In many of the conversations I have with my entrepreneurial friends, I see a common question coming up again and again – “As a startup, how can we arrive at the right price for our products and services?” In a recent such conversation, my friend, a founder of a Boston based startup, gave some examples of startup pricing mishaps. In these cases the companies revised their prices (upwards) and as a consequence got a very bad press. He observed, “Even the slightest mistake we (startups) do on pricing gets noticed both by our customers and the press.”

Last year I took the Pricing class, one of the sought-after entrepreneurship classes at MIT Sloan, taught by professor Catherine Tucker (http://cetucker.scripts.mit.edu/), an expert on pricing. For the past few months Prof. Tucker and I have been having conversations on startup pricing. Some of the questions that came during our conversations were – “Why do some startups get the pricing right?, Why some startups seem very undecided on their pricing (and constantly revise their pricing)? How do startups decide on their prices?, Are there better ways of arriving at prices at startup?”. To go deeper on these questions, we are planning to conduct a pricing study focused on startups. We strongly feel that the results from this study will unearth some misconceptions on pricing and will produce best practices and strategies on startup pricing.

For this study we are looking for participation from startups that meet these criteria:
- Funded (angel or VC)
- Has been earning positive revenues for 1-3 years

To make this study more effective and to get better results, I am planning on either meeting the founders/pricing decision makers in person or conducting the interviews over phone.

Please help the startup community by participating in this research. If you would like to participate in this research, please feel free to contact me via email – mitmads@sloan.mit.edu or Twitter (@mitmads).