029 — Wrestling with SaaS Pricing: Building Value to Justify Prices

Hey, I'm Ryan Hefner, and this is the All Play podcast. So I lost to the queues. The queues beat me, but not for the reasons why you might think. So last episode, I was talking about how on starter packs, I was looking to, I was running this big queue job to basically backfill a bunch of data for the, I think at the time, over 240,000 or 250,000 starter packs, that I had, you know, currently on the site. And my goal was to set up the Stripe integration, configure the plans, and, get those live before those queues were done.

Well, I achieved part of that. I did end up doing the Stripe integration. I did create some initial plans. But you know what? I got to the part on the pricing page.

I had my nice three plans there. I had a free plan. I named the the intermediate kind of, like, intro plan, the expand plan, which I I don't know. I'll get into the names of those maybe in this one, maybe in another one. I had this promote plan that I thought I could maybe try to, like, use as an anchor against the the cheaper one or the basically, the only other one that was charging because it's free, expand and promote, which was the three plans that I came up with.

And then I got down to that section where you're supposed to list the features that you get for each of these plans. And I realized that even with the backfill data that I was doing, I just didn't feel like the upsell was really there to justify, the price. Like, I was, like, thinking about it. I was like, I don't know if I would subscribe to this. I don't know if I would pay the $7.

Now I probably, well, actually, I don't even know if I would pay the high tier price. And this is where I started getting a little bit conflicted about, like, you know, this is where I don't know if it's just the resistance or, you know, the monkey mind that's that's going in and and making me second guess this stuff. I do think the the information is valuable. And I do know that you can obtain some of this information on other services for free, which is also probably playing a little bit into my psychology of whether or not it's worth it to charge these things. But, you know, when I started getting to those features and trying to really, like, differentiate each one from the free to the the initial paid and then also this promotion plan, I I just realized that there just didn't seem like there was that much value.

So I can get into what is basically gonna be included into the the free, that expand plan, and the, the promote plan, at least what I what I had then and what I'll I'm still trying to figure out now even. So free, you can obviously browse the site, log in, authenticate via your Blue Sky account, and follow freely. You know, you can explore these different, starter packs. You can explore profiles. You can follow as many people as possible.

And that's really, you know, that's really what you get for the free plan. For the expand plan, which is basically, I thought it the idea is you can kind of more expand out your profile and make it a little bit richer. And by doing that, maybe it will just offer more ways for people to either, discover your profile or or your packs and vice versa other people and just make it more valuable, richer navigating experience. Now that, I was thinking about charging $7 a month. And I know that that seems high, but I do have some future plans for that plan, which I think would justify that as well as just more stats around that.

So that kind of brings me to the second part. I actually have another queue job running right now, which is backfilling even more data and trying to bolster up, all more stuff that I can basically include into those stats. And, so I have that job running. And then the but, you know, I will get we'll we'll touch on what what that's gonna do. But, basically, that was the idea for that plan, as well as this idea of maybe being able to kind of, like, connect more accounts other than just Blue Sky and have that associated and and linked to your profile.

And then the promote plan I thought was kind of the most, like, simple straightforward. If I can start driving more traffic to the site and people can basically promote or feature their profiles within very prominent sections within the site, whether that's during search, whether that's, within the within the context of a of a individual starter pack that they happen to appear in, and just really anywhere where you can explore more of the site and have, either your profile or your starter packs appear in a in a featured area. And, actually, I think that one's way more straightforward, but that's also the one that at the time or currently, I have it set at, like, a hundred bucks a month. And then I also do have yearly plans, which are basically, the monthly fee times 10, so you get two months free. So the yearly would be, 70 for the expand plan and, 1,000, for that promote plan.

Now if I'm starting to drive traffic that I was originally had back in, December and January, I think I'd easily justify that hundred dollar plan. And that's actually funny because even though it's more expensive, I think it would it actually already has more value baked in, and you can have those promoted. I'm actually calling those people supporters as just like a terminology thing, and I like that just from, like, a concept of, you know, these people are kinda, like, supporting me, working on the platform. They're also then being elevated, because of for that support. So they get a little bit more prominent, display within the site.

