I am just ready with an early MVP of my B2B SaaS - a support center/knowledge base using Notion as CMS.
- Customers can set up the knowledge base on their own custom domains/subdomains. - Embeddable widget for their website so that their website visitors can quickly skim through the available articles - Content auto-syncs from the connected Notion database - No need to make Notion database public. As long as the page is connected, private pages work just as well - Works with Free Notion plan - with multiple collaborators
I am looking to work with some entrepreneurs who could benefit from such a product.
The objective is to get their opinion and experience of the product before I start making a roadmap for the product. (Essentially build the product in collaboration with my customers)
*Here is my question:*
I am not sure about offering the product for free. I want to add some $ value to the price (not even a monthly subscription, but a one time fee) so that I can get a fair understanding of “if this is an actual pain-point customers are willing to pay for.
Does that work? Or will potential customers be ticked off by asking to pay for a bare-bone MVP?
(The product does what it is supposed to. It is just that the MVP doesn’t have customer dashboard and the other nice-to-haves)
If charging them sounds good, what should the price-point be? $100/yr locked-in price?
Would appreciate any feedback you have on this.
Cheers
There are some free business models (e.g. Google, Facebook) but this is a hard route that requires tons of capital, and probably involves selling the free users as the product.
In a third of the time you'd spend setting up payments and describing the idea with marketing, you should perhaps ask people about their problems, then mention your solution contextually, and then listen carefully to what they say.
Do all the responses talk about it doing what it does now? Then charge.
Do they talk about mostly one clear functionality/vision they all want? Great, charge and build.
Do the responses cover multiple ideas/functionalities? That's bad, it means you have to find a niche with a plurality of expectations, or this will never work because the expectations are too varied for a cohesive profitable offering, or tend towards integrated visions that you cannot compete with on the build power of a small team. Sometimes people don't ask for what they turn out to want (e.g. iPhone, Notion itself with great design and low stress), but this is the case for very few successful startups, and if you look carefully, they all tend to rapidly respond to feedback post-launch anyhow.
I heard this general idea from Jason Cohen - invalidating - and it's incredibly useful. This sounds like the right scenario to apply it.
The only real validation of a product - either people pay for it or not.
If it's a real problem for real people (and not an imagined one for imagined B2Bs), what are they doing right now? Is it good enough?
Why do you, of all people, want to solve this problem, of all problems? What's the fire emanating from inside?
With good answers to these questions you'll find it a whole lot easier talking with clients. If the problem is real and painful enough for them to have cobbled together a solution, they won't care if you made your software out of matchsticks.
Charge 10% of the value received. Estimate the value based on extra revenue generated, expenses saved, time saved, etc. (Business owners should value their time worth more than $50/hr. So multiply hours by $50-100)