Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Economic downturns are the optimal time to transition to usage-based pricing

Madhavan Ramanujam · The art and science of pricing | Madhavan Ramanujam (Monetizing Innovation, Simon-Kucher) · Dec 8, 2022 · at 1:31:20

Madhavan Ramanujam, pricing strategist and partner at Simon-Kucher, discusses how economic downturns provide leverage to adopt usage-based pricing models.

0:00 / 0:25exact quote · 25.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Frankly, this is the best time to actually think about these things. Like if, you know, if people are not using the product, changing it to a usage-based, people would say that's great because You know, there's a downturn. We're not using the product. And they would opt into a usage based pricing because they are going to pay lesser because they're not using. But when times are good again, they're going to use it. And basically what you did is you just lodged in a usage based pricing easily compared to like trying to do that when the times are good.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Madhavan Ramanujam

Insight
Ramanujam: Autonomous AI software can capture 25% to 50% of created value
“In the classic SaaS situation, we used to say if you can charge 10 to 20% of the value, that's actually great. But in AI, you can actually charge 25 to 50% because it is autonomous.”
Madhavan Ramanujam Jul 27, 2025 ▶ 43:55 Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ramanujam: Outcome-based AI pricing will jump from 5% to 25% in 3 years
“In, there are a lot of benchmarks and studies that actually show that, and this is also my belief, that in the next three years, that five percent number will move to 25%.”
Madhavan Ramanujam Jul 27, 2025 ▶ 44:22 Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam
Insight
Pricing low to drive growth is a fallacy without Amazon-like costs
“Often I see entrepreneurs who say, let's just price low to like grain, gain growth. That's a fallacy. I mean, if you don't have a business model that actually supports this compared to Amazon, then You probably know shouldn't be in a penetration strategy.”
Madhavan Ramanujam Dec 8, 2022 ▶ 54:39 The art and science of pricing | Madhavan Ramanujam (Monetizing Innovation, Simon-Kucher)
Insight
Ramanujam: Effective B2B value selling requires creating needs rather than discovering them
“Many founders show up and try to understand what are the needs of the customers. That's one way to look at it. But you need to be able to create needs rather than just discover them, right?”
Madhavan Ramanujam Jul 27, 2025 ▶ 17:25 Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam
Insight
Ramanujam: POCs should co-create ROI models rather than test feature functionality
“The right way to think about an ROI model is to actually co-create it with your customers from day one, which means You know, agree and validate on the assumptions and the inputs. So like, Hey, how long does this process take today? How many engineers are ther…”
Madhavan Ramanujam Jul 27, 2025 ▶ 19:22 Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam
Insight
Ramanujam: AI startups must monetize on day one unlike SaaS
“AI founders need to tackle monetization from the very early days, like day one in their seed stage, pre-seed kind of thing, which was not probably the focus for, you know, the previous SaaS companies. Why is that so? Because of two reasons. One, there's for th…”
Madhavan Ramanujam Jul 27, 2025 ▶ 27:57 Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.