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The Future of GenAI Pricing: Monetization Strategies & SaaS Trends with James Wilton
36 Plays5 hours ago
Pricing in the world of Generative AI is still an open debate, with companies struggling to balance cost, value, and customer expectations. In this episode of Marketing Spark, pricing expert James Wilton, founder of Monevate and former McKinsey consultant, breaks down the challenges of monetizing AI-driven products.
We discuss why traditional SaaS pricing models fall short, the mistakes companies make when introducing AI-powered features, and why a hybrid subscription-usage model may be the best approach. James also shares insights from his new book, Capturing Value, and reveals how AI companies can stay competitive while maximizing revenue.
Tune in for expert pricing strategies that can help SaaS and AI founders future-proof their monetization models.
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Transcript
Introduction to James Wilkin and Expertise
00:00:37
Speaker
Today, I'm joined by James Wilkin, one of the world's leading experts on SaaS pricing and monetization. A former McKinsey pricing expert, that's on his LinkedIn profile, James has spent over a decade helping startups and fast-growing companies capture more of the value they create through smarter pricing strategies.
00:00:53
Speaker
He's also the founder of Monovate, the go-to consulting firm for SaaS and tech companies looking to optimize their pricing.
Exploring 'Capturing Value' and AI Pricing Trends
00:01:01
Speaker
In his upcoming book, Capturing Value, James explores the emerging trends in Gen AI pricing, including his take on the hybrid usage tiered model, one that could shape the way AI powered software is sold in the future.
Challenges and Strategies in SaaS Pricing
00:01:15
Speaker
and this episode of marketing spark will discuss why pricing general is such a challenge what companies are getting wrong and how sass founders can future proof their pricing models welcome to marketing spark.
00:01:27
Speaker
Thanks for having me, Mark. Great to be here. Before we dive into the Gen AI pricing landscape, I'm interested in getting your take on the BDB SaaS landscape. It wasn't that long ago that SaaS pricing was pretty straightforward. Companies sold their subscription on a monthly or annual basis and offer different tiers of service, mostly around features,
00:01:49
Speaker
or the number of users to that that model seems, I don't know, antiquated prices become more complex and subscriptions are just one way to purchase services. What's happening and what are the biggest challenges facing SaaS companies when it comes to pricing, meeting customer demands, and of course the rise of Gen
Understanding Product Value for Pricing
00:02:05
Speaker
AI pricing? That's a great question. I think probably the first important thing to think about is,
00:02:10
Speaker
It's true that generally sass pricing has been done a certain way people have got quite comfortable with these kind of user based subscriptions tearing by different features and so forth but just because something is done that way all the time doesn't mean that's the way that it necessarily should be done you know and i would always say like the right way to price something.
00:02:27
Speaker
You've really got to think about several things you have to think about how the product adds value to users you have to think about your company's own internal objectives what are you trying to achieve you need to think about your market that needs that wants that that buying preferences all those factors are really going to come together to decide what is the right way for you to be pricing.
00:02:47
Speaker
Within sats you see a lot of concentration of certain metrics and certain styles but actually if you think about the whole set there's a lot of variety because people who are doing it well are thinking about all these different things and are coming up with quite different models it usually means that there's some form of charging a reoccurring or recurring payment month month of a month, but the way that they scale the value and the options that they that they give you are quite different.
Applying Pricing Principles to Gen AI
00:03:11
Speaker
When I think about newer technologies and Gen AI, all the principles are the same. You still have to think about that in in the same way. It's just that the type of products we're dealing with now are slightly different and the knee-jerk responses are going to be slightly different as well.
00:03:27
Speaker
If I say this, you'll probably push back, but I always think of pricing as a combination of art and science. it In some respects, you do an analysis, you quantify the value of your product, or you try to quantify it, and you establish a price that you think people will pay. Sometimes it's an easy proposition. Sometimes it's gut feel, especially for early stage companies that really don't have a track record and don't really know how much value they're delivering to companies.