Feels a little bit better than, like, featured or, I don't know. I mean, I guess I'm calling it promoted, but, but really they're supporters. And, so yeah. So wrestling around with all that kind of stuff, you know, it's like, what goes on? Like, it's just interesting the psychology that you can get into when you start thinking about pricing plans.

For one, it's like, would I pay for it? What other people's pay for it? What are other people charging out there? And, actually, that was one thing that that kinda started to make me a little bit more, I guess, less, self conscious of these plans is when I started looking around, especially within the blue sky space, I actually found several services that maybe were offering just a core value with a bunch of other features coming soon. So I might actually take that tactic and actually get the subscriptions and make them more available on the site with the with the kind of the flag of, like, a coming soon or, TBD on some of the features.

But we'll see. You know, it also kinda feels a little bit disingenuine to offer like that, so I don't know. It's it's these are those things that has come, like, bouncing back and forth and, like, tipping the scales from one direction to the other. Regardless, what I did end up doing, though, is I did actually deploy the underlying code, on the site that will support descriptions, the subscriptions as well as, has the pricing page and has the hooks into, to be able to view the your account when you're authenticated and to see which, subscription you're currently associated with. It's not being promoted, and I kinda have it currently hidden from the footer.

But if you connect, you might be able to find it. So the updates are there, and I also am just using that as a way to kind of spot check the, Stripe integration and make sure that it's working, against the production instance and a few other things. So I did deploy some stuff, but I didn't go all in, and I don't feel like I'm necessarily in promotion mode right now for starter packs. I feel like I'm still kinda tooling on some of the underlying features and trying to build a little bit more value to then go all in to start promoting these subscriptions. So that's where that's at.

I do have a queue running right now. It is running at a slower pace, than that previous queue because I ended up actually after I deployed that new update, I started listening to some more stuff off of the fire hose, and it turns out that I ended up overloading my Redis instance. And so I had to burn that one down, and I am starting a new one. And so, that is holding things up a little bit, but I I do have some of the backfill information. So it is getting more information.

I also started thinking about, like, I need to come up with some more value to add to the site in general just to drive more traffic. And, so some of this backfill is actually grabbing some more of the numbers around the people that have joined from specific starter packs, both this week and all time. And so I think there's some interest interesting stuff that I'm gonna be able to add to the site for that. I also think just general blue sky statistics could be cool and create, like, a cool visualization. So I have some ideas working on that.

But, also, I'm, I don't wanna forget just some of the core stuff that I wanna have. And I think in addition to being able to explore and follow, really having a quick way to not only add and or remove people from, your own starter packs, but being able to make starter packs on the site themselves. So a starter pack editor that is, a little bit more streamlined and also, both during the creation as well as the the updating or addition to people to the site. So those are some of the things things I'm working on. Again, I'm hoping that those will both drive a little bit more traffic and a little bit more value to the site.

And I also basically did another, like, refresh of some of the, the copy and trying to reposition it a little bit less of a focus on blue sky and more of a, you know, find your tribe, grow your tribe, tool to connect and, connect with people, you know, can, and then expand your community beyond the the people that, you know. So yeah. So that's that's kind of, like, just a quick update on what's going on with starter packs. I have some more stuff I will do in another video, but I'm at eleven minutes. So I'm gonna end there.

So check it out. It's at starterpacks.net. You're listening to the All Play podcast. I'm Ryan Hefner. You can find that at allplay.fm.

And, you can find me at ryanhefner.com . And, hit me up on blue sky. I'm @ryanhefner.com . Let me know what you're thinking. This is also gonna be the first episode, launch or released since transistorf m.

Trans transistor.fm has, added a new feature, basically, that allows for an auto post to go out on Blue Sky and then comments on that will get kind of aggregated on the transistor f m site for that podcast. So that's gonna be cool. I'm gonna see what's going on there. Definitely, you know, drop a rating, drop a review in your podcast player, or, drop a like or a comment on that blue sky post that will be on the allplay.fm, blue sky count. And let's talk.

And we'd love to know what other people kind of are wrestling as far as, like, coming up with subscription plans and obviously trying to get out of their own head as far as, like, what things truly do add value and which don't and, all that good stuff. So, alright. I'm Ryan Hefner. This is All Play Podcast. Have a great one.

Later.