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How To Raise Prices (the Right Way) — Reid DeRamus, Substack
Description
On the podcast: whether or not to increase your price, how to execute if you do, and why price increases often impact growth more than retention.
Top Takeaways
💳 Should you raise your app’s prices at all? It’s one of the most impactful ways of increasing lifetime value and revenue so the answer is yes: you should definitely consider raising prices. But it’s a balancing act. How do you not sacrifice long-term growth for short-term gain?
🌟 Avoid customer backlash by reaffirming the value proposition. Asking people to pay more for the thing they’re already getting is a tough sell, so reaffirm your value proposition by simultaneously launching new or teasing upcoming features ****to avoid customer backlash.
💰 Look at your retention metrics to determine whether or not to raise prices. Above-average retention metrics might indicate that you’re leaving money on the table and should consider a price increase — but if they’re not healthy, focus on product and retention first.
📈 Price increases tend to affect acquisition more than retention. Strong price increase execution means less churn from existing subscribers, with a little more pressure on new user acquisition.
🏆 Add tiers to give users options and strategically raise prices. Bundle higher tiers with extra features or introduce lower tiers for your core user base.
About Reid DeRamus
👨💻 Growth PM at Substack, a newsletter publication platform that provides writers and creators with infrastructure, payment, analytics and design to publish their work and send to email subscribers.
💪 Reid helped launch and grow Hulu, Crunchyroll, and HBO Max, taking his learnings and starting a company called Yem that helped individuals and small teams build their own media empires. Yem was then acquired by Substack, where Reid is now a Growth PM.
💡 “I need to figure out the value that my existing subscribers are getting [and] make sure I'm reinforcing that. But I also need to be mindful of how it'll slowly expand from my core audience today, too, if I want to continue driving subscribers.”
👋 LinkedIn | X, formerly known as Twitter
Links & Resources
‣ Boosting Retention with Better Onboarding
‣ Improving Retention with Audience Surveys
‣ Connect with Reid at LinkedIn
‣ Reid on X, formerly known as Twitter
‣ Substack on X, formerly known as Twitter
Episode Highlights
[1:13] Price increase: Raising prices is a great way to boost customer lifetime value and revenue but executing it well is a balancing act — with tradeoffs.
[5:40] Consumer sentiment: Asking customers to pay more for the same product is a tough sell. Take a cue from the standard set by Netflix and Spotify by teasing changes and with marginal — not double — increases.
[9:26] Subscription 101: Substack is a great analogy for consumer subscription apps. Health metrics can be “too