Being strategic with your pricing is one of the surest ways to boost your company’s sales growth. Lowering your prices just the right amount gives you a better shot at market penetration and at being competitive in a tightly contested field. However, there is a point when such competitive pricing becomes problematic—when it becomes predatory pricing. It can be hard to distinguish fair, competitive pricing from illegal predatory pricing. Read on to find out where the boundaries lay and to ensure that your company is remaining legally competitive with its pricing. What is predatory pricing ..read more

When you’re running your SaaS business, dealing with a huge glossary of financial terms daily, it’s to be expected that you might occasionally get two terms with similar meanings mixed up. You might confuse your deferred revenue with your fulfilled revenue or with your backlog, for instance. They’re easy mistakes to make, but they can have serious unintended consequences for your business. The difference between revenue expenditures and capital expenditures is another example of two similar terms that are easily mixed up. Understanding how each should be tracked can mean big savings over tim ..read more

Bloomberg’s online subscription created quite the kerfuffle when it was released, sporting a much higher price point than the majority of the competition. As a titan in the financial media market, their digital-first mindset puts pressure on The Wall Street Journal to reevaluate their pricing strategy in order to keep up.   We’ve taken a look at the financial media space before, pitting The Wall Street Journal against The Financial Times, so now that Bloomberg has its hat in the game, we decided to dig in again. This episode focuses on how willingness to pay and re ..read more

The quilting and knitting industries are a lot bigger than you think, which is why we’re going to do something a little bit different in this episode and take a look at how someone might go about capitalizing on these industries. While services like Quilty Box and YarnYAY! exist already, there’s a huge opportunity for additional subscription box services, and we’ll show you why.   In this episode, Peter and I talk through willingness to pay data and feature preference, as well as some top-level stats that are sure to surprise you. It shows just how important it is ..read more

You’ve seen them before. The technical books on everything from Python programming to user mapping, Unix systems to sustainable design—each one featuring an engraved image of some sort of cute animal. That’s O’Reilly Media’s signature style, and we're breaking it down with them in this week's episode.    This fellow Boston-native company has an authoritative brand in the education and technology market, backed by decades of success in publishing. And though their subscription learning platform is an awesome tool, O’Reilly doesn’t do a good job of building their pri ..read more

You think you know what your board wants to hear: exponential growth, overwhelming booking numbers, and a bulletproof business. But what they actually want to hear is the truth. Your board members want to see the numbers behind your company's progress laid bare, and they want to see your framework for improvement. They have the same goals as you—to build a successful business—and they have the expertise and perspective to help. But they can only do that if you give them the right numbers to work with. The metrics you present should speak to your higher-level goals while showing a complete p ..read more

For this week's episode, Peter and I are going to the land of time, also known as Hubstaff, the employee time-tracking & productivity monitoring software. They're used by all types of folks, from landscapers and construction crews to attorneys and software companies, blue collar and white collar alike.   How much does Hubstaff cost? Hubstaff has 4 pricing tiers: Free, Basic for $6 per user per month, Premium for $9 per user per month, and Enterprise at $16 per user per month. Hubstaff's pricing page is sure and steady Fundamentally, Hubstaff's main pricing page ..read more

This episode is going to be a little different. Instead of tearing down the pricing strategy of another popular SaaS business, we're looking at an influential player in the marketing and branding space, the one and only Gary Vaynerchuk. While Gary doesn't have a subscription offering at the moment, we've put together some data that speaks to his ability to monetize the existing relationships with his followers.   Much like our look at Kanye West, this episode is all about how the subscription model helps brands (or people) turn relationships into a predictable reve ..read more

First impressions last a lifetime, just like misspellings, erroneously addressed greetings, and missing commas—that's why we highly recommend using editing tools like Grammarly to check important emails before you hit "send."   Since 2008, co-founders Alex Shevchenko and Max Lytvyn have quietly grown Grammarly into a freemium product reaching millions of daily active users, many of whom pay for the extra features that come with the Premium tier. That massive growth and wide-ranging customer base bring their own set of headaches, though, with a vague pricing page an ..read more

Before we get to the formula for calculating revenue, let's make another revenue formula very clear: Understanding revenue = understanding your business = growing your business Revenue is the most fundamental metric for any company, and yet it is seldom understood perfectly. First, there is more than one type of revenue. Second, recording it and calculating it get progressively more complex as your business scales. And third, after you've calculated it, you must know what to do with it. The future of your business starts with one simple equation. What is revenue? Before we get to the rev ..read more