My company is building in the same space as Tier - in fact our offering looks close to identical.
The problem we've faced so far is catching buyers who want to solve this problem, the deeper, underlying issue, rather than the problem that's in front of their face.
For technical contributors, they're usually tasked to throw up a paywall, and you can do that quickly and easily using your billing engine and some lightweight hard-coded logic.
For the business stakeholders, they're usually paralyzed by an inability to decide what the pricing should be, and implementation is an engineering problem. I spoke to one buyer recently who was doing a re-pricing exercise (which Tier and Stage both promise to make easier going forward), but even he believed that this re-pricing would be the last, and that further adjustments would be minimal.
It's nice to see other, credible people enter the space - I think it actually is a problem worth solving, and it's neat to see how their approach rhymes with ours. Of course I don't wish them too much success, since I'd like to have some customers too.
100%. The main reason we created https://priceops.org is that there's a real mind-shift that has to happen for someone to realize that there's even a "there" there. Most people who've been through it understand all too well, but even there, it's tempting to think "Oh, if only we'd just committed ignorantly to a better pricing model..." not realizing that you'll always get it wrong and the context will always be changing, so it's critical to have an implementation that can respond to new information.
> 5. Pray that no one ever has to touch it again. (Or failing that, hope you've got a new job somewhere else before that happens.)
So many otherwise smart people make this foolish bet. It is an exceptionally long shot.
> Of course I don't wish them too much success, since I'd like to have some customers too.
Feeling is mutual, I'm sure <3 I think it's potentially a very big space with a lot of work to be done, so there's room for plenty of players in it.
The problem most teams have with pricing is they think it’s a sales problem.
It’s not.
It’s a cross-functional problem that mostly has to do with product (how it’s bundled, which features are on which tiers, and how customers move between tiers) and customer segmentation (how different customers value the features).
I've got agree with your comment about the business stakeholders. The uncertainties around pricing and (at the moment) the even trickier problem of price increases can lead to inaction.
The problem we've faced so far is catching buyers who want to solve this problem, the deeper, underlying issue, rather than the problem that's in front of their face.
For technical contributors, they're usually tasked to throw up a paywall, and you can do that quickly and easily using your billing engine and some lightweight hard-coded logic.
For the business stakeholders, they're usually paralyzed by an inability to decide what the pricing should be, and implementation is an engineering problem. I spoke to one buyer recently who was doing a re-pricing exercise (which Tier and Stage both promise to make easier going forward), but even he believed that this re-pricing would be the last, and that further adjustments would be minimal.
It's nice to see other, credible people enter the space - I think it actually is a problem worth solving, and it's neat to see how their approach rhymes with ours. Of course I don't wish them too much success, since I'd like to have some customers too.