Lincoln Murphy, Author at Customer-centric Growth by Lincoln Murphy

SaaS Pricing Model: Value Metrics Are Key

December 7, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy

Your SaaS Pricing Model should be built around what the customer values, which probably means staying away from “commodity” metrics like storage. I find most articles about “SaaS Pricing Model” to be less-than-helpful because they almost always fail to take into consideration the WIIFT of the customer – the What’s In It For Them. Most […]

SaaS Marketing – Web App Pricing Page Review: Salesforce.com

November 15, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy

A look at Salesforce.com’s pricing page to see if the SaaS leader views it as a Marketing page. I asked – both on Twitter and this blog – for people to send in what they thought were well-designed SaaS Pricing Pages. Someone that follows me on Twitter asked what I thought of Salesforce.com’s Pricing Page. […]

Your Revenue Crutch is Killing Your SaaS Startup

November 12, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy

Web Apps and Software-as-a-Service that comes from consulting companies or other service businesses can be lucrative but can be held back by non-scalable revenue streams. Do you have a less-scalable revenue stream that you rely on even though it is holding your business back? We’ll call this a Revenue Crutch. It is something you keep […]

37Signals Caught Treating SaaS Pricing Page like a Marketing Page

November 1, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy

The popular Web App company actively tests their pricing page layout. I was asked over the weekend if I saw the noise about 37Signals raising their prices. I had not so it was very nice to hear from colleagues looking for my opinion on the matter. So, here’s my opinion on the 37Signals price-raising uber-scandal; […]

SaaS Growth Hacking Experts Resource Guide

October 5, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy

Growth Hacking isn’t a set of tactics or just about getting cheap traffic to your website… Growth Hacking is a mindset. It’s not just about getting traffic on the cheap; it’s about understanding and exploiting customer behavior, technology, and distribution. Real Growth Hackers use their imagination to pull all of that together to drive growth, however growth […]

SaaS Free Trial: Feature or Time-Limited?

October 5, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy

Freemium is free-forever, Free Trials have time limits and the psychology of the two COULDN’T BE MORE DIFFERENT! I got this question from some random person and I thought you might be interested in in my response. Feel free to comment if you have similar experiences and would like to weigh in. Q. What are […]

Web Apps use Customer Support to Increase Revenue

October 4, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy

SaaS vendors know getting the sale is just the first step; keeping the customer means keeping them happy and that a happy customer will generate more revenue over time! A client that I am working with on their Pricing Strategy just sent me the following question (you can send me questions, too): Lincoln – This […]

Does Goldilocks Pricing Work for SaaS?

September 15, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy

A Pricing Strategy for SaaS built for the sole purpose of nudging customers away from a decoy price to the middle version can work. I was asked for my thoughts on this question someone posted on Quora: “Based on your real-world experiences, does Hal Varian’s ‘Goldilocks pricing’ result in most buyers choosing the middle option?” […]

As SaaS Matures, so will SaaS Pricing

June 21, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy

The common SaaS per-user, per-month subscription revenue model is rapidly evolving. From time to time I feel I must remind everyone – buyers, sellers, pundits, commentators, & analysts – that SaaS is not a pricing model or pricing strategy. From the vendor side, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a unique Software Business Architecture where service is the […]

5 SaaS Pricing Mistakes to Avoid

June 11, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy

For SaaS & Web App companies, Subscription Revenue is a no-brainer, but doing it right is not! There are many pitfalls Web App & SaaS companies need to look out for when it comes to pricing. If you keep the “Pricing is Marketing” mantra running through your head and “What’s In It For Them?” (them being your […]

SaaS Pricing: Please Learn From the Zendesk Fiasco

May 18, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy

It is time for SaaS & Web App startups to sit up and pay attention. SaaS Pricing is very important to your venture but not just to ensure you make a profit or cover expenses. It is so much more than that and you should seek to get it as right as possible out of […]

Cloud Acquisitions Create New Opportunities

May 12, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy

So you’ve built a killer SaaS product and [Google or Oracle or Microsoft or…] just bought your big competitor; is this good or bad for you? NOTE: This post is originally from May 2010, but the last two years have been full of Legacy Software vendors snapping up SaaS and Cloud providers. From SAP buying […]

SaaS Distribution: Time to Change the Channel

May 12, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy

Do SaaS products require, or can they benefit from, distribution through a 3rd party? I’ve written in the past about SaaS channels and how most people are doing it wrong, and there seems to be renewed interest in this topic. Unfortunately, things haven’t changed much. Since this is “software” as-a-service, people cannot get away from […]

SaaS, Web Apps, or Just ‘Apps’?

April 20, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy

On my last trip to San Francisco I sat down with Matt Childs of DreamSimplicity to talk about the state of SaaS. We shot some video as we talked about how Google & Apple have changed the distribution landscape for SaaS & Mobile making App Stores & Marketplaces a new reality for SaaS vendors and […]

SaaS Pricing: Commodity Metrics and the $240 GB

March 31, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy

SaaS pricing strategies that use low-value commodity metrics – like storage – to differentiate tiers force customers to make price comparisons that shouldn’t be made. Updated for 2014 This topic came up with a client who wanted to pass on the storage costs associated with the use of the system to their end-customer. We quickly […]

SaaS Pricing: Versioning for Market Segments

March 5, 2010 Article by Lincoln Murphy

Rags Srinivasan posted a great article titled “The Science of Optimal Versioning in SaaS” to his blog that talks about SaaS pricing. In the article, Rags talks about taking apply SaaS pricing to through different bundles of features at different prices for various market segments. The whole article is great, so I encourage you to […]