AI 产品定价：来自 400+ 家公司与 50 家独角兽的启示 | Madhavan Ramanujam

Madhavan Ramanujam 2025-07-27

AI 产品定价：来自 400+ 家公司与 50 家独角兽的启示 | Madhavan Ramanujam

访谈实录

Madhavan Ramanujam： 优秀的创始人需要同时拿下市场份额和钱包份额。这不是二选一。你必须在这两方面都做得更好。

Lenny Rachitsky： 感觉如今每家公司都想成为 AI 公司。AI 定价有什么不同？

Madhavan Ramanujam： AI 领域的赢家需要从第一天起就掌握变现能力。如果你为客户带来了大量价值，却一开始就训练他们习惯每月 20 美元的预期，并且把自己的锚定在了低价位上，那你就有麻烦了。你构建的功能中，20% 决定了 80% 的支付意愿。但讽刺的是，那 20% 往往是最容易构建的部分。

Lenny Rachitsky： 你最想让创始人记住的最大教训是什么？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 如果我们用市场份额和钱包份额来做一个 2×2 矩阵来思考，你真正想要进入的那个象限是基于结果的定价模型（outcome-based pricing model），即右上角象限——那里你同时拥有高度的自主性和良好的归因能力。大约只有 5% 的公司真正处于基于结果的定价模型中。如果你想在 AI 中获胜，想办法进入那个象限。

Lenny Rachitsky： 你觉得现在那些热门的 IDE 创业公司，以后会不会遇到麻烦？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 其中一些，会的。我就不点名了。

嘉宾介绍

Lenny Rachitsky： 今天的嘉宾是 Madhavan Ramanujam。Madhavan 是我认识的人当中在定价和变现策略方面最聪明的人。作为 Simon-Kucher 的管理合伙人，他与超过 250 家公司合作过，其中包括 30 家独角兽企业，帮助他们确定如何定价、打包和增长产品。他还是定价领域著作《Monetizing Innovation》的作者。现在他带着一本新书回归了——一部续作，名为《Scaling Innovation》，教你如何架构你的企业以实现长期盈利增长，以及如何避免团队容易掉入的那些阻碍他们建立真正持久、可持续业务的常见陷阱。Bill Gurley 为这本书撰写了前言。我有机会读到了早期版本，非常喜欢。这是一本每位创始人都需要阅读的书。

（广告段落已跳过）

重返播客：新书《Scaling Innovation》

Lenny Rachitsky： Madhavan，非常感谢你来做客。欢迎来到播客。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 很高兴回来，Lenny。非常感谢你再次邀请我。

Lenny Rachitsky： 这是极其罕见的第二次上播客。你有一本新书即将出版。我这里有一本非常早期的版本。如果你在 YouTube 上看的话，这就是你寄给我的那本。大概 200 页。顺便问一下，这是你自己打印机上打出来的吗？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 是的，我觉得打完那个之后墨水就耗尽了。

Lenny Rachitsky： 感谢这份早期版本，非常棒。我们这次对话要做的，就是过一遍你在这本书中分享的一些最重要的教训，让大家了解你分享的许多内容，以及自从写完第一本书以来你学到的很多东西。

为什么写第二本书

Lenny Rachitsky： 让我从这个问题开始：你为什么决定再写一本书？《Scaling Innovation》——这本新书的名字——和《Monetizing Innovation》——第一本书的名字——之间有什么区别？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 《Monetizing Innovation》其实是我们八年前写的。时间过得真快。那本书的核心论点是：如何构建不只是酷、而且人们真正需要、看重并愿意为之付费的产品？我觉得那本书有了自己的生命力。这些年里，创业者们不断向我们提出另一个问题：“嘿，我们做出了一个很棒的产品，我们知道有支付意愿，但我们如何建立一个伟大的企业？我们如何规模化？“而残酷的真相是，即使你有一个很棒的产品，你可能仍然找不到快速增长和盈利增长的方式。所以我们写了《Scaling Innovation》，试图解决这个难题。

