Pricing for before your first dollar
Most pre-revenue founders price like they’re afraid of losing deals. They’re losing the deals anyway, just to “no decision” instead of to a competitor. Price for the pain you remove, not the cost you incur.
Find out where you standWhy this matters now
There’s a specific pre-revenue pattern: you set a price you’d be embarrassed to pay yourself, prospects accept it without question, and you take that as confirmation. It isn’t. It’s a sign you’re priced low enough that buyers don’t take the decision seriously. If price isn’t a real consideration in any of your conversations, you’re leaving money on the table and signaling that the product solves a small problem. The right pre-revenue price is high enough that the buyer pauses and asks whether the value is real.
Questions you should be able to answer
Have any of your prospects pushed back on price, or has it been accepted in every conversation?
Do you know, in dollar terms, what the buyer’s current pain costs them per month?
If you doubled your price tomorrow, would your closed deals still close, and which ones wouldn’t?
Are you pricing based on cost to deliver, on competitor anchors, or on the value the customer captures?
The trap to avoid
Discounting to win the deal
When a prospect hesitates, founders cut price instead of cutting scope. This trains buyers to expect more discounts and signals that the price was negotiable, which means it was never grounded in value to begin with. Worse, the discount sets the floor: every future deal in the same category gets that price. Cut scope instead. “Yes, we can do that, but for less than the full offer.”
What changes next
At early-revenue, with paying customers, you have the data to raise prices on every other deal until you start hearing real pushback. The threshold of pushback is the actual market price.
The full pricing guide