Episode Details

Aseem Badshah started selling Socedo for $50 a month. Today, the average customer pays $1,000 a month. The path to better SaaS pricing started with casual hallway conversations after failed sales pitches. The right pricing strategy transformed SaaS customer lifetime value by 20x.

Aseem grew Socedo's SaaS pricing from $50/mo to $1,000/mo by asking prospects what they would pay before building features, pivoting from B2C to B2B after Techstars revealed the wrong target audience, and treating revenue as the single metric driving every decision. Building integrations with Marketo, HubSpot, and Salesforce doubled subscription pricing per customer.

Aseem Badshah is the co-founder of Socedo, a B2B social lead generation platform. Before Socedo, he ran a digital marketing agency for Fortune 500 brands. The company has raised $1.5 million and continues moving upstream into higher SaaS pricing tiers.

🔑 Key Lessons

• 💰 Ask for money to validate SaaS pricing early: Aseem wishes he had stopped the freemium approach sooner. When prospects say "that's cool," ask them to sign an SOW. Real commitment reveals whether you're solving a top-three pain point.
• 🎯 Listen in hallway conversations to find higher SaaS pricing opportunities: Aseem's biggest pricing jumps came from casual post-meeting exchanges where prospects revealed real priorities and budgets.
• 🤝 Do founder-led sales before hiring reps: Aseem sold Socedo himself for 18 months, learning the sales process. Founders close better because prospects listen to CEOs, and you learn which features drive larger deals.
• 📉 Pivot when customer development shows low willingness to pay: B2C social media managers would pay $10-20/mo. B2B prospects with revenue pressure leaned in at $1,000/mo. The right audience can 20x your SaaS customer lifetime value.
• 🛠️ Build integrations to multiply customer lifetime value: Connecting Socedo to Marketo, HubSpot, and Salesforce made leads more actionable and doubled or tripled average revenue per customer.

Chapters

• Introduction - building a product to scratch his own itch
• What Socedo does - B2B social lead generation
• Origin story - managing Microsoft's social media presence
• The fog of war - building for yourself instead of the market
• Techstars and forced customer development
• Distinguishing real interest from polite excitement
• Finding the first 10 customers
• SaaS pricing evolution from $50 to $1,000 per month
• Marketing channels - using Socedo to sell Socedo
• Founder-led sales for the first year and a half
• Key lesson - revenue is the one metric that matters
• Raising $1.5 million
• Expanding customer lifetime value through hallway conversations
• Lightning round

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/125
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email