Founder Topic

How do early-stage founders price their product?

The archive's consensus: pricing is an experiment, not a formula. Hamish McKay repriced Order Editing every two months, walking it from $400 to $600 a month to find willingness to pay. Floriye Elmazi positioned Sisterwould premium first, then lowered the price as scale allowed. The deeper lesson from Josh Foreman at InDebted: when a pricing model reflects genuine customer value, defend it — his biggest regret is rebuilding it 15 times on investor feedback only to end up where he started.

Pricing is the decision founders revisit most and research least. The Founders In Motion archive covers pricing a SaaS product with no customers, pricing premium consumer goods against giants, pricing robots against labor costs, and defending an unfashionable pricing model against years of investor pressure.

Quick answers

How do I price with no customers yet?

Keep testing upward. Hamish McKay launched Order Editing "at like four hundred dollars a month," then asked "can we sell it at 500," found out they could, then 600 — changing pricing almost every two months to discover willingness to pay. Caroline Tran's variant: give the first customer a reasonable (not cheap) price, then let the market supply data points.

How should I price a premium consumer product?

Decide what you are first — FMCG, premium, or in-between — then check the margins sustain the business. Floriye Elmazi launched Sisterwould at $58 with a Sephora-level vision, and only reduced to $39 after two and a half years of scale. Andy Miller at Heaps Normal sometimes held or cut prices as they scaled, passing economies of scale to drinkers because accessibility was part of the brand.

How do you price against an existing cost, like labor?

Anchor to what you replace. Dyna Robotics rents robots at several grand a month rather than selling hardware — on par with or cheaper than typical US labor cost — because their restaurant customers are price-sensitive and low-margin.

What founders in the archive say

EP 15
Hamish McKay · Order Editing

He Built a Shopify App for MrBeast, Now It's Doing $2M ARR

Hamish McKay co-founded Order Editing, a Shopify app that gives online shoppers a "Grace period" to change their order after checkout — and hit a million in AR in the first year by building in public and refusing venture capital.

$1MA million in AR hit within the first year, building in public with no venture capital
"the majority of the time we've just built our own technology like our own IP that guarantees that that system doesn't get the order until we say so"— Hamish McKay, on how Order Editing works (01:05)
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EP 19
Andy Miller · Heaps Normal

Building a $50M+ Zero Alcohol Global Craft Beer Brand

Summer beer, winter launch, unknown brand, mid-pandemic, and non-alcoholic. Kitchen-kettle XPA brewed in longneck bottles. Robbie Williams on the cap table. $50M+ B Corp. Andy Miller on building Heaps Normal into Australia's biggest non-alc beer brand.

$50M+Brand valuation. Built from a kitchen-kettle prototype and pandemic-era hand delivery.
"You're launching a summer beer style, in the middle of winter, with an unknown brand, and it's non-alcoholic."— A journalist describing the Heaps Normal launch, repeated by Andy (03:35)
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EP 14
Jason Ma · Dyna Robotics

He's Building $600M Robots That Folds your Laundry

Jason Ma turned down offers to return to Google DeepMind, Nvidia and Meta to start Dyna Robotics — and just raised $120 million to build robots that fold napkins non-stop for 24 hours instead of chasing the humanoid dream.

$120 millionRaised to power the future of the physical economy with fully autonomous single-task robots
"the bottleneck for useful robots is AI and software"— Jason Ma, on why he started with everyday tasks instead of humanoids (00:43)
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EP 32
Josh Foreman · InDebted

$350M Fintech Founder Steps Down as CEO to Rebuild With AI

Ten years into building InDebted into one of the biggest debt collection software companies in the world, Josh Foreman stepped down as CEO to rebuild it from its core — because the competitor he fears most is an AI-native version of himself, starting today with nothing to protect.

$12 → $1M/weekfrom the first revenue Josh remembers "like it was yesterday" to over $1 million a week today
"Now I'm so confident on the ability for the business to compound over the long term that I have to think about a world where the business exists without even me in it."— Josh Foreman, on why ten years in changed his thinking (03:34)
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