3.2 How to Find Your Price

Most founders pick a price by looking at competitors, cutting it by 20%, and calling it a day. That’s not pricing strategy. That’s guessing with extra steps. And bad guesses kill you, because pricing too high spikes your churn, and pricing too low attracts users who won’t stick around either.

Nick Buzz learned this the hard way. He launched Baked at $5,000 to $6,000 per month. Nobody bought. He dropped to $2,000. Still nothing. He had to work backwards from what the market would actually tolerate before he found the number that converted, which turned out to be $4,317 per month. That’s not a round number. It’s the number his customers told him through their behavior.

You don’t have to learn that lesson the expensive way. There’s a framework called Van Westendorp that gets you a defensible price range in one afternoon with five conversations.

The Van Westendorp Pricing Sprint

The method is four questions, five prospects, one week. You’re not running a survey. You’re having real conversations with people who look like your target customer. They don’t need to be paying customers yet. They just need to have the problem you solve.

Here are the four questions, in order:

At what price would this product be so cheap that you’d question whether it actually works?

At what price would this feel like a genuine bargain, where you’d feel smart for buying it?

At what price does this start to feel expensive, where you’d need to think twice?

At what price would this be too expensive to even consider, no matter how good it is?

That’s it. Four questions. You plot the answers and find where the acceptable range overlaps. Your launch price lives somewhere in the middle of that range, closer to the “bargain” floor than the “too expensive” ceiling.

The conversation sequence matters. Lead with context, not numbers. Explain what the product does in one sentence. Then ask the questions in exactly this order, from cheap to expensive. If you reverse the order, you anchor them high and their cheap threshold inflates. You want their uncontaminated gut reaction, not a negotiation.

Don’t show them a pricing page before the call. Don’t mention what competitors charge. Don’t say “we’re thinking around X.” The moment you anchor them, the data is corrupted.

To run this in one week, book five 20-minute calls Monday through Wednesday. Use your existing network, a relevant subreddit, or cold outreach to people who match your ICP. The script for getting the call is simple: tell them you’re building something for people with their specific problem and you want 20 minutes to understand how they think about paying for a solution. Most people say yes to that.

After five calls, you’ll have a range that’s based on real human psychology rather than your own anxiety about what feels too high. The floor where quality doubt kicks in is your absolute minimum. The ceiling where people tap out is your hard upper limit. Launch somewhere in the lower third of that range, then raise it as you add proof.

This week, identify five people who have the problem you solve. Book the calls. Run the four questions. You now have more pricing data than 90% of founders at your stage.