你可以把它看作《Monetizing Innovation》的续作。《Monetizing Innovation》讲的是如何构建伟大的产品；《Scaling Innovation》讲的是如何构建伟大的企业。写一本书……做这件事需要有一个目的。对我来说，写书的理由是根据我所知的东西回馈给创始人。写书很难，写一本好书更难。和《Monetizing Innovation》一样，《Scaling Innovation》不是营销噱头。它里面装满了真正可操作的内容，你周一早上就能开始实施。我们写这本书是为了回馈我们所知道的一点东西，帮助企业实现规模化，并朝着盈利增长的方向架构自己。

核心论点

Lenny Rachitsky： 我特别喜欢像你这样的人——花了几十年的时间，从真实的一手经验中反复学习，然后把所有这些东西分享给大家。这是最……学习ROI最高的方式，就是让你做所有这些工作、学到所有这些东西，然后你把答案分享给我们。所以我特别喜欢这类书。

如果要把这本书的核心论点浓缩成一个简单的想法，好让我们能把它种在创业者的脑子里，你会怎么说？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 如果要我浓缩这本书的核心论点，基本上就是：如果你想建立一个持久的业务，你需要能够朝着盈利增长的方向进行架构。这意味着你需要掌握两个引擎：市场份额（market share）和钱包份额（wallet share）。

这听起来很简单，但实际上相当复杂。因为如果拆开来看，要获取市场份额和钱包份额，你需要在获客、变现和留存三个方面都做得好——也就是获取客户、从他们身上赚到初始收入，同时还要持续地赚钱，并让你的客户真正去推荐更多客户。

事实上，很多公司采用的是单一引擎策略。他们只关注这两个主题中的一个，基本忽略了另一个。这会导致各种各样的问题。你会看到一些公司说”不惜一切代价增长，把变现往后推”；你会看到一些人说”我要尽早变现”，但他们可能因此错失获客机会；还有一些人过于专注于一小群忠实客户，既没有好好变现，也没有在真正获客。

优秀的创始人需要同时驾驭市场份额和钱包份额。这不是一个选择题。你需要在两个方面都不断提升。但这并不意味着你在所有时间点都要在市场份额和钱包份额上投入同等的精力，而是意味着你对这两个主题投入同等的注意力，深思熟虑地权衡取舍，并问自己：“我怎样才能把这两个主题放在一起看，从而朝着盈利增长的方向架构？“这就是这本书的核心论点。

我们实际上展示了九种策略，帮助企业朝着盈利增长的方向进行架构。每一章的结尾都会说明这个特定策略如何规避单一引擎问题，帮助你同时关注市场份额和钱包份额。书中还有CEO和领导层应该反思的问题，帮助他们在架构盈利增长时判断自己是否走在正确的轨道上。打个比方，如果你在驾驶一架飞机，你不会想只用一个引擎飞行。那为什么在经营企业时要这样做呢？

创业者常见的陷阱

Lenny Rachitsky： 好的。我觉得很多创业者或正在考虑创业的人并不会觉得自己属于某一个阵营。直觉上你不会说：“哦，当然，我们就一直只关注增长，别的都不重要。”

你提到了一些创业者会掉进去的陷阱，能不能再谈谈那些常见的陷阱，让人们能对照自己，觉得”糟糕，我好像就是这么干的”？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 让我们来拆解一下与这些原型相关的陷阱。如果你是颠覆者（disruptor）原型，你可能会掉进两个陷阱之一。第一个是：你可能成功着陆了，但无法扩展。也就是说，在你急于获客的过程中，你可能以很低的价格给了太多东西，把家底都送出去了，但没有什么可以用来扩展。这是你最可能掉进的第一个陷阱。

第二个陷阱是：赢得的市场份额和真正留住的市场份额是不同的。如果你过度专注获客，你实际上只是在不断获取越来越多的客户，但没有花足够的时间与已经获取的客户在一起——留住他们、向上销售、让他们满意等等。所以你可能掉进这个陷阱。

如果你是赚钱者（moneymaker），你会掉进两个陷阱之一。第一个是：你可能会对客户锱铢必较、竭泽而渔。因为你专注于变现，你可能会设计出非常复杂的定价模型——不同层级、隐藏费用、各种收费项目，让人感觉你只是在想方设法地从客户身上一分一毫地榨取。

赚钱者会掉进的第二个陷阱是价格溢价悖论（price premium paradox）：你以为高价代表价值，但你的价格高到实际上开始伤害获客，对大多数人来说就变得不相关了。

