When you’re launching a new business, determining your pricing is a crucial but extremely difficult task that’s more art than science. Worse, for many businesses, adjusting pricing later is difficult, so you need to get it fairly close to right the first time around, or at least build some slack into the system so you can change it more easily.
Anyway, I was thinking about this problem for a new service we’re thinking about launching in conjunction with MightyBrand and I had a thought: what if you had a contest where people could predict your pricing? You could either give the closest person (or a few people) a large prize, or award anyone within 10% of the correct answer a free copy or subscription of your product or service. People seem to enjoy those “how many jellybeans in the jar”-types of contests, and the advantage to you is that you get people to tell you what they think the value of your service is, before you set your pricing model. People could intentionally try and mislead you by telling you a really low number, but then they’d reduce their likelihood of winning the prize.
Brilliant idea or just really clever? Tell me in the comments 🙂
PS – If you use this idea, be sure and let me know how it turns out.