I made a graph, because that’s worth 1000 words:
It make no sense. The fixed cost (subscription) covers fixed costs (staff, rent, whatever) the variable costs cover variable costs (Lambda computing). If you’re trying to cover fixed costs with the variable cost then people are just going to reduce their use.
I just don’t get it, at all.
Yeah, you can’t get around people optimizing their costs. Especially as a technical platform.
AWS actually encourages this, even though they make less money from optimized performance/usage. But then they make more money from new/additional usage/workloads.
If the fixed costs (subs) are not covering the fixed costs (staff etc) then, yeah, it’s a problem that needs to be addressed in some way but reducing the appeal of the product doesn’t seem it. I recommended PD to lots of people but most of them couldn’t hack the technical aspects so it was hard. I persisted myself because it was such good value. I could never recommend it now. It’s hard. I really believed in this thing.
Yeah I definitely can no longer recommend it the way I did before (which was basically like a no-brainer recommendation).
At this point I’d just say “Yeah it’s a cool platform, especially for semi-technical users who like tinkering. Just compare the features & pricing with alternatives.” Which I guess is just the way it is. :man-shrugging:
Macro; is it fair to say that it was a no-brainer previously because of your perceived high value to low cost compared to everything else on the market?
I believe that was the general sentiment you shared when we spoke – was a while back though.
Yeah I think that’s what we’re basically saying here.
Before, we got great value for the cost.
Now, I guess the cost matches the value. :man-shrugging:
But I understand your desire to maximize revenues (over the short term at least).
What I’m expressing here is not the thought that you should charge less and make less money.
But rather just maybe revisit how you approach pricing & features for entry-level users.
I’m sure there’s a way to set things up in a way which doesn’t alienate some of those users.
Like… I see two ways to think about it. And idk which one is the reality for your business (and I haven’t seen the numbers):
- “This is as much usage as we’ll ever get from entry-level users, so let’s charge them for everything they’ve got.” (this feels like the direction)
- Or “yeah, entry-level users are not the main contributors to our cashflow… but, they can grow as customers over time and also attract more customers if we treat them well and they remain satisfied”.
For example, Microsoft never made much money (if any) from giving out Windows licenses to schools.
The money came in later, once those users grew & matured into individual users & businesses.
Anyway, just sharing some thoughts.
Feel free to discard them.
My guess is the small level users are more trouble than they’re worth in support costs/general admin/friction and they want rid of them. Or at least that’s what their pricing says.
Yeah maybe it’s a pain to support those little seedlings. But a forest without seedlings will never grow.
Can’t transplant trees forever.
: Something else related to the no-brainer thing:
One thing I really liked about Pipedream at first is also that it felt like rooting for the underdog. I’m all about that, so I was all in.
• Like: “Alright, these guys are trying to change the game!”
But now it feels like Pipedream is trying to become a top dog (as attested by other comments). It’s much harder to have any affinity with that. But business is business, I guess (who cares about affinity). :man-shrugging:
• Like: “Ok, nvm, they’re just trying to be like everyone else and fight for a piece of the same pie.” (as opposed to creating an entirely new pie/changing the game)
Rethinking my point above, if you want rid of the admin costs of small users you put the fixed cost up, not the variable, so I guess that doesn’t make sense. They must need/want more money and right now, not in a year or two. Today. I feel bad if they’re out of runway, it’s a great idea.:shrug:
Yeah, I hope that’s not it. Can’t get very far by salvaging yourself.
Ironically, I just watched an amazing presentation, which is related to this, from Marcus Buckingham at the Global Leadership Summit this week (today/just now, actually. It ended 20 minutes ago).
It’s impossible to sum up in a few words, but I thought these slides were closely related:
Actually, there’s a part of the talk that’s much more closely related. And I think it’s so important that I actually transcribed it.
It pretty much sums up this situation 100%:
Shape-shifting is unloving. Delta last year took their frequent flier program and they changed it to a frequent spender program. They brought Boston Consulting group in, who told them that you could get more money out of transactions if you cease to see people that you serve as “passengers”, and you saw them instead as wallets. And so we as passengers were like “I thought, idk, I thought you were what I was looking for. I thought you were an airline. And now you’re a bank.” Of course, people pushed back against this and they had to change it right back around. Let’s call it what it is: it’s unloving.
I thought you were this, and you’ve shape-shifted, and now you’re that. You’ve become incoherent in terms of experience design. That’s a failure in leadership. It’s unloving.
You get more of what you ~expect~ accept. And there’s too much in our world that we’ve allowed to happen. We haven’t pushed back on things that are unloving. We’ve let ourselves be reduced to elements of a transactional operation/equation. It’s not acceptable. And the people are going to fight back against it, and create more loving worlds for the generations to come.