Evolution and Complexity of SaaS Pricing
00:03:55
Speaker
Has the emergence of these different models made pricing that much more complex? Because you have so many different options, so many different paths that you could follow, so many different models that you could adopt, or now there's you're adopting a combination of models at the same time. If you're a SaaS company or a SaaS founder, how how do you approach pricing these days? In some ways it can be fairly intimidating. There are a lot of options. If you go back 10 to 20 years or so, I think at that time,
00:04:25
Speaker
the amount of complexity you started seeing really increased, right? Because you previously went from a system where software was still fundamentally installed by by CDs or DVDs on people's desktops, right? The pricing models for those became relatively simple because you're almost always going to be charging based on how many seats you have because that's how many that's how many installations you you need. But now since everything's moved to the cloud, it gives companies so many more options for like the metrics that they can pick for how do they how do they scale the pricing.
00:04:54
Speaker
for their different customers. It's a massive opportunity because you have so much more control and freedom to be creative now, but it also makes it more difficult because you have so many more degrees of freedom and things that you have to consider. It can become
Importance of Pricing Strategy in Business
00:05:08
Speaker
overwhelming for companies. Just the reality for many SaaS companies is product comes first.
00:05:12
Speaker
Then they do sales, then sometimes marketing comes as a necessary evil. Pricing is one of those things for many companies that auto of gets thrown into the mix. They probably don't spend as much time focused on it as they should. They probably don't do as much research as they should. They don't talk to customers about pricing as much as they should. So what is the better approach now, given the complexities of the of the pricing landscape, given the fact that there's the different models? do companies need to build pricing departments, do they need to work with companies like Monovate to make sure they're doing pricing right? and It strikes me that they probably have to make a much bigger investment in terms of time, energy, and resources than they've done historically. Is that an accurate depiction these days?
00:05:54
Speaker
Pricing is an opportunity that a lot of people don't take advantage of, honestly. What you just said at the beginning of that was exactly right, Mark. People tend to think of pricing as an afterthought, right? They build their product, they get themselves set up to sell it, and then maybe I'm exaggerating, but a week before we have to make our first sale, oh, we need to decide on a price point. How should we price it?
00:06:12
Speaker
The usual thing to do there is just to think, well, what's the right way to price something in this market? is They go and they look at their competitors and see what's done and just kind of copy those. right That would probably be a fine way of doing it if there was a right and a wrong way to price something in a particular industry segment. But I would suggest that's just not true. right like So much of it is going to be based on what you are trying to achieve. and I always use this example, but if you imagine that you have two companies right and they serve the same customers, they have exactly the same product, same executive team, everything is exactly the same for these two companies apart from what they're trying to achieve. right and Company A is
00:06:56
Speaker
really focused on just trying to get a lot of customers quite early and they're going to worry about really monetizing later. You have the other company, Company B, who wants to maximize profitability right out out of the gate. If you think about the decisions that those two might make to to match that that that's a set of objectives, Company A, the one who's focused on volume, is probably going to price really low because they're going to maximize the amount of companies that they can they can sell to then.
00:07:20
Speaker
They're probably going to give very few options, make a couple of simple choices because that's going to make it easier for people to buy. They're going to make their their choices quicker and speed up that whole process. They're probably going to be very transparent because they want to maximize the chance that people will consider them. If people can see their pricing, they're going to be more likely to do that. And they're probably going to come in with a ah guarantee that we will never raise price on you so that people don't get worried that they're going to suddenly find out that they're doubling, tripling their price.
00:07:46
Speaker
But company B, when they're trying to maximize profit profitability, by contrast, they're probably going to price really high because they want to make sure that they get the maximum margin they can on every single deal. They're probably going to have an incredibly complex and granular pricing strategy because it's in their interest to monetize every distinct part of piece of value that they can give through their product. They're probably going to not be transparent with their pricing because it helps them to just get to a customer, feel them out, figure out what their willingness to pay is, and then put the price on the table that matches their their their willingness to pay.
