Murtaza Bambot: Doc, another question that popped in the Zoom chat that I wanted to touch on about pricing was from Fabian, which was. What do you think about community members and clients defining their price, pricing, like a, sort of choose what you want option in practice.
Do you find that that leads to like potentially higher value or you know, because they feel bad about or lower price? How do you kind of think about that?
Doc Williams: That's a great question. Fabian, John Sha Fabian got a great company. Love the community. That's gonna be awesome stuff, man. Great to see you here. I usually do not, so the simple answer is no, I don't like it.
And the reason behind it is a lot of your, you are already servicing and having a great product doing that. Your members are not a good gauge at that. They, there's so many other factors that you're giving too much power to them and they could be actually setting the wrong standard for your own community.
So I, it's too much power to them for the most part. And then also too, It's, it's just hard to dictate. The only reason I would say if you are allowing them to pick their price point is if you're doing validation and you're in the validation section, maybe as an exercise, and I wouldn't have it continually, I would have it like, okay, you're our only, we're only doing this for the first three.
We'll let you pick X, Y, and z. We're gonna reevaluate at the end of three months, and then we're gonna see how much we actually made you, or how much we saved you and all these things. Because then they, they're gonna be more, it's gonna be more valuable for them if they say, Hey, it's only worth this much.
I'm only willing to pay this much. It could just be a slippery slope and just spiraling pricing that you're trying to catch. Maybe not even your ideal client if they've got that mindset, if that makes sense.
Murtaza Bambot: And, and real quick, I'll say that usually people do like, choose what you want, pricing as an accessibility option to help like disadvantaged communities or disadvantaged folks be able to get access.
But I will say is it, it removes the predictability of your revenue. You don't know how much you're gonna make each month, and because of that, it's kind of a detriment. And there's other ways like. Scholarships and like more structured discounts that would help those disadvantaged people more while also giving you that reliability and your revenue coming in.
So that's why, like I totally agree with Doc, is it, it feels nice in practice, but it actually hurts your business a little.
Doc Williams: I love that. I'm so glad you brought that up. I, I love giving away scholarships if you're and usually what I would even do with scholarships if I'm like, Hey, I would love to offer this to qualify, like, Maybe they're doing an assignment or they're doing something that's showing that they really want.
That, and they're not just looking for a bargain. And then we'll be like, yeah, this is the scholarship. We have a whole like, presentation. A lot of the programs I work with or communities for them to celebrate, Hey, I, I'm awarded this kind of scholarship to do X, Y, and Z. And then they're brought in. And then also too you know, allowing them to do testimonials and things like that.
To see this, this is actually going on with NBA Summer League. They have a program called Sports Business Classroom. It helps different ones that are trying to break into the front office to go and learn and learn the the cap, and basically learn all the stuff in the front office for kids that cannot afford it.
Chris Paul, he's a player for Phoenix Huntsville now. Washington. He got traded this week. Anyway, that's not the point. He has a foundation that he gives away 10 scholarships for kids every single year. So the value, and they say the value, the value is about $5,000. They pay for the full trip, all of those things.
So now people understand the value of the program. They understand how much it is, and they're seeing that it's a limited spot in what makes you qualified to be able to receive the, the scholarship.
Guest: But, but even, but even if you, if you offered such a contribution model for a free tier where you don't expect revenue anyways, then I would just be additional revenue.
Doc Williams: This is the thing I, I think it really depends on, depends on the structure of the business.
And there's a whole other way for communities that have free tiers. I think it's even a bigger conversation if you wanna do free tail tiers. The problem that I find is when people bake in free tiers first, before they even have their pricing structure, it screws up because then people are worrying about the conversion.
Tactic to bring 'em from the free tier to what's the percentage of them going into the paid. And then we're working on this huge funnel where if we worked on premium or we worked on a structure that would make it feasible or for your business to be profitable, going for that first, then sprinkle on free tier later on when we're, we're trying to do different levers.
It's just very complicated when you get started first. So, I, I always go premium. I always go with the paid route and then free tier later on because the funnel is crazy. The funnel has to be crazy for that .
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