如果你是社区建设者（community builder），你会掉进两个常见的陷阱。第一个是：你过于专注于基本盘，反而错过了前沿——也就是说你过于专注忠实客户群，忘记了吸引不同类型的客户，你没有在获客。

社区建设者会掉进的第二个陷阱是：你把客户训练成了”花更少的钱期待更多”。因为你急于满足忠实客户群，你开始给他们越来越多的东西，把你最好的客户训练成了用更少的钱期待更多。

这六个陷阱在这三种原型中非常常见。成为一个盈利增长架构师意味着你要规避这些陷阱。换句话说，你需要同时扮演颠覆者、赚钱者和社区建设者。关键是你如何拥有那种原型和正确的策略来经营你的业务？

美观简洁的定价策略

Lenny Rachitsky： 好的。这些是你不应该做的。你提到有九种策略来实际推进定价、变现、规模化等方面的工作。能不能分享几个策略，两三个，也许是你最喜欢的？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 当然。我来展开几个策略。也许第一个要讲的是我们所说的”美观简洁的定价”（beautifully simple pricing）。在你的早期阶段，拥有一个非常简洁的定价策略远比什么都重要，它不应该在销售对话中制造太多摩擦。我的建议是，你周一早上回去可以做的一个测试：拿一些早期的潜在客户或现有客户，让他们把你的定价策略复述给你听——如果他们要替你推销，他们会怎么描述你的定价策略？如果他们无法用简单的方式把它情境化并解释清楚，那你就没有一个简洁的定价策略。就是这么简单。

拥有简洁的定价策略还意味着你的定价需要能够讲述一个价值故事——也就是说，你需要根据你实际带来的价值来为你的价格提供情境。

这里有一个很好的例子是 Superhuman。他们刚开始的时候，实际上是在和免费的电子邮件产品竞争，同时推出一种高端的邮件体验。你该怎么为这个定价？我觉得 Superhuman 团队的 Rahul 等人做得相当不错。他们推出了一个每月30美元的价格点，非常简洁。但他们讲述故事的方式是：你每天花一美元，就能在每周找回四个小时的生产力，这样一来这个定价就不显得离谱了。就好比一周买一杯拿铁的价格，就能找回四个小时。我为什么不这样做呢，对吧？

定价的情境化和价值故事并不只适用于高端产品。再举一个例子，赛百味（Subway）的5美元一英尺三明治，就是用定价讲述故事的另一种方式——只要5美元，你就能获得很多价值。所以，美观简洁的定价（beautifully simple pricing）的真正含义是：制定一个客户一看就懂的简洁定价策略，同时你的定价本身就在讲述一个价值故事，说明客户如何真正获得这些价值。在书中，我们提供了一个包含10个要点的清单，帮助你确保自己的定价是美观简洁的。

Lenny Rachitsky： 在了解这些策略的过程中，你的建议是尽可能多地尝试所有策略，还是选择几个适合自己的，甚至一个就够了？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 一共有九种策略。我们将它们分为两类：适用于创业阶段的策略——也就是刚起步时——以及适用于规模化阶段的策略。创业阶段有四种策略需要执行，规模化阶段有五种，所以是完全可以管理的。我认为创业阶段的四种都适用，规模化阶段的五种也都适用，但并不意味着你需要从第一天起就同时关注九件事。

Lenny Rachitsky： 所以第一个是针对创业阶段的？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 对，美观简洁的定价是创业阶段的策略。没错。那么在规模化阶段，我认为最重要的策略之一就是掌握谈判技巧，真正擅长应对谈判，尤其是在 B2B 场景下。具体该怎么做呢？因为你需要能够谈论价值，并根据这些对话为你的价格提供情境。

掌握谈判技巧

要掌握谈判，归结起来有三件事：精通让与索取（gives and gets），擅长价值销售（value selling），以及掌握正确的谈判策略。我们逐一展开。

让与索取

让与索取为什么重要？因为在谈判中，通常你在不断让步——你在给予让步，对方在不断要求。如果你没有从对方那里获得任何回报，你实际上是在向对方传递一个信号：他们可以持续压价，而你需要不断让步。但如果你在给予的同时要求一些东西作为交换，你就在谈判中引入了真实的分量，因为你的让步对你来说确实意味着什么，所以你要求相应的回报。这会让谈判变得有效得多。

在书中，我们讨论了 B2B 场景下排名前十的索取（gets）和 B2C 场景下排名前十的索取。在 B2B 场景中，我最喜欢的一种索取是我所说的价值审计（value audit）。具体含义是：如果你要给予一个让步，就要求一次价值审计作为交换——每六个月，客户内部的一个团队会被委托对你的产品进行价值评估，使其成为客户的商业案例，你与他们共同完成，明确产品实际创造了多少价值。这非常有效，因为如果客户真的参与进来，你就获得了极大的未来重新定价谈判的筹码，因为这是他们自己的商业案例，由他们在内部推动，而且你实际上让你的产品变得非常有粘性。所以这是一种看起来无害的索取，但对未来的谈判可能非常有力。所以，精通——

Lenny Rachitsky： 这真的很聪明。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 谢谢。精通让与索取确实非常关键。

价值销售

掌握谈判的第二件事是擅长价值销售。要擅长价值销售，你需要做三件事：第一，创造需求；第二，创造确认循环（affirmation loops）；第三，构建一个好的 ROI 模型。我们逐一讨论。创造需求非常重要，因为许多创始人出现在客户面前时，试图理解客户的需求是什么。这是一种思路。但你需要能够创造需求，而不仅仅是发现需求。

比如，假设你是一个营销自动化 AI 产品，你节省了原本需要三周时间才能完成的工作——把数据汇总到营销经理可以分析的仪表盘中。你创造需求的方式是询问现有流程，然后说：“那么，据我所知，所有这些工作实际上需要你们花三周时间把数据整理好，才能让营销经理看到有意义的仪表盘并采取行动。如果这一切可以瞬间获得呢？“看，你刚刚就创造了一个需求。所以关键在于以创造需求的思维方式去面对客户，而不是仅仅去发现需求。

第二件事是创造确认循环。这一点非常重要。我见过很多创始人进入谈判后，急于介绍自己的产品，不停地讲，却没有任何来自对方的确认。你需要适时暂停，创造确认循环，比如问一些这样的问题：“好的，到目前为止你已经了解了这些功能。这些在你的公司中会怎么落地？你觉得有价值吗？这个仪表盘你最喜欢哪里？”

当你提出这些问题，客户开始复述他们在你的产品中看到的价值时，你就在创造确认循环。当你最终开始销售产品时，这些循环会变得极其有用。因为如果客户已经认同了产品所创造的价值，你也能进行更顺畅的商业讨论。

第三件事是构建一个好的 ROI 模型。我看到很多创始人先做一个 POC（概念验证），POC 结束后再拿出一个 ROI 模型来为自己的价格辩护。这时你已经输了。没有人会相信你刚刚炮制出来的 ROI 模型，每个人都会质疑你的假设。

构建 ROI 模型的正确方式是从第一天起就与客户共同创建——也就是说，对假设和输入达成共识并进行验证。比如：“你们这个流程目前需要多长时间？有多少工程师参与？“你提出的问题都应是 ROI 模型的输入项。如果你完成了这个过程，并且客户认同了所有的输入，他们就很难对 ROI 模型的输出提出异议。所以，POC 应当被界定为：POC 的目的是构建商业案例，我们将与客户共同创建 ROI 模型，而不是仅仅做技术和产品功能测试，然后你再拿出一个 ROI 模型。

ROI 模型的三个关键维度

在构建 ROI 模型时，有许多维度可以关注，但有三个非常关键。第一个是：基于客户正在追踪的 KPI 和指标，你实际带来了哪些增量收益？这可以是增量收入、客户流失率的降低等——这些都是你的产品为客户的业务线带来的直接、有形、清晰的影响。

第二个维度是成本节约。你是否减少了人员编制？是否降低了许可证费用？有哪些有形的成本节约？

第三个维度，也是最常被忽视的，是机会成本。比如，如果你为一个团队节省了10个小时，他们实际上会用这10个小时做什么？这也是可以量化的。当你把这三个方面整合在一起，你就构建出了一个完善的 ROI 模型，可以在价值销售中用来支撑合理的价格。

掌握谈判的策略

我们之前谈到了掌握谈判的三个步骤。第一个是让与索取（gives and gets），第二个是提升价值销售（value selling）的能力，第三个则是真正提升谈判技巧，以及你实际该使用哪些策略。我们发现有几个策略非常有效。

