(project management SaaS) in 1999, they have since invented Ruby On Rails, written 3 books and reached $25m in ARR.
How?
This posts explains...
Joseph Sugarman is one of the greatest direct response copywriters of all time.
With just his writing, he sold over $6m of BluBlocker Sunglasses in the 1960s. In the 1960s, that's a lot of sunglasses.
If you're interested, here is that very advertisement:
In his book,
, he tells a couple of stories about the impact of keeping pricing simple.
The first story explains how a business that had produced 9 variations of a special watch wanted Joe to sell them in the Wall Street Journal.
Joe agreed but only wanted to sell 1 of the 9 variations. The business owner disagreed:
"Logic states that more choice = more sales", he said.
Joe agreed to run two almost identical ads, one selling all 9 variations and the other selling a single watch.
Can you guess which ad pulled 3 times as many sales?
Yep, the ad that sold a single watch.
The next story concerns a wrinkle reduction pill subscription Joe was selling.
For the pill to be most effective, a customer would need to take 2 pills per day for 3 months, and then 1 pill per day going forward.
This was not simple: both from a pricing perspective but also from a product instruction perspective.
Again, Joe decided to run a test...
The first variation sold the boxes at double the price for the first 3 months... and the second variation sold boxes at a flat rate.
Can you guess which converted higher?
The flat rate box.
Simplicity works.
And I'm not sure if
has read the book, but they definitely shrug off pricing complexity:
In a world of SaaS usage metrics designed to drive expansion revenue...
offers a flat rate of $99 per month regardless of features, users or projects.
Simple.
Compare the pricing page above with
, a world of difference...
Listen to the late, great Joseph Sugarman and keep your pricing simple stupid.