Everyone is talking about subscriptions. Twitter is warming up for an IPO, Adobe pushed everyone to Creative Cloud, and iOS got a full repaint. Feeds are full of new apps and new SaaS dashboards. The loud part is launches. The quiet part is making rent. This is about that quiet part. Software as a business from the trenches, the stuff that keeps you up at night and actually moves the needle the next morning.
Price Like You Mean It
Most of us underprice because we are afraid to be wrong. The truth is, being forgettable is worse. Your price tells a story. A nine dollar plan screams toy. A three figure plan says we solve a real problem. Pick a price that matches the pain, then watch what happens.
Start with three tiers. Anchor with a higher tier that makes the middle tier look safe. Add yearly plans to lock in cash and reduce churn. Use trials with a time box so people feel a real start and a real finish. Stripe will tell you in plain numbers which tier carries the business. If nobody buys your top tier, the value is unclear. If everyone buys your lowest tier, the plan design is wrong.
Do not copy pricing from your neighbor. Copy the question behind it. What job do we replace, and how much was that job costing? If your product saves a sales rep one hour a day, you are not selling software. You are selling time. Price the time, not the widget.
Sell Outcomes, Not Features
Feature lists are easy to write and easy to ignore. Outcomes make buyers lean forward. Replace feature bullets with before and after stories. Before: spreadsheets, missed follow ups, crowded inbox. After: one screen, clear queue, money in the bank. Screenshots help, but the headline should be the outcome.
Build your home page around a single promise. Back it with one primary call to action. Everything else can live on secondary pages. The goal is not to show that you worked hard. The goal is to make the buyer nod and click. Activation beats attention.
Onboarding is part of sales. The welcome email should show the first win. The first session should end with a result they can save, share, or ship. If they leave the first session with a blank state, you just trained them to bounce. Treat onboarding like a product, not a formality.
Ship Small, Support Hard
Releases do not need to be big to matter. They need to be clear and safe. Ship small slices that are easy to test, announce, and support. Your release notes are marketing. Your support inbox is research. Every support ticket is a test you did not run. Tag root causes, not only symptoms, and feed them into the roadmap.
Speed matters, but trust matters more, especially in a year full of cloud trust questions. If you deal with data, publish what you log, how long you keep it, and who can see it. Plain words beat legal fog. Tell customers when you break something before they tell you. People forgive outages. They do not forgive silence.
Pick one stack you can maintain when the pager goes off at three in the morning. Fancy tech is a thrill. Paying customers prefer uptime. AWS keeps getting better tools. Heroku is fine if you watch the bill. Docker is making noise but still early for most teams. Choose boring where it touches production.
The Books Say One Thing, The Street Wants Another
What the books say: find product market fit, then scale. What the street wants: proof that buyers stick around and pay on time. Fit sounds like a ceremony. Retention is a graph that either slides or it does not.
What the books say: freemium drives growth. The street wants: qualified trials that convert with intent. Free can work if you have a strong sharing loop or a huge market. If not, you are running a support line for non buyers.
What the books say: focus on features that delight. The street wants: boring stuff that removes friction. Faster imports beat fancy themes. Better search beats new widgets. Delight is a byproduct of things that save people time and money.
What the books say: hire when it hurts. The street wants: hire one role ahead in sales and support. Software scales. People need help. A great support person can save a shaky product. A shaky support flow can sink a great product.
Practical Checklist
- Define the core outcome: one sentence on the job you do and the metric you improve.
- Set three prices: clear middle plan, yearly option, and a real top tier with a concierge perk.
- Watch CAC and LTV: know customer acquisition cost by channel, and lifetime value by plan. If CAC is over one third of LTV, fix pricing or channels.
- Track activation: pick one action that predicts retention. Push new users to that action in the first session.
- Measure churn: monthly logo churn and revenue churn. Create a save offer only for win back, not for every cancel.
- Publish status and uptime: a simple status page, clear incident notes, and a postmortem when you slip.
- Shorten the path to value: import, template, or sample data ready on day one. No blank states.
- Answer fast: first response time under one hour during business hours. Even a human auto reply with a time estimate helps.
- Kill features you cannot support: dead features rot trust and slow onboarding.
- Run monthly cohort checks: plot retention by start month, not just totals. Celebrate flat lines. Fix slides.
- Ask for the card early: trials convert better when the card is on file and value is clear. Be honest about it.
- Keep a simple CRM: track leads, reasons lost, and next steps. A spreadsheet beats memory. A basic tool beats chaos.
Build for outcomes, charge for value, earn trust every week.