Article · long-form guide

The Ultimate Guide to Willingness to Pay

Lenny Rachitsky & Patrick Campbell · lennysnewsletter.com Freemium Intermediate

The most concrete guide to actually measuring what customers will pay, including survey methods and tier design. It turns pricing from guesswork into a research-driven process.

  • Measure willingness to pay directly through structured customer research
  • Design tiers around distinct customer segments, not arbitrary feature bundles
  • Localize pricing by market and currency to capture willingness to pay everywhere
Open on lennysnewsletter.com ↗

It answers 13 questions

  1. How do I decide how much to charge for my product?
  2. What is a value metric and why does it matter for pricing?
  3. How many pricing tiers should I have and how should I package them?
  4. How do I run customer discovery as an Indian founder building for Indian users?
  5. How do I raise prices without losing my existing customers?
  6. How should I price for the Indian market versus global customers?
  7. What's the difference between a customer saying they'll pay and actually pulling out a card, and how do I test the real one early?
  8. How do I price my product when I am selling it myself and have no comparable competitors?
  9. How do I test whether people will actually pay, not just say they like it?
  10. How do I sell in India where buyers negotiate hard on price and payments come in late?
  11. Should I offer a free trial, a paid pilot, or a discount to close my first customers?
  12. Should I build for a market I know from home, like agriculture or local retail, or chase a global software idea?

And 1 more across the hub.

Read with it

  1. Patrick Campbell built ProfitWell on pricing data from thousands of companies, and this is the single best free deep-dive on... lennysnewsletter.com Article · long-form guide Pricing Your SaaS Product Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell), via Lenny's Newsletter
  2. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  3. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  4. Kevin Hale's YC lecture is the clearest introduction to pricing first principles and the mistakes founders repeat. The... ycombinator.com Video · ~35 min video + transcript Startup Pricing 101 Kevin Hale (Y Combinator)
  5. Video · ~25 min How to Talk to Users Eric Migicovsky
  6. Long-form, candid interviews with Indian founders and investors on how they actually grew, distributed and built brand, one of... The Neon Show / Neon Fund Podcast · 200+ episodes The Neon Show (100x Entrepreneur Podcast) Siddhartha Ahluwalia
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →