Notably, founders often treat pricing as something to calculate once and revisit rarely. Adrian Vanzyl sees this as one of the most consistently underweighted decisions a company makes. Pricing isn’t simply cost plus margin. Instead, it shapes who buys the product, how they perceive it, and what kind of company gets built around it.
This isn’t a call to obsess over pricing endlessly. Rather, it’s a reminder that a number chosen quickly in the early days often sticks around far longer than it should.
Why Low Prices Don’t Always Win More Customers
Founders often default to low pricing, assuming it removes friction and speeds up adoption. In practice, though, this assumption doesn’t always hold. Price itself carries information. A price set too low can signal low quality or low confidence, even when the actual product is genuinely strong.
Consequently, some products sell better at a higher price point, not despite the price but partly because of it. Customers use price as a proxy for quality when they can’t fully evaluate the product upfront. A founder chasing volume through aggressive discounting can accidentally undermine the exact perception that would have made the product easier to sell.
The Trap of Pricing Based on Cost Alone
Cost-plus pricing feels safe and defensible, since it’s grounded in a number the founder can actually calculate. However, it ignores something important. It overlooks the value the product actually creates for the customer, which is frequently far higher than the cost of delivering it.
A product that saves a customer significant time or money can often command a price well above its production cost. That works as long as the value gets communicated clearly. Anchoring purely to cost leaves real revenue on the table. More importantly, it fails to position the product according to what it’s actually worth to the people buying it.
Why Changing Price Later Is Harder Than It Should Be
Indeed, a price set too low early on creates a specific kind of problem down the line. Existing customers expect the original price to hold. Raising it later often triggers churn, even when the increase is modest and reasonable relative to the value delivered.
This dynamic makes the initial pricing decision more consequential than most founders realize at the time. It’s far easier to start slightly higher and offer targeted discounts than to raise a price that customers have already anchored around. Notably, the first number chosen often becomes the baseline every future conversation gets measured against.
How Pricing Shapes the Type of Customer a Company Attracts
In fact, price doesn’t just determine revenue. It also filters who becomes a customer in the first place. A low price point tends to attract price-sensitive customers. These customers are more likely to churn when a cheaper alternative appears, and often demand disproportionate support relative to what they pay.
By contrast, a higher price point tends to attract customers who value the product on its actual merits rather than its cost. These customers are generally more stable, more profitable, and less prone to constant price comparison. This connects directly to the broader discipline of choosing the right customers in the first place, since pricing is one of the clearest levers founders have for shaping that mix.
Why Pricing Experiments Deserve More Rigor Than Founders Usually Give Them
Admittedly, many founders set a price once and leave it unexamined for years. They treat it as a fixed constant rather than a variable worth testing deliberately. This hesitation is understandable, since pricing changes feel riskier than most other experiments a company can run.
However, treating price as permanently fixed means missing something important. It means missing the chance to find a number that better reflects actual value delivered. Structured, careful experimentation, rather than guesswork or indefinite avoidance, tends to reveal pricing opportunities that founders significantly underestimate until they actually test them.
What Adrian Vanzyl Believes Founders Should Consider Before Setting a Price
Before settling on a price, founders benefit from asking a few specific questions. What alternative is the customer actually comparing this to, even if it’s not a direct competitor? Separately, what outcome does the customer actually value? How much is that outcome genuinely worth to them? And how will this price age as the product and company mature?
These questions shift pricing from a quick calculation into a genuine strategic decision. It becomes one that reflects the business the founder is actually trying to build, rather than simply covering costs with a reasonable margin on top.
What This Means for Founders Setting Their Price
For founders setting or reconsidering a price, the practical takeaway is to treat the decision with real deliberation. Don’t default to whatever feels safe or common in the category. Price according to value, not just cost. Start closer to where you want to end up, since raising later is harder than it looks. And revisit pricing periodically, rather than treating the first number as permanent.
That’s the discipline Adrian Vanzyl encourages every founder to bring to a decision too often made quickly and revisited too rarely.