Company Objectives and Competitor Pricing
00:08:21
Speaker
They're probably going to want to ramp up price quite aggressively once they get a customer on board on the assumption that the customer is going to see more and more value over time as they start to use it. We just talked about the fact that these companies are exactly the same in every respect, apart from the fact that their objectives are different.
00:08:36
Speaker
And we just defined two completely different pricing strategies for these two. but If companies when they're building their their pricing strategy were clearer about what are we trying to achieve, given that we're trying to achieve multiple things which may pull us in different directions, what is the the relative priority of these things? That alone would be a massive shift in how likely you are to build a pricing strategy that is actually going to help you and actually be a strategic lever for you as opposed to just a tactical decision.
00:09:04
Speaker
It is interesting that you talk about pricing and being a strategic lever as opposed to an afterthought. You take into account the creativity of the options for different models and the competitive landscape. I'm curious about your take on how does a company, given the strategic importance of pricing, how do they properly do, I don't know where the property is the right word here. How do they do competitive research? Every company has different levers that they're pulling, yeah different models that they're embracing.
00:09:34
Speaker
How do you effectively do competitive research so that you can go to market knowing that we have context here? we have we've We've benchmarked different types of companies, different types of models, so that you can make a smarter decision.
00:09:49
Speaker
yeah I'd say in general companies, when they're building their pricing strategies, they need to do they need they need to get a really good fact base to do it. And they think you need you need different types of fact base. You do need a competitor fact base and understanding what your competitors are doing, how they're pricing, what their relative price levels are. Doesn't mean you need to copy them as we just talked about, but just knowing what they're doing and will will inform probably how familiar and how palatable certain pricing strategies are going to be to to the customer. And then also, of course, when you build your your offerings, it's going to dictate how favorable they look in in comparison to those. And of course, you also need to do custom research as well, which is all about going out and understanding their needs, their buying preferences, their willingness to pay and so forth. You're going to see differences across different segments.
00:10:36
Speaker
But yeah, with with with competitors, this can be it can be tricky. it can be well It can be easier or trickier depending on the kind of market that you're in. If you're if you're a consumer product or you're selling to SMBs,
00:10:49
Speaker
That's probably relatively easy to do competitor research because a lot of those kind of companies are going to publish their pricing strategies openly on their website. so You can go in and you can look and see this is what they're pricing and these are the features that they have. You may not be able to get you know great granular data on exactly when they're saying they have a feature. Is that the same level as your comparable one? Is it better or worse? You may not get to that, but you get you get pretty good pretty good data.
00:11:13
Speaker
In situations where you don't have that, maybe it's more you're you're serving the enterprise space and everything is you know behind the contact us area, it's a lot more difficult. I would say what's proven to be quite helpful for for us, and I know a lot of other people who are building out pricing strategies, is to go and speak to people who who have formally worked in these in in these companies or customers who have formally bought from these from these customers and speak to them and try to understand what they what they were quoted at what they paid like directionally you really shouldn't go in and ask them say like hey how much does this company charge for for this you start getting into sort of competitive stuff but generally how much would you expect this kind of a company to charge for this is generally certainly anything from a pricing strategy point of view like generally how do they think about their offerings and what's their price metric and stuff that is far less sensitive so that information is out there you just need to find the right people to talk to to go and get it
00:12:11
Speaker
Let's turn our sights on the Gen AI pricing landscape.
Complexity in Gen AI Pricing
00:12:16
Speaker
The obvious question is, why is monetizing Gen AI still on open debate? And what makes pricing in this space uniquely challenging compared to traditional SaaS models?
00:12:28
Speaker
yeah I don't want to say that we're overcomplicating it in general. That's probably slightly wrong, but it's it's also not entirely wrong, right? What is really different about Gen.I. is you have a bunch of these functionalities or products which create value in quite a different way than SaaS products typically have. It feels very different from that point of view. We talked about earlier, there's these kind of knee-jerk pricing strategies that everybody goes to for SaaS. Doesn't necessarily make sense in an AI world. It knocks everybody out of their comfort zone.
