Four segments were identified and discussed:
1) Business users (thousands of $) in a small organization (non-IT) – scope: internal application
2) Web dev group in a company – no capacity outside big value apps => may be the right segment to pursue
3) Small startups – External Site Developers
4) Consultants building a solution for a business using a fixed bid model

Each customer segment would have a different price point.

For a good summary of the “Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA)” see this article.

Per the discussion, the BATNA for the startup segment (#3) was:
a) find a technical unpaid co-founder – assume that this is out
b) raise or spend $ to hire developer or consulting firm – assume a budget in the range of $50K-250K
So for AppIgnite the pricing for the startup segment could be possibly in the $20K-250K range (if lowering the entry price).

I never realized that the BATNA approach could be applied to product pricing so good lesson!

I think the idea of targeting web developers at companies sounds more promising, but you need to set the price point so that managers can easily sign off on it. For example, we have a project (already being implemented) to do essentially inventory management (RFID tracking, etc.) with a web based form. It started out as a skunkworks idea of a nonprogrammer–I got as far as doing some of the backend work, but ran out of time (we tend to run very lean)–now, we have someone in IT working on it (now that it has funding).

But even for simple projects like inventory management, it takes time to put together even a basic prototype and if one could get a quick prototype up and running and show it to management and test it in a limited setting, then it might be able to convince them to put real resources into the project. If the price point is right, then they might get management to sign off on the prototype. Where life gets difficult is in the support level–if it’s something running on your server it’s fine–but if it has to run on ours, that becomes more of an issue. One is the practical question of how difficult is it for a small IT team to get it operational on their servers. The other question is security–let’s take the inventory management software idea–how does the client gauge if your product is secure? Do they are a large organization, do they have to do a security audit?

But, I can definitely see the advantage of this in the prototyping stage!

“Don’t sell to customers like us; sell to customers with a lot of money, who think high price is a measure of quality.”

Now that you have a super sales pitch pluggio homepage you could try a small amount of linkedin / facebook ads targeted at recruitment or marketing people, get Ilya Lichtenstein on the case. If you’re already all over this please let us know how it goes!

Good podcast, a couple of bon mots that will stay with me (probably slightly paraphrased) :

“Sometimes a couple of hours in the library save a year in the lab”

“You’re trying to make the price so low that the perceived risk falls to zero, that won’t work”

Sam