Madhavan Ramanujam：

第一个策略是带着选项上谈判桌。许多创始人急于拿出一个产品和一个价格，然后说：“好，这个产品十万，这就是我们要卖的。“不可避免地，对话的焦点会立刻集中在价格上，你就只能围绕价格来谈。

但如果你在桌上摆出选项，比如好、更好、最好三个档次——如果你的产品是十万，再摆出一个二十万和一个三十万的选项——那你就不再只谈价格，而是在谈价值。因为如果你的客户对预算比较敏感，他们会说：“嘿，我喜欢十万这个价位，但我其实更喜欢二十万产品中的那些功能。“那你接下来的问题就是：你具体喜欢哪些功能？为什么这些功能对你有益？这样你就把对话重新拉回到价值上，而不是仅仅围绕价格。我们发现，通过这种方式展开对话，最终达成的结果远远好于只展示一个产品和一个价格。

用定价模型创造选项

展示选项不一定非得是不同的产品，甚至可以是定价模型的选择。我可能给一个大家周一早上就能试的简单技巧。我之前跟一位创始人聊天，他说：“嘿，我觉得预算大概在十万左右，这是我从关键利益相关者那里了解到的，但我的产品确实带来了惊人的价值，这个产品我甚至可以收五十万，但我没有勇气去要五十万的价格，因为我大概知道预算就是十万。我该怎么办？“对于这类情况，实际上应该在定价模型中带着选项上桌。

所以我们指导他这样去谈：十万起步，加上对你带来的增量价值收取10%，或者一口价五十万。这在谈判中其实是一个非常好的局面。因为如果对方对价格敏感，他们的注意力会集中在十万上——这是一个很低的入门费用。但对话会自然而然地转向：“那个10%是什么意思？怎么衡量价值？“这是一个非常好的对话，因为现在你们讨论的是”你如何创造价值？价值从哪里产生？你拿多少份额？”

然后你会看到两种情况之一。要么客户说：“太好了，你愿意共担风险，我们就选十万加10%的方案”；要么在80%的情况下，作为买方你可能想避免基于结果的定价模型（outcome-based pricing model），但此时你并不会死盯着五十万这个数字。买方支付的实际上是为确定性付出的溢价。因为桌面上有了十万的选项，没人会再去纠结五十万，而你也终于有勇气把五十万摆出来了。在这个具体案例中，五十万最终谈到了四十万，他们的成交额比原来的预期翻了四倍。所以在谈判时桌上有选项是至关重要的。

锚定与递减让步

我们在书中还展示了一些战术，比如锚定很重要——如果你从高价位起手，最终落点也会更高。还有递减让步——你怎么给出让步？最差的谈判者会先给一个小让步，然后对方一要求就再多给一点……你可能先给个5%的折扣，采购的人说：“不够。""好，我再多给10%。""还不够。""我给15%。“你在向对方传递什么信号？你基本上是在暗示：我可以一直被压价，你可以拿到更多折扣。

最优秀的谈判者会递减让步。他们会说：“我可以给你15%。""好的，我还需要更多。""我再加5%。""我需要更多。""我再加2%。“这样你就在自动向对方传递一个信号：谈判实际上快要结束了。所以如何递减让步同样非常重要。

当你把这三件事综合在一起——如果你掌握了让与索取（gives and gets），提升了价值销售（value selling）的能力，并且使用了正确的谈判策略——你就能从每一笔交易中提取全部价值。这在你处于扩张阶段时尤为重要。

Lenny Rachitsky： 这真是非常好的建议。我很喜欢这只是你书中的一个小章节，但它可能决定你公司的成败。有趣的是，在一本关于 Scaling Innovation 和公司增长的书里，你用了一整章来谈谈判。这里的假设是不是你的定价和变现很大程度上受制于你谈判的好坏，因为这会改变你整个定价结构和收入水平？这就是你在这部分投入这么多篇幅的原因吗？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 正是如此。我的意思是，在 B2B 场景中，你可以设定任何你想要的定价，设计出很棒的定价模型。但至少在目前，依然是一个人在跟另一个人对话、进行谈判。如果你无法把你放在桌面上的东西放到具体情境中去，不懂得围绕价值来谈判，不懂得为你的价格赋予语境，你就会在桌上留下很多钱。

