Essay · ~10 min read

Ask Teresa: How Can You Test a Customer's Willingness to Pay?

Teresa Torres · Product Talk Free Beginner

Torres lays out a clean ladder for testing willingness to pay without waiting to finish the product: ask about past spending, then run a demand test with a real pricing page, then actually ask for the money via pre-orders or a concierge sale. It is practical and honest about why hypothetical 'would you pay?' questions give you data you cannot trust. Useful whether you are in Bengaluru or building outside the big startup hubs, since none of it needs a finished product.

  • Start from behaviour: what people already subscribe to or pay for beats any answer to a hypothetical price question.
  • A mock pricing page plus a waitlist or checkout click is a cheap demand test you can run before you build.
  • The strongest test is simply asking people to buy now (pre-order, Kickstarter, or a hand-run concierge sale) and seeing who pulls out a card.
Open on producttalk.org ↗

The question it answers

  1. My ideal customer can't afford my product. Did I define them wrong?

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