Charging For Your Product Helps You Focus On Customers Instead of Users
I was just listening to a Podcast from 37signals on product pricing. It reminded me of some the issues we went through when launching ScreenSteps Live. The podcast gives a great overview on pricing principles but they left out one aspect that I feel is really important: charging for your product helps you find out who your customers are.
Discovering who your customers are is crucial and it isn’t as easy as it would seem. When a product first launches it can be picked up by a wide variety of groups. But a product can’t effectively target all types of users so decisions have to be made pretty early on about what type of customer you are targeting. Not charging for your product can push you towards making the wrong decision.
Our launch and continued development of ScreenSteps Live is a great example of this principle.
