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Replay — the price is right!

What should you charge? Also who? And When? And how? For this edition, Cameron and I went live from our friends at Moneta Ventures to talk pricing strategy for early stage startups. Let's go.

Hey friends 👋

Let’s talk about something that trips up almost every early-stage founder:

Pricing.

If you’ve ever agonized over what to charge, when to charge it, and how to explain your pricing to customers (or investors) without sounding like you pulled it out of a hat — you’re not alone. Pricing is one of the most squishy decisions you’ll make. And yet, it’s one of the most important.

In this week’s Office Hours, Cam and I tackled:

  • Why pricing is never just about price — it’s about your value proposition, target customer, and traction signals

  • How to test and validate your pricing like an experiment (not a guess)

  • The difference between pricing what you built vs what customers value

  • How to talk to customers about pricing without torpedoing the conversation

  • And why your pricing model is actually one of your most powerful startup hypotheses

If your current pricing strategy is basically “$99/mo seems reasonable,” consider this a wake-up call. You don’t need to have perfect pricing out of the gate — you need a testable hypothesis and a plan to learn.

And hey — if you want the full mental model for how we think about startup validation, you can watch last week’s Office Hours on the Traction Model.

As always, I go live every Friday at noon PT to talk startups and answer your questions — sometimes solo, sometimes with guests. Bring your sticky questions. We’ll tackle them together.

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—jdm


PS: this session was originally hosted on LinkedIn Live on May 1st. We are posting a replay this week because Cam and I are out of town at the NorCal Venture Conference judging a pitch competition.

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