所以对我们来说，谈判本身就是另一个变现（monetization）话题——你要把它看作是从每一笔交易中提取全部价值。这不仅仅是谈判技巧，比如”把老板留在家里不要出现”之类的谈判套路，而是植根于价值销售（value selling）、让与索取（gives and gets），聚焦于从每一笔交易中提取全部价值的真正谈判策略。

Lenny Rachitsky： 太有用了。抛出一个更高的第三选项，比如五十万，这个想法真的很有意思。因为我通常听到的建议是：“直接报出你以前不敢报的两倍价格……”直接抛出来碰碰运气，但开口说”那五万怎么样？“真的很吓人。而这个方法则是一种没那么可怕的方式。“好的，我们还有这个五十万的选项，这是你能得到的。“然后他们可能会说：“哦，这正是我们想要的。“你就心想：“哇，居然奏效了。”

Madhavan Ramanujam： 没错，这是一个获取勇气的非常简单的技巧。

Lenny Rachitsky： 太酷了。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 放一个好的价格点上去。

Lenny Rachitsky： 哇，太棒了。这简直是金玉良言中的金玉良言。好的，你有九个策略，我们已经讨论了两个。不用深入展开，但能不能再列举几个，让大家知道还有哪些可以学习的？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 当然。我们讨论了如何先落地再扩展（land and expand），也就是如何设计你最好的免费产品，让你既能落地，同时也能扩展。我们还讨论了如何制定正确的打包策略、如何在流失发生之前就阻止它、如何有效地涨价。因为在你的扩张旅程中，某个阶段你必然需要提高价格，但如何以一种有意义的方式来做到这一点？

我们涵盖了各种适用于创业阶段和扩张阶段的策略。但这些策略组合在一起，都能帮助你清晰地表达并朝着盈利增长去架构。

Lenny Rachitsky： 太好了。好的，我们来聊聊 AI 吧。你的书很大一部分在讲 AI 定价与传统定价策略有多么不同。感觉现在每家公司都想成为一家 AI 公司，所以我认为这会适用于很多人。AI 定价到底有什么不同？

AI 定价为何与众不同

Madhavan Ramanujam： AI 定价与之前那批公司截然不同。为什么会这样？因为 AI 创始人需要从非常早期——比如种子轮甚至更早的阶段——就开始解决变现问题，而这很可能不是之前那批 SaaS 公司的重点。原因有两方面。

第一，首次出现了需要应对的成本动态（cost dynamics）。所以你必须从第一天起就思考变现问题。但还有一个更关键的原因——价值捕获（value capture）。因为 AI 产品确实在创造大量价值，如果你不从第一天起就进行捕获，那你实际上是在训练客户用更少的钱期待更多的东西。

举个例子。如果你在做一个切入劳动力预算（labor budget）的代理式 AI（agentic AI）产品，劳动力预算是软件预算的十倍。如果你照搬所有旧的方法论，那你从一开始就在变现不足，并且在训练客户用更少的钱期待更多的东西。那么，你如何建立一套基础模型，让你真正能够捕获自己创造的价值？

归因问题与定价权

为什么这件事变得如此关键？因为借助 AI，创始人终于可以真正解决归因问题（attribution problem）。在之前的时期……比如拿 Slack 来说，你可以说生产率提高了、效率提升了，但你无法衡量它、监测它、将其归因于 Slack。这大概就是他们采用按席位定价模式的原因。

但在如今的情况下，你会看到有公司说：“在一家财富 100 强公司，我能够将吞吐量提升 10%，将废品率降低 5%。“当你进入这种 AI 正在创造核心价值、且可以归因于 AI 的情境时，你就获得了极大的定价权（pricing power）。

所以从 AI 创始人那里，我们经常听到两个问题。第一，“我该如何设定正确的定价模型？“——也就是”我该怎么收费？“——这变得比收多少钱重要得多。因为底层商业模式已经改变了。我们已经从”为使用权限付费”（pay for access）的软件模式，转向”为交付的工作成果付费”（pay for work delivered）。变现模型成了关键。这是人们问我们的第一个问题。

