Changing Displagent's Pricing

A Long Two Years

I still cannot believe it when I say it out loud: I am a little over two years into my journey with Displagent. Two. Years.

Ironically, it's hard to fathom that I've been working on this product for so long even though I've lived out this solo journey personally the entire time. I think you tend to focus so much on your goals and think so often about what you have not yet attained that you forget to stop and ponder just how incredibly far you've come already.

This solopreneurship gig is a journey unlike any I have ever experienced in my entire life.

What Took So Long?

Displagent has required so much work to get up and running. For what is supposedly a "small" micro SaaS app, Displagent has been nothing short of extremely challenging to build, launch, and grow.

So why has it taken me so long to experiment with the pricing?

Learning

I want to place special emphasis on the "build" part of that. When I started my dev work on Displagent, I had:

• Never created a .NET Web API from scratch.
• Never fully understood .NET dependency injection and controllers.
• Never created a real, fully-built frontend web application.
• Never created an Electron application.
• Never setup complex, multi-OS CICD pipelines.
• Never hosted anything in Azure ever before.
• Never used Mailchimp or executed on any email marketing.
• Never launched a newsletter.
• Never created a landing page and blog with a metaframework like Nuxt.
• Never consistently engaged on a question-and-answer forum.
• Never tried to build or sell my own product.

And I've probably still left off a few "nevers" from that list.

The point of me saying that, though, is that this journey has been a massive learning experience. That's arguably been the hardest part of building Displagent: this is my first product ever, I've never had to use so much advanced technology at one time nor had to engage in consistent, hardcore marketing. Displagent checked most of my "firsts" in the world of soloprenuership, and that's no exaggeration.

Let that be a lesson for you, too: you cannot speed up learning and experimentation. We all have to suffer through it, none of us is an exception.

First Customer

Considering how incredibly difficult and steep the learning curve was to actually code the product, in addition to me executing marketing tactics, it took quite a while before Displagent was at a place where someone was ready to actually purchase it.

And once I got my first customer, it was very slow and drawn-out before I got my second and third customer. That took an excruciatingly long time to come about, and I nearly burned out waiting for new customers twice during that time period; it was a very challenging time for me as founder.

Product Market Fit

And then, for the very first time ever, around October 2023, I felt a surge of wind under my wings. Seemingly all of sudden, my product just lifted off straight into the clouds. Trials, and more trials, and more trials, and feature requests, and more bugfixes, and more trials, and... finally, a consistent stream of new customers.

It took all of that entire span of time for me to go from building something that only existed in my head to establishing a steady stream of customers.

It Takes Way Longer Than You Realize

So between all of that - and I still left out a thousand small details and lessons learned - it has really taken a while for me to get the product in an established enough state where I could start measuring critical business metrics against it. Finally, I'm now able to look at things like MRR, Profit, ARPU, MoM Growth, and more.

And until all of that was established, there was simply no reason for me to experiment with a large assortment of pricing models.

Psychology

I will say this, though: the psychology of changing your prices is extremely challenging. This could be an entire blog post by itself, but needless to say, I have run through dozens and dozens of worrisome "what if" scenarios.

I have not looked enough at my competitors pricing, and then I obsessively looked too much at their pricing. And I worried about "what if this" and "what if that", and I worried about tanking my now-established, steady stream of new customers.

So much worrying and silly psychology about changing a few small numbers on your website.

Let's See What Happens

But tonight, I finally did it: after a nice confidence boost from my wonderful wife, I finally pulled the trigger and upped Displagent's pricing.

I want that $10,000 MRR. I'm getting ever so close, and I'm hoping this provides a nice boost.

Let's see what happens.

Upwards and onwards.