How makers stay productive

Hey, we might have gone down all sorts of rabbit holes on twitter. But honestly I find pricing fascinating. Before I start to really ramble, I should point out I'm not in sales / marketing or "biz dev" as they sometimes call themselves. I'm a full stack developer but I've spent alot of time in the last year working out pricing and digging into the science of why people buy. I should also point out, there is no right or wrong answer.

Pricing is a careful dance. If you price too high you get nothing, price too low and you will get less. If you price it at $100 and get 1 sale it's better than 45 sales at $2. You also need to look at your competitor pricing and what the market already accepts. Now with that aside lets go. Some of these was in the twitter thread but I'll try frame things different.

The problem with $2 a year is that people see a lack of value in a price point that low. The other problem is to make any money you need a lot of sales. $2 with 500 sales gets you to $1000. Also keep in mind using Stripe on $2 you will lose .31 cent per transaction.

The 500 sales you want are only going to be a % of over all downloads. So say 10% of 5,000 downloads. That's also going to be a % of the number of views you can get and traffic you can drive to the product. (this applies to everything) And that volume is what gets you.

What we were talking about on the thread gives you alot more options. If you take the $12 one off payment. Ignore the yearly pricing thing for now. (Personally I think the 1 off might be better)

$12 a user you need 85 sales to make the $1,000 (Stripe is .60 cent per transaction give or take)

$20 a user you need 50 sales to make the $1,000 (Stripe is 0.83 cent per transaction)

Now the other thing $12 or $20 is the ability to create demand and scarcity pricing (and this is the gold mine)

In the thread we talked about creating a mechanism that if a user invited 5 users who download and install they could pay 0 or $2 even for the install. This is a method Dropbox for example used at the beginning and it can give you good solid growth. People that like using the tool and want to pay for it can share it with others to reduce the price, say $2 off per active signup.

The other thing you can do is run sales and discounts on some channels with time limits. This creates the scarcity and people are more likely to signup and try it right away to avoid losing the discount your offering.

You would have some weeks when it's full price but other weeks give a discount. At a low price point your ability to maneuver is greatly diminished.

You can use all sorts of methods to allow users to purchase at a discount but they have to do something for you.

Write a review or testimonial. Share with friends. Create a video on instagram stories. Tweet about it. Contribute some code, etc,

Another option is the pay what you want model. But this should have a min amount. This you tired with no success but long term it might help as part of a few different pricing things.

Never undervalue something you created, remember you executed the idea no one else did. Hope it helps or at least gives you some ideas. Fire anything you want at me on twitter or telegram or here. I'll do my best to answer it.

I'll dig in a little deeper on what I already said on Twitter:

Subscription vs. One-Off Payment

I think people are tired of subscriptions, so would be very wary of signing up for a subscription (even a yearly one) that, in reality, brings only value by removing a small annoyance (as opposed to say improving your workflow). I also don't think anyone expects to pay a subscription on a browser extension (vs a SaaS).

Also, if you were to go the subscription route and only charged annually, you'd have a decent amount of churn just from expired, lost and stolen cards that get replaced.

Pricing and Perceived Value

Your three biggest issues here are:

1. It's a browser extension, which people are used to getting for free.
2. It's only removing a minor annoyance, as opposed to a improving someones day to day work
3. Other options exist via browser extension and they're free, although they're not targeted specifically to this issue.

For me personally, the only browser extension I've ever paid for is CSS Scan, which I paid $20 for (one-time purchase). But it's something that I'll get immediate return on by improving my workflow for freelance and side projects. I can actually calculate my ROI for it pretty easily. The only other ones I considered paying for were Boomerang for Gmail, which also had a clear benefit to my daily work.

I'd recommend going with a $4.99 one-time payment, similar to Which Login from Peter Thaleikis.

Other Revenue Options

1. Keep it free, but push the Buy Me A Coffee link a little harder. Maybe after 3 days, a coffee cup pops up in the bottom right hand corner of a site that normally has a chat and you make a pitch along the lines of "Aren't you glad you don't see these anymore? Buy us a coffee so that we can keep blocking these for you!"
2. You could get creative and offer a free option and paid option. Free option replaces all chat pop-ups with a random cute dog/cat photo and the paid option completely removes it or makes it where you can click on the animal photo and it loads the chat (as opposed to switching it on/off in the extension settings).
3. You could sell the extension to an already popular Ad blocking extension. Google is making changes to Chrome that has the potential to really negatively impact some blockers, so adding the functionality of something like Hello Goodbye to their features could help them diversify a bit and give them an edge over their competitors. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evy53j/google-struggles-to-justify-making-chrome-ad-blockers-worse
4. I know you mentioned that you reached out to them, but getting your Mac version in a package like Setapp could be really great.
5. I doubt they'd put this on there, but you could reach out to AppSumo and other Lifetime Deals sites. They're usually after SaaS options tho.

I'm definitely speaking from privilege here and can't speak to your financial and/or family situation, but I also think that you shouldn't feel the need to monetize this. You're 16, obviously very smart and talented. Your product reached #2 on Product Hunt and has gotten some great coverage. You gained some Twitter (and PH) followers from it. In some ways, you've already gotten some pretty great (non-monetary) returns. I for one am excited for whatever you release next. IMO, it's okay if this isn't your money maker. You're definitely going to have one and a lot more people will likely see it and be interested in it because of what you already did with Hello Goodbye!