第二个问题是，“我该如何应对概念验证（POC）和早期的商业讨论？“因为另一边的买家也想在参与商业讨论之前看到价值。这两个话题变得非常关键，我们在书中展示了很多相关内容。

Lenny Rachitsky： 我们来聊聊概念验证（POC）这个话题吧，我觉得这是很多人都在应对的问题。然后我想聊聊你书里的那个二乘二矩阵，我把它调出来。先聊概念验证（POC）。

重新定义概念验证（POC）

Madhavan Ramanujam： 谈到概念验证（POC），很多创始人把它理解成对技术功能的验证，验证产品在客户环境中是否真正运行。他们设定的预期是：“我们把产品放进去，看看它是不是真的能用。“他们可能会问：“概念验证（POC）到底该不该收费？“我们稍后会展开讨论该不该收的问题。

但这其实是一种完全错误的框架方式。概念验证（POC）应该被定义为：它的全部目的就是创建一个商业案例（business case），到此为止，没有别的。它不是为了展示产品功能在客户环境中的适配性或集成能力。所有那些东西都是商业案例的副产品。

如果你这样来定义，你可以说：“看，这是一个为期 30 天的试点，目的是与客户用户共同创建 ROI 模型，并建立商业案例。如果 30 天结束时我们基于商业案例看到了价值，我们可以进入商业讨论。“这样你实际上还没有谈到你的价格。你只专注于与客户共同创建商业案例。而基于商业案例，你可以制定出合理的商业协议。如果他们看到了价值，他们会为此付费。要以这种方式来思考概念验证（POC）。

我经常被问到的问题是：“概念验证（POC）该不该收费？“答案是应该，但要聪明地收。我们先说为什么必须收费。收费的原因在于，你可以开始区分只是凑热闹的人（tire kickers）和真正的买家。它变成了一种线索甄别机制（lead qualification mechanism）。如果没有这个门槛，你会吸引来所有那些对 AI 仅仅出于好奇的人。他们只是想看看它能不能用，会说”好啊，我来做个概念验证（POC）“，然后拖你 30 天、60 天、90 天，消耗大量资源，最后根本不买。你完全浪费了自己的时间。时间就是生命。所以给概念验证（POC）加上一个价格标签，表明双方都是认真的，你应该收费。

如何聪明地为概念验证（POC）定价

但你具体怎么收？你需要聪明地收费。这意味着你要确保概念验证（POC）的定价不反映你实际的商业合同。因为假设你只是说这是一个一万美元的 30 天试点概念验证（POC）。如果你不说明这和商业讨论不是一回事，你就设下了一个锚点——客户会想，哦，概念验证（POC）行得通的话，那就是一年 12 万美元的合同。所以你必须明确：这一万美元只是用来建立商业案例的。商业讨论会在那之后进行，它不代表最终商业协议的价格。

但对方买家可能仍然会逼你：“说得好，但我需要一个价格或预算，否则我不会推进。“有两种方法可以化解这类问题。第一种方法是将价格与价值挂钩来提供语境。比如在被逼问价格时，你可以说：“对于像您这样的客户，我们在类似场景下至少能释放 1000 万美元的价值。而我们的定价……ROI 是一到十倍。”

你实际上说了你需要 100 万美元才能启动，但你并没有直接说出来。你只是说：“价值是 1000 万，我取其中的十分之一作为回报。“所以你给了买家一个暗示，但你以一种合理的方式来表达——一到十倍的 ROI，对吧？这是第一种方法。

化解预算追问的两种策略

他们可能还是会说：“说得对，但我需要一个预算。“这时候，不要直接给他们一个预算数字说”可能是 20 万的方案”——千万别这么做。这是你能做的最糟糕的事。给他们一个区间。你可以说类似这样的话：“最终的定价会在 50 万到 100 万之间。然后基于我们与您共同创建的商业案例，我们可以在那个区间内选定一个能体现我们所带来价值的价位。“你给出的是预算区间，对吧？这是做概念验证（POC）的另一种方法。

所以你如何经营早期成果，选择谁作为早期客户——在快速、大规模地构建 AI 公司时，这一点至关重要，因为它实际上决定了你未来发展的命运。挑选这些早期成果非常非常关键。要有认真的买家，做好线索甄别，建立正确的概念验证（POC）流程，并且——坦率地说——不要仅仅把概念验证（POC）看作是验证你的产品是否有效、是否交付价值，它更是一个绝佳的商业”测试与学习”实验机会，好好享受这个过程，看看你能带来什么价值，以及你能实际捕获其中的多少份额。

