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Pricing model feedback?

Hello! My name is Janice and I work for Owlpost, a gift giving service start up readying for launch. We essentially take the hassle of sending out gifts or cards for loved ones out of your hands for a monthly fee. The last bar to going live is the pricing model. We feel it could be improved upon, streamlined or lowered, but it's hard to see a solution that results in profit. Here's the current model: http://owlpost.co/pricing/ ANY feedback on what works and what doesn't would be of enormous help. There are no wrong answers! Thank you in advance!

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2 answers

There are risks and rewards in every pricing model. I'll try to explain them simply here.

I see you're using a monthly service fee model for your new business. That's good. In the ever popular Software as a Service model (SaaS) the incremental costs associated with growing the user base is very low and so profit comes from the nth user. In other words, the more users you have the more profit. It's also true that you will show losses until your user base gets to a certain threshold. Finding the balance between short term revenue and long term profitability is a simple exercise in financial modeling. The risk here is that you never reach volume to be profitable.

In labor intensive businesses, this isn't the case. Your business seems like a labor intensive one. If my assumption is correct, as your user base scales, you will need to have people devote more time to finding presents. Similar to the SaaS example, if your shoppers become more efficient as volume scales then you can probably run in the near term with lower profit and count on scaling to become more profitable.

However this isn't the case with most small businesses. If your shoppers efficiency stays the same or gets worse as volume scales, then you'll need to build profit into your pricing from the start and increase your margins for the larger packages.

Personally, I see your business model as being pretty niche and targeted to people who have extra cash and less time. They will likely pay more for a more personalized service and this will be your secret sauce to success rather than high volume of the same kinds of interactions. The risk here is that the pricing is too high to become popular.

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Hi Janice, actually I consider this project one of the coolest ideas ever! it's unique and out of the box really I'd like to mention here that maybe if you could use specialized gifts like Hand-made gifts or 3D-Printed gifts would be a plus for your project because it's wouldn't be about the price which is seems relatively high for some of the people. targeting your customers would get more power to your company and I think that would be cost effective for both the company and the customer, maybe also if you used some kind of satisfaction and loyalty track programs would be cool. Wish your the great success in your project.

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