Most Startups Are Undercharging - Dalton Caldwell

Most of the time, people are way undercharging for their product. For some reason, there are ideas out there that you should either not charge for your product or you charge such a tiny fraction of what you could be charging that you're not set up for success.

To give you an example, I've seen startups charge 1/10 or 1/100 of what they should actually be charging. For whatever reason, I think there are ideas out there that investors want you to never charge, or they... I don't know where these ideas come from, but a lot of the time, the first advice we give to people is to dramatically increase their prices as fast as possible.

A lot of the times, startups apply to, I see, saying that they are competing on price, and the way that they're winning versus competitors is that their product is cheaper. The reason that is so dangerous is you don't actually know if your product is good or if it's solving a real problem for people. You could just be trying to get people that want the cheapest possible product.

So if you are charging a fraction of other options for your thing, it could be that you're actually getting bad data about whether or not anyone wants your thing. Right? And so, that's one way that you know that you're in trouble: is that your entire customer acquisition strategy is that your product is way cheaper than everyone else's.

Usually, a good product that we see become successful does not charge less than competitors; it actually charges a premium. It's because it solves such a huge problem for their customers that they will happily pay a premium versus other options on the market. Because it's such a great product, right? That's a sign that you've made something that people want: is that the market pays a premium, not a massive discount to what other options are.

That's a really good sign for you. Instacart was expensive, Jordache was expensive, Airbnb, I think, was expensive, Dropbox was expensive. It wasn't like DoorDash was, "Hey, we're like other things, and we're like a tenth of the cost." That was never the pitch.

I'm sure there are examples of those, but generally speaking, of our hugely successful companies, they are either serving a market that has never been served before and so it's expensive, or it's actually more expensive than direct competitors. I mean, Zapier charged money and IFTTT did not. So they had a perfect substitute that cost more money.