One Hundred Dollars

Recently I’ve been calling a couple of customers per-week to chat about their Scout experience. One of the questions I’ve been asking comes out of left field: ”What would you pay another $100/mo for?” I’ll ask the question first to see if they have any suggestions, then run a small selection of ideas by them.

Besides asking my future wife to marry me, it’s the best question I’ve asked in years.

Key Insights

Why not $50 or $1,000?

I wanted a number that was significant enough to force customers to weigh the cost vs. benefit: crossing the $100 barrier felt like a good line for this. If it’s too low, customers might not think hard enough. If it’s too high, the decision starts to involve other people.

Not a sales pitch

I’m looking for as much non-biased feedback as possible, so when running through features, I avoid painting ideas too brightly. Additionally, I don’t want to make it look like a backdoor attempt to sell something.

Audience

I’ve been talking to customers who have used Scout for several months: they know our product’s strengths and weaknesses. They understand our approach: when discussing features, they’re going to have an idea of what it might look like based on our past performance.

In summary, I loved the purity of the question. There’s no bullshit. We want to build something that’s worth another $100. What would it take for us to do that?