00:12:58
Speaker
it forces you to go back to those principles that i talked about how do we create value right what are the customers want what are they how do they want to buy how we thinking about that there's a little bit of that i think which makes it difficult.
00:13:11
Speaker
The other real complexifying factor of Genii is that right now we do have this cost challenge, which is not something that SaaS companies have typically had to to to deal with. In the Genii products, they typically have a huge amount of compute needs. At the moment, that compute is quite expensive and also People are just starting to adopt gen a AI products and I feel like we don't really have a great understanding of just how much usage is expected or typical yet it's going to be changing all of the time. If you're going to set a pricing strategy and you're trying to think about how much cost am I going to incur through the usage, it's just very difficult to
00:13:49
Speaker
to do of course companies on one hand they want to get adoption of the products so that people see the value in them more likely to scale with them but they don't want to put themselves in a position when the under pricing it and. Reduce their profitability or put them in the red that's a big concern in the back of everybody's mind.
00:14:06
Speaker
You add into the mix the emergence of DeepSeek claiming they have a model that's just as good as chatTBT claiming that they develop it for $6 million, dollars which through Wall Street and Silicon Valley into mayhem because of the models and the valuation models were thrown out of whack. It's left to be seen whether what DeepSeek actually has and the fallout of that, but it's very volatile right now. A lot of AI companies are experimenting. They're dabbling. They're seeing what models work and what don't. What are the biggest mistakes that you've seen AI companies make when it comes to pricing so far? I've got two sort of categories of mistakes. I think one is how do people price when they start adding gen AI functionalities in? And second one is like mistakes they make in terms of the actual pricing pricing structures. I think the first one, just in terms of price levels,
00:14:57
Speaker
I have seen so many examples of companies who are building or have built Gen AI powered um ah features or capabilities or whatever it is, and then have just gone to customers and said, so we've built this, here it is, we're now going to increase the price of this package by 2030, sometimes in Canva's case, 300%.
00:15:20
Speaker
There's these huge price rises that come from this because we're trying to cover the cost of of doing this. But we're still in a world right now where most of this technology is niche, right which means that some customers are going to really value it and be willing to pay quite a high price for it, but a lot of customers won't. So you can't just force this functionality in a standard to a base package and expect that everybody's going to pay it or automatically.
00:15:44
Speaker
You've got a lot of these stories now of people pricing these things quite high and having real pushback from customers. And as I say, I think Canva is probably the biggest, most noteworthy example of that because they increased the price of one of their packages by 300%. To a level, by the way, that actually is quite a reasonable price level, even taking out Gen. AI, like it's just more competitive now, but they justified it through the fact that they had this new Gen. AI features and customers were not having that justification.
00:16:13
Speaker
There's been some good research recently and Kyle Poyer called out on his on his newsletter, Growth and Unhinged. He actually cited some research from a company, The Name Escapes Me, but talks about how customers actually are not willing to pay more for features just because you say that there's Gen AI tech in there, right? like If you can convince them that there is extra value that comes from that, and this is how it creates value that they gain, but just saying that it's Gen AI powered is not enough. Makes sense. But that's practically what a lot of companies I think are ah ah doing and falling into that trap. I spent a lot of time focused on brand positioning and messaging.
00:16:48
Speaker
Companies like Intercom, for example, their homepages say AI powered. They've abandoned their brand positioning and focus and jump on the AI bandwagon. Some of them try to torque their pricing by saying it's AI. It's got to be worth more right now. It's an interesting.
00:17:04
Speaker
marketing strategy, let alone a pricing strategy. I wanted to ask you about the fact that major players like Google have set early pricing benchmarks for AI usage. How should startups and mid-sized companies position their pricing strategy to remain competitive while well capturing value?
00:17:21
Speaker
its It's probably one of the most difficult areas to get into, right? Because everything's changing all the time, and you don't want to make sure you're competitive. More than saying there is any one particular thing that you have to do in terms of your actual price setting, it's just making sure that you have a really good understanding of A, what your costs look like and how they scale, and then B, what your customers look like, what their usage patterns are starting to look like, although you're going to have to keep analyzing this on a long-term basis.
