Insight
Mickos: Customer pricing complaints without churn validate effective pricing
“And then, by the way, if customers complain about price, that doesn't mean the price is too high. It is too high when they abandon you. If they complain and they don't abandon you, in a weird way, they're confirming that your pricing is pretty good.”
Insight
Mickos: The best way to avoid cyberattacks is proactive hacking
“Because the best way to avoid getting hacked is to try to get hacked.”
Insight
Mickos: SaaS companies cannot succeed without getting pricing right
“There is no successful SaaS company that doesn't have good pricing. Like, it's completely impossible for you to succeed by whatever metric you have if your pricing isn't more or less right.”
Insight
Mickos: Pricing must be designed to pass the detached economic buyer
“The problem is always for the seller to explain it to his or her boss, and for the buyer to explain it to the economic buyer. Because every purchase has an economic buyer in the background who is not excited about the product, who doesn't care about the vendor…”
Disclosure
Mickos: HackerOne raised prices with subscriptions, improving customer satisfaction through predictability
“So we increased our pricing and started selling subscriptions for much higher amounts, and the customer is much happier, because they can predict every year what it will cost.”
Insight
Mickos: Customers fundamentally value convenience and predictable cost above quality claims
“So customers look for, always look for convenience and predictability of cost, whatever they tell you. There are, of course, exceptions to everything, but even when they say quality is all we care about, they will often perceive it in a form of convenience. Th…”
Insight
Mickos: Public SaaS pricing forces vendors to justify rates against competitors
“So when you publish your pricing like this, you are subjecting it to competitive analysis by others. So it's not like you could just dream up these numbers. You have to be able to justify them to a customer who will come back and say, But this other vendor cha…”
Insight
Mickos: Enterprise buyers fear abandoning overpriced products they hate
“Business people are afraid of abandoning even a product they hate that's overpriced.”
Insight
Mickos: Companies Should Price and Justify Freemium by Customer LTV
“If you're wondering about pricing and how to set it, and should you do freemium or not, a way to think about it is lifetime value of the customer. And this is something we learn from the gaming industry, where that's all they do.”
Insight
Mickos: Limit SaaS pricing to 3 or 4 tiers to frame middle choice
“You always need good, better, best. You need three, ah, tiers. You can have four. Don't have more than that. It's human psychology. Some people will always choose the cheapest. Some people will always choose the most expensive. Most people will choose the one …”
Insight
Mickos: Freemium models require maximizing adoption rather than limiting free users
“But if you go for a freemium, you must go all in. You can't sit there thinking, okay, we'll give away this for free, but let's hope not many will take it. No. You need to hope that everybody will take it. Like, if you do a freemium, you have to go all in, and …”
Disclosure
Mickos: HackerOne's early commission model failed because economic buyers demanded budget predictability
“At hacker one, it meant we had to increase our pricing. So when I joined the company, we sold on a commission base where we say, okay, customer, if you pay a thousand dollars in bounties to this hacker, we will take 2200 dollars as commission. It was a beautif…”
Assertion Supported
Mickos: AWS launched at one-tenth the price of Sun Microsystems' cloud
“Not many will remember, but when AWS launched their cloud service, there were cloud services around. For instance, Sun Microsystems had one, ah, but AWS came out with something that cost a 10th of what they had.”
Insight
Mickos: Users either spend time to save money or money to save time
“So what they learn in the gaming world and elsewhere, in open source as well, that some people will spend time to save money, others will save money, spend money to save time.”
Assertion Supported
Mickos: MySQL had 15M non-paying users and 12,000 paying customers
“Like we had fifteen million users who paid us nothing. And then we had 12,000 customers who paid us money.”
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