UNDERPRICE INTENTIONALLY

“I think the tiered pricing is really helpful here. If any creators are unsure of what to price it at, you can think of tiered pricing as the market helping you decide. It was helpful for me in several of the products I launched to start really low at a point where many people got in real early. I have friends now who I met through Internet pipes who joined at $30, who have joined several events, who didn't even know there were events when they purchased it.”

“Honestly, you don't, which is why for most of my projects, I just have a time deadline, and that's it. And it's this constant fight between this pretty ambitious, probably crazy deadline. If I had another month, it would have been the same product. In fact, I think it could have been a worse product. That time constraint helped me stay focused.”

“A couple years ago, I said something along the lines of I finally felt financially secure, and it wasn't because of any number in a spreadsheet or a banking app. It was because I finally felt like I could build things. That was why I learned to code in the first place. You could wipe my audience and, yes, I would be sad. But I also would still feel just as, quote, rich because I feel like I can come up with an idea that I wanna see in the world and make it.”

“People don't get destroyed because they do something that's, like, so bad for any human. They get destroyed because whatever action they took was counter to the way that people interpreted them. So even at this dinner, we talked about MKBHD with his panels app and, like, is launching an app for screensavers all that bad? Absolutely not. If another creator did it, no one would care. It was just because it was counter to the way that people had interpreted him.”

“I just want a product to probably be underpriced so that when people buy it, especially in those early stages, they just feel awesome about their purchase. And by the way, there are marketing reasons for this too. Because then they're more likely to go and share it. But, genuinely, as a creator, I care about that from more of the psychological reputation perspective where people are just like, oh, I know that if Steph put something out there, it's hopefully going to surpass my expectations.”

“I intentionally call them projects, not products, but to create things that they just want to see exist in the world. Sometimes they make no money. Sometimes they make very little money. And sometimes they do make a surprising amount of money. But that velocity of being able to just say, I wanna create this, and maybe I'll keep working on it, but also maybe I won't, is what I've seen work for so many of these kind of indie makers.”

“Something that people do wrong sometimes, and I actually did this wrong with a bunch of my early projects, is I made a big launch out of something to start. And the problem with that is that it's really hard to see the signal from the noise around, are people paying attention? But in this case, what I had done is I've just kind of put it right at the end, which meant that someone had to stick with the podcast all the way through. And then there was probably a twenty second call out being like, hey, if you think this is interesting, go check it out here.”

“Let's actually talk through that slippery slope. It's like, oh, tweets about trends, and then people say they want it. So then you go and create a product about trends. And then because of that, you test events. And then because those go semi well, you expand them. Then you go, wow, this is going really well. It's now time to quit my job. Time to hire a community manager. Oh, no. Now this community manager costs more than I expected, so therefore I need to increase prices. Oh, now that prices have increased, less people are buying. You can see how that spirals.”

“A lot of people get that wrong. They hear that I sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of doing content right, and they think, oh, of course, you have over a 100,000 followers on Twitter. No. At that point, I had around 5,000 followers on Twitter, and it was actually the product that yielded attention that drove more followers. They think, let me build up the audience, and that'll yield customers for my product. But the things that have built my audience the most are actually these products.”