00:17:46
Speaker
and what their willingness to pay is across these different segments. If you can know all of that, in addition to keeping tabs on what your competitors doing and what those reference price points are for what they're doing, then you'll at least have the full set of information that you need to be able to make good ah balance decisions.
00:18:03
Speaker
it's It's not going to be a set it and forget it type exercise. The landscape's constantly moving and you're going to have to keep refreshing. You
Hybrid Pricing Models Discussion
00:18:10
Speaker
advocate for a hybrid model that blind subscription and usage based pricing. Can you break down why this approach works best for Gen AI applications? I'm actually surprised we haven't seen more of these models yet. There's a lot to be gained from that approach. When you started to see these user facing Gen AI products like chat TPT and Copilot and so forth, that's right. The initial move was to price it.
00:18:30
Speaker
unlimited use on a per-seat basis. That's generally the model that came out, which of course is about as traditional SaaS as you can think. We've got this incredibly new tech, we're saying everything's different, and we go right back to what the sort of probably the most comfort comfortable SaaS pricing model is. I don't think it's a terrible model in itself. For some of these assistant type platforms, there is unique value that keeps coming for every single user who uses it, provided they're going to use it well, right? It's not that it doesn't make sense and the value doesn't scale with users.
00:18:59
Speaker
But i think because we have the cost issue and we don't know exactly how much people are going to use it then. The price level that you end up having to set for that per user license ends up having to be really high in order for you to hedge like copilot was priced at thirty dollars per per user which is more than you pay for the entirety of of the office suite.
00:19:18
Speaker
addition for that you know see ah it's It's a really high price to get people in at. and If you want to build comfort and get people adopting it, that's a barrier to that approach. That's tough to get around. You could also argue that value does scale with usage to a certain extent here. You could have one user paying $30 and getting an insane amount of value given the amount that they're they're using it and somebody who's not getting really much. You're not price differentiating particularly well with that offer.
00:19:43
Speaker
Then if you go to pure usage, that's sort of the next sort of wave of price models you see when we're pricing very granularly by usage, you're now far more able to scale with costs, so you can cover that far more accurately. You can get down to lower price levels, which also makes sense. But you get to problems there as well, I think, because although value probably does directionally scale with usage, in that people will probably not argue that the more I use this, the more value I i get, I don't think people will necessarily always argue that If I use it three times as much, I get three times as much value. When anybody who's interacted with these tools like like chat GPT, they incur costs every single time you type a query and the machine runs. But you don't necessarily get value every time you ask it a question. You usually have to ask it several questions to get the thing that you are looking to get to. If you're charging customers for every single, for want of a better word, ping of of the system,
00:20:37
Speaker
They're going to start questioning whether this is really valuable or not, because i'm getting I'm having to pay extra for every single one of these. Plus, you get to the situation where, as a buyer, I don't know exactly how much all my users are going to use this, so I don't know how much I'm going to end up paying. It's the very like typical pains of usage-based pricing that you see back in the the SaaS world. So I think that's that model has some issues as well. The hybrid model that we got to, where I think you're charging by users, you're giving user licenses, but you're scaling the price of those user license by tiers of usage, marries the best of both of those worlds. In that situation, you can create a low usage
00:21:16
Speaker
low price version could even be free and you can make sure that people then can dip their toe in the water and experience it and try to understand the value and get somebody who's maybe not using Gen AI to start using it, but then you have a mechanism within your licenses to bring people up to higher price levels as theyre as their prices in increase. I might not want to pay for 300 additional transactions, but I might be okay saying if my usage level doubles, I'll pay an extra whatever it is, 40%, that might make sense to me. You marry the models, you still have a way of scaling with value and with cost, but you keep the nice, simple user-based model, which keeps everything easy to to engage with. You are starting to see some
00:22:02
Speaker
players getting towards that point. I think chat TPT have a couple of different tiers. I don't necessarily think they've thought about the tiers in exactly the right way, but it's moving into that general structure. We're going to see more gravitation towards that kind of an approach going forward. I use a lot of AI Gen tools. I love the technology. I feel like I'm at the early days of the web when all these tools are starting to emerge and you could do just about anything. and I have a pro account for chat TPT, $20 US a month.
