My first paying user told me I was charging too little. It took me 4 months to listen.
She signed up, used Genie 007 for two weeks, then emailed me.
Not a bug report. Not a feature request.
She said: "This is saving me two hours a day. Why are you only charging £12 a month? I'd pay ten times that."
I thanked her, filed it away mentally, and kept the price at £12 for another 4 months.
My reasoning at the time:
- I needed more users, not more revenue per user
- Raising the price might slow growth
- I wasn't "big enough" yet to charge more
All of it was wrong.
Here's what was actually happening:
The £12 price was sending a signal I didn't intend. Some people who would have been perfect users looked at it and thought: if it's only £12, how good can it actually be? A few never even tried.
When I finally raised the price, something unexpected happened. The conversations changed. People who signed up at the higher price asked better questions, used more features, and churned less.
Not because the product changed. Because the price filtered for a different kind of user.
The woman who told me to charge more was right from day one. She understood the value better than I did.
The hardest part of pricing is that your price communicates your belief in your own product. Charge too little and you're not being humble. You're undermining the thing you built.
I built Genie 007 (genie007.com) as a voice-to-action tool because I was losing hours a day to typing things I could say in 30 seconds. 1,200+ clients now. The pricing conversation never really ends.
What's the earliest pricing mistake you made that took you longest to fix?
Four months is the part I recognise, though mine was ad spend rather than price. Campaigns that clearly weren't working stayed live for months because I hadn't admitted they weren't working, and the delay cost me more than the money did.
What broke the habit was writing the number down before anything went live - if cost per lead is over X by day four, it dies. Deciding while I'm still neutral is the only bit that works, and a price change takes the same shape: pick what you'd need to see, and by when, before you touch it.
One user offering ten times the price is one data point. She happened to be right.
The insight about price filtering customer type is the real story here. You weren't just leaving money on the table - you were running the wrong measurement system. Your £12 price was sending a signal you couldn't hear because it was too weak to override your conviction about needing volume. Her signal was stronger because it came from actual value experienced. Same product, two measurement systems running in parallel. When you switched to hers, it didn't just change revenue - it changed what customers asked for, used, and valued. That's the hard part: founders who can see the signal first often understand their product better than the founder does.
This is a really interesting perspective. I think one of the hardest things for early-stage founders is separating “we need more users” from “we need the right users.”
We're currently facing a similar question while building our SaaS product. We're still very early, so we're experimenting with how pricing, free trials, and perceived value affect activation and conversion.
One thing I'm learning is that pricing isn't just about revenue—it also communicates positioning and the value you believe you're creating.
Curious: when you eventually raised the price, did you test different price points, or did you make the jump based primarily on customer feedback?
Answering your closing question: the pricing mistake that takes longest to fix is the model, not the number. The number is an afternoon's change, which your £12 story proves. The model is architecture: it wires into billing code, decides who self-selects in, shapes your own incentives, and most founders inherit it from whatever the market leader does rather than choosing it.
We sell in a market where the default model is a percentage of the revenue the software touches, and the switching complaints in competitor reviews are all about the model, never about the number. You made the cheap kind of pricing mistake. The expensive kind is the one nobody emails you about.
The idea that price filters for a different type of customer is important.
It is easy to view pricing only as a revenue decision, but it also changes who tries the product, how seriously they use it, and the quality of feedback they provide.
How did you decide on the new price point after finally accepting that £12 was too low?
The part about the £12 price changing who took the product seriously is really interesting.
It’s easy to think of pricing as just a revenue lever, but it can also affect the type of customer you attract and the conversations you have with them.
What surprised you most after making the change?
This hits harder than it looks. Your customer's signal (£12 feels underpriced) wasn't just about revenue - it was about your measurement system.
At £12, you were measuring: user count, growth rate, market reach. The metrics that seemed to matter.
At the higher price, you started measuring: conversation quality, feature adoption, churn rate. The metrics that actually reveal whether someone found real value.
That 4-month gap between hearing the signal and acting on it is the hard part. Your brain had optimized around "we need volume," so even a clear signal about value got filed away as secondary data.
The person who paid more wasn't a different customer. She was the same person - but now your price was aligned with the actual value she was getting. Which made both of you measure and communicate about the same thing.
Price is a measurement system. It determines what signals you can see, and which ones you'll trust.