and the timeline and execute on the plan as agreed.
Who should participate?
The Pricing Design Sprint is for you if you are:
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A B2B SaaS startup
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Pre-Series A - roughly meaning you have between$100K and $1M in ARR.
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Can commit reasonable organisational ressources and attention to work on this - especially during the first 8 weeks of the design sprint.
Who in your organisation should participate in the sprint?
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Up to two people (same price. The value is primarily on the organisational level, not the personal one).
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Whoever has a position to execute on a project like this - normal titles for key stakeholders I work with are 'Founder', 'CEO', 'COO', CCO', 'Product Manager', 'Jack of all trades'.
Assume one person spends half his/her time on this project during the sprint. If two people participate, assume 1/3rd time spent.
Assume also a pull on both sales, customer success and product teams as well, to facilitate customer interviews, survey distribution, participation in internal workshops etc. We will make it work for each particular organisation.
If you have any doubt about if this program is right for you or if you can participate, either simply fill out the application form, and let me know your concerns there, or send me an email upfront at ulrik@willingnesstopay.com.
But will it work for us?
Fair question. And yes, it will.
Right now my bet is you are struggling with figuring out how to even start thinking methodically about pricing.
Everyone is. The pricing 'advice' found on the web or in books is either 1) anecdotal and lacking any clear structure and method on how to apply it or 2) focused solely on optimising price points with large data sets, which is good if you are Microsoft or SimCorp, but useless for almost anyone else.
Today I can charge €100K+ from a well-funded startup and get warrants to do a pricing overhaul and help them build this competence internally. For enterprise tech companies it can be triple that. And I get paid up front and have a 6 month waitlist.
Why? Because I broke down the critical elements of 'pricing' and 'packaging' and sequenced them into a unified design process. A process that actually takes every component of your commercial model seriously. How your customers use your solution. How they perceive risk. Who the buyer is. How their budgets work. How your acquisition model is set up. What your product roadmap looks like.
I also realised that the traditional price optimisation math that was developed to price frozen yoghurts and cans of coke vs. cans of pepsi wouldn't work for SaaS - because your product changes all the time when new features are added, and because a SaaS business has to focus on optimising pricing across the customer lifetime, not in a single transaction.
So instead of trying to optimise prices based on regression analysis of large datasets, searching for statistical significant results that - best case - are only valid until your product changes, I developed an approach using odd's theory and bayesian updating, that can work with less than 100 customers and for products that evolve over time.
Pricing is hard only because you don't have a structured, methodical process to go through, that takes into account the particulars around a B2B SaaS business. That's what you get here.
So yes: it will work for you too. In fact I guarantee it.
My 'Founders Guarantee'
By June 2022 your pricing and packaging will have absolutely transformed your business and you will be in a far better position commercially, than you are today. I know that for a fact.
In fact, I often take equity instead of cash payment from Series A+ startups, simply because I know how much more it's going to be worth, when I can add another +30% to their growth rate by doing a pricing re-design. Founders tend to like that I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is and share the risk with them as a shareholder. I'm happy to. I spent 10+ years as a founder too, so I get it. Talk is cheap.
That's why I'm offering what I call my 'Founders Guarantee', which means that I'll pay you back the full €15K at the end of June if we haven't achieved a meaningful impact for your business. You have to do the work, implement new pricing and run through the validation and calibration steps.
But if the Pricing Design Sprint and your no-limits access to me for some reason - any reason! - doesn't create a meaningfully different situation for you and you are significantly better off by June 2022 - then I'll give you a full refund. No argument and no questions asked.
How to Sign Up
You apply by filling out the form below.
After this I will contact you within 1 business day, to:
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Fill out a long-form questionnaire about your business (your product, customers, sales process etc.)
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Sign an NDA (so that you and everyone in the sprint can talk more freely).
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Ensure you are a good fit for the Sprint - e.g. if you are 'too early' or I deem you really have a larger operational problem, I'll try and help you, but not by joining this Sprint.
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If there are potential conflicts of interest with other participants (e.g. direct competitors etc.), I will admit on a first-come basis.
After this I will send you the invoice for the participation fee of €15K and set you up with the internal slack channel etc. prior to our kick-off on the 3rd of January.
Apply through the button below. Sprint starts on January 3rd and runs through June 2022.