00:22:31
Speaker
I use it a lot for different reasons and different ways, and it's tremendous value. like The ROI on that is unbelievable. For companies like Chachibiti, there's an opportunity and a challenge there. There's an opportunity for them to embrace people like me and upsell me and offer even more value. There's also a challenge trying to get people like me to pay more. You mix into that the competitive landscape and all the pricing strategies and it's Huge challenges, huge opportunities at the same time. I'm certainly not going to argue that it's an easy thing to design because there are a lot of considerations, right, for how you design the tiers and the thresholds and so forth. I'm very similar to you, it sounds like, with the chat GPT usage. I have Pro, I use it all all the time. I feel like I get a huge amount of value from it now in the level that I'm using it. As far as I'm aware,
00:23:15
Speaker
The only tier above i say it's plus isn't it it's like plus is the version that we have and pro is the one that they just bought $200 per month and it's basically unlimited users which actually it sounds like they're still they're losing money on that from what what sam Altman said recently. If chat gbt turn around to me and said hey you're using plus too much we need you to buy pro now i'd be like well.
00:23:36
Speaker
I'll just scale back my usage because I don't want to pay $200 per month. But if they turn around to me tomorrow, Jap GPT, by the way, if you're listening, please don't do this. If they were to turn around tomorrow and say, James, your usage just kind of crushed over a threshold, you now need to be in the $30 a month, $40 a month tier based on that, I'd probably be like, okay, I'm still getting a reasonable amount amount of value. As long as I'm in that tier for a while, I'm not going to spiral out of it. That probably is an amount that I would pay extra. Likewise, there might be people who aren't willing to buy um plus for $20, but might be willing to pay $10 a month for lower usage restriction. There just needs to be some more thought on the right level of granularity to be able to effectively price differentiate across the base. so
00:24:16
Speaker
The other dynamic is we're in the midst of an arms race. We're at a time when building these tools, relatively speaking, is easier than ever. There are no lack of competitive options, whether you're in the chat space or any other business application. If something gets too expensive or you don't like the features or simply have app fatigue, there are some other applications. Some of them are free. A lot of them are low cost. That adds to the pricing dynamic. You have to think about how do we Manage pricing how do we manage turn at the same time when there's lots of options i think the ah the vendors need to think about.
00:24:53
Speaker
features which are going to help them defend price point even in a world when there's a lot of cheaper options around. It's probably an obvious one to everyone, but I've been thinking recently about data safety. I've been using chat GPT as I know a lot of people have, but I'm still somewhat nervous about what I put in there because I've played around with the privacy features and tried to make sure that the information is not going anywhere, but I don't know for sure that it's not ever going to end up anywhere that I wouldn't want it to. I probably feel a lot better with chat GPTs level of privacy that I might do with some other providers in this early days, that providing that level of security is probably something that people would pay extra for, even if the the output of the program is similar.
00:25:29
Speaker
We started this conversation with a loaded question, multifaceted question. and I'm going to end the conversation with a loaded question. What trends do you see shaping the future of SaaS and Gen AI pricing?
Evolving Pricing Models and Strategies
00:25:43
Speaker
If you can delineate between the two these days, and could we see pricing shift towards models like revenue sharing, paper performance, or flat rate pricing as the market matures? The short answer, I do see that there's going to be those kinds of models.
00:25:57
Speaker
With GenAI, we're going to end up completely converging towards any particular way of doing this. Honestly, I don't think that's the answer. We might end up with one model that is slightly more prevalent than other ones, especially when we get into the world of agentic AI. You've got these things that are actually doing stuff in addition to just giving you information or giving you written things. you're going to end up with the value being provided by all of these different agents as being very different. It may make sense for some of those to be priced on a per-user model, right? You have an agentic AI who basically becomes your personal assistant. You're probably going to think about paying that in the same sense that you would be for paying for an an EA or somebody who would be handling those kind of tasks. You wouldn't necessarily want to think about something that scales with a level of value because it's more of an an administrative thing. You're probably going to think about the value of that way.
