I built the complete PMM for a pricing product — and the founder refused to launch it.

A pre-launch product, a blank PMM slate, and one owner: me.

The methodology underpinning all of it was Patrick Campbell's monetization & pricing course — I used ProfitWell / Price Intelligently as the guiding system: value metrics, the six pricing models, price-sensitivity research, and value-based pricing as the through-line. I came in pre-launch with no positioning, no personas, no messaging, no packaging, no GTM, and built all of it — from the category framing down to the onboarding questions — then handed over a complete, ready-to-run go-to-market. The founder chose not to run it.

Startups don't die from bad product. They die from ignored pricing.

The first decision in any positioning work is deciding what story you're really telling. I refused to tell "a pricing-page builder" — that's a feature. The real story is survival.

The evidence I built the framing on: the #1 reason startups fail is running out of money. Companies revise product and marketing strategy every month — and touch pricing once every three years. Most spend roughly six hours on pricing, ever. Yet a 1% improvement in monetization lifts profit by 12.7%, and 98% of companies that changed pricing grew revenue.

The decision: don't sell a page builder. Sell the job — find the right pricing strategy before you run out of time. The product is the vehicle; the job is survival. That became the simple promise and the spine under everything else.

"Never experimenting with pricing means you will never learn the real value of your product and its potential for growth." — Mathilde Collin, CEO of Front

A category play — the first pricing-optimization platform for Webflow.

Rather than slot Pricer into "Webflow apps" or "pricing tools," I positioned it as the first of a new category and differentiated on the one thing competitors couldn't copy: learning pricing by doing.

The decision: differentiate on speed of iteration — test multiple pre-built strategies and publish in minutes — not on design or templates. The moat is the process, and that's also the positioning: pricing isn't an event, it's a loop.

Pricing strategy is stage-dependent. So I segmented by MRR stage.

Most persona work splits by industry or company size. For a pricing product that's the wrong axis — a $5K-MRR startup and a $5K-MRR agency need opposite pricing help. I split the market by where the money actually is.

The decision: each persona gets a different plan, message, and monetization motion — not one generic pricing page. The packaging has to follow the persona, or the primary plan serves no one.

Roles in the room: founders, PMs, PMMs, marketing generalists, agencies/consultants, and sales reps who own pricing in sales-led companies.

The jobs I designed for

The hardest part of pricing isn't the number. It's the value metric.

Most pricing work starts with "what should we charge?" I started one level up: what unit of value are we charging for? Get the value metric wrong and no model scales.

The framework I used to choose a model

I mapped the six SaaS pricing models with their trade-offs, then matched each to a persona — instead of picking one on instinct.

A real pricing-sensitivity finding — and what it changed

The pricing I designed — and why I changed the model

First version charged a percentage of revenue (align with customer success). Final version charged on traffic. Here's why I moved off the principled option.

The decision: a take-rate is principled but operationally messy at pre-seed — revenue tracking is hard, and buyers can't compare it to anything. A traffic metric is clear, forecastable, and still grows with the customer. Principle lost to clarity — and clarity wins the self-serve buyer.

Every setup question teaches a concept and captures the data to recommend a price.

I refused to build onboarding as a form. I built it as the customer's first pricing consultation — each question does two jobs: educate the founder and feed the recommendation engine.

The lifecycle I designed around the MRR deadline

Behavior nudges fire on the funnel: started a draft and didn't publish in 7 days → published the pricing page → first subscribed customer.

Don't monetize until you've earned the right to.

A PLG product monetizes differently at each stage. I planned the ICP, messaging, and the monetization motion to shift as the base grew — not to flip the switch on day one.

A complete launch motion, blocked at the founder's sign-off.

The full pre-launch checklist and launch plan were ready to ship. They were never run.

Channels: LinkedIn · Twitter · Reddit · IndieHackers · Slack · Product Hunt.

The dashboard that would've proved it worked.

I built the metric set to answer one question: is the pricing strategy actually growing the business — or just looking busy?

The decision: the signal that matters is plan-revenue distribution — which plan drives the most revenue per user, not just the most users. That's how you know whether the primary plan is doing its job.