00:26:42
Speaker
versus if you were using it as like um a marketing use case and you're doing it to to generate campaigns and things, there's probably a certain amount of value that comes with how much work and how many campaigns it's able to do. Then you might end up with more of a workload-based or a usage-based way. That's another example, and an agenda ai that works in a manufacturing shop and constantly analyzes the processes to make sure that there aren't sources of in in inefficiency and corrects them and saves you money, that seems like a perfect case for an output-based model where you know you're going to pay it based on how much that it it saves you. So you do get it not revenue sharing, it's more of a cost-saving sharing type approach. But I think all of those models are very different pricing models, but they all make complete sense given the use case of those different things. Now that we have this world where you're going to be able to
00:27:30
Speaker
see that value alignment far more clearly and the attribution is going to be so much easier because there's going to be less of a step between where the AI ends and where the the value ends up happening. You have the opportunity to be able to price in all those different ways.
00:27:44
Speaker
Final, final question.
Motivation Behind 'Capturing Value' and Building Strategies
00:27:46
Speaker
I've written three books. I understand the pain that you go through when you write a book and the fact that it's a labor of love more than a financial exercise. I'd love to talk to you about your book, capturing value. What prompted you to write it when, you know, what kind of madness did you suffer from that said, I need to write a book. Why would someone want to read it? What's the value that you're hoping to deliver with the book? Well, thanks for asking. I'd say with.
00:28:13
Speaker
The initial idea for the book, it it was to answer a pain point that I was seeing all of the time. You brought up earlier how sort of people start in startup start with a great product and then they think about sales and then they think about marketing. It's very rare for a startup to bring in pricing expert person who knows how to build a pricing strategy. What tends to happen is They get to a certain point and somebody on their leadership team is told, by the way, we'd love you to build us a new pricing strategy. Now, this person invariably doesn't have any experience in doing that before. So it doesn't know how to do it. And obviously changing your pricing is not like a casual thing. There's a lot of opportunity, but there's a lot of risk there as well. Your customers can leave. You can end up putting yourself in a worse position. It's really difficult. These people have this hospital pass given to them. And if they don't have budget for consultants or people who are used to doing this for them.
00:29:03
Speaker
All they can do is start looking for information out on the internet and books and things. I would say there's a lot of information out there around SaaS pricing, which is at best misleading and probably at worst wrong. What I wanted to do with capturing value was to be able to give these people something that can talk them through the entire process of building a pricing strategy for a SaaS product or any kind of tech product that you might be wanting to monetize. It's structured so that Thank you go through all the different things that you need to you. think about.
00:29:32
Speaker
ah you given enough theory so that you can understand how to think about the area you got enough to be dangerous. Talk through the different options that you have at your your disposal and what are the what are the were the pros and cons there and then also gives you some practical steps for saying if you now need to go and build this out these are the things that you should do these are the things that you should get and this is how.
00:29:52
Speaker
how you do it it should be a really good one-stop shop for being able to talk somebody who maybe doesn't know exactly how to do this to be able to make a pretty good attempt at it that's how i hope people will use the book the book is available on amazon and all the leading bookstores Absolutely. Yes, available on Amazon right now. Awesome. Tell me where people can learn more about you and Monovate.
Further Information on James Wilkin and Monovate
00:30:14
Speaker
You can learn more about me on my LinkedIn profile. d You can learn more about Monovate at our website. It's monovate.com. And Capturing Value has a website as well. Actually the book, it's it's capturingvalue dot.com.
00:30:27
Speaker
Thanks James, and thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it, follow it of course, subscribe by Apple podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app and share via social media. If you're a BDB or SaaS company with a million to $10 million dollars in revenue and you're looking to jumpstart your marketing, we should definitely talk about how I can help you with some fractional CMO and species