Lenny Rachitsky： 所以这里的核心要点是，对于 AI 公司来说，你不能再先增长、以后再考虑变现了。你的建议是——你一开始怎么定价，最终就会怎么定价，而且很容易变现不足，因为人们没有意识到他们现在是在帮助客户节省实际的人力开支，而不仅仅是提供一套让人稍微高效一点的 SaaS 软件。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 完全同意。我坚信 AI 领域的赢家必须掌握变现能力，而且必须从第一天就开始掌握。当我们与早期创业者交流时，这是一个让很多人夜不能寐的话题，但这也正是我们写 Scaling Innovation 和其他资料的原因——让他们有勇气从第一天起就正确地思考定价问题。对 AI 公司来说，这一点已经变得非常关键。

Lenny Rachitsky： 你觉得那些热门的 IDE 创业公司——我就不点名了——你觉得它们变现不足吗？它们以后会不会陷入麻烦？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 有一些肯定是的。我认为它们可能会在这方面遇到瓶颈，因为它们可能展示出很高的收入增长，但那是持久的收入吗？人们真的会留下来吗？会不会有大量流失？营销上的盈利增长涉及很多方面——不仅仅是快速增长，还要有利可图地增长，拥有持久的业务。所以有些公司确实如此，虽然不点名。但正因如此，深思熟虑地对待市场份额和钱包份额才如此重要。

低价锚定的风险

Lenny Rachitsky： 这两个概念是不同的。我想你在这里说的是，有些公司的留存可能撑不住。但另一方面，它们确实很便宜——每月 20 美元就能让你的工程师效率可能提升 10 倍，这交易是不是太划算了？你觉得它们当初应该定高得多吗？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 当然。如果你为客户带来了大量价值，却从一开始训练客户预期每月 20 美元的价格，把自己锚定在低价位——我认为确实有公司这么做了。然后它们试图通过推出更复杂、价格更高得多的产品来扭转局面。这是摆脱那种困境的一种方式。

所以这其实是在获取更多客户和同时赚钱之间的权衡。这正是那本书的核心主题——市场份额和钱包份额，以及如何同时主导这两者。如果它们对两者都有深思熟虑的规划，不仅有一个扩大市场份额的愿景，还有一个明确的落地和扩展策略来提升钱包份额，那么这些策略对这些公司来说可能是奏效的。如果你只是抛出一个 20 美元的产品，指望快速扩大市场份额，那你就麻烦了。

定价模型矩阵：归因与自主性

Lenny Rachitsky： 好。这恰好引出了这个矩阵图，它更深入地探讨了这个问题。告诉大家不该做什么很容易，但你还要告诉大家该怎么做。现在我要在我的屏幕上调出你书中的这个矩阵图。如果你在看 YouTube，就能看到它。

来谈谈这个吧。这本质上是如何找到最佳定价模型以及你在哪里拥有最大定价权。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 谈到 AI 公司和变现模型时，我们经常被问到这样的问题：“我应该采用用量计费吗？应该基于结果吗？应该是副驾驶模式吗？我该怎么思考我的定价模型？“所以我们提出了这个框架——一个相对简单、直观，但非常强大的框架。

这里有两个轴。一个是归因（attribution），另一个是自主性（autonomy）。当你的归因程度高、自主性程度高时，你就拥有高的定价权——我们稍后再回来详细讨论这一点。

先看左下角第一个象限。这个象限里你的归因程度低、自主性程度也低。在这种情况下，最适合的定价原型是按席位（seat-based）或订阅模型，因为你也没什么别的选择——你无法将大量价值归因到你所提供的东西上，而且你处于副驾驶模式，不是自主模式，所以按席位定价是合理的。

但如果你处于那个象限，立刻要思考的是：你如何实际构建更强的归因能力，向右移动，从而获得更大的定价权？看右下角的象限，那些就是已经做到这一点的公司。它们能够证明更多归因到它们所提供的价值上，但仍然没有处于完全自主的模式——也就是说仍然有人类参与其中。

以 Cursor 为例，它确实提升了生产力，能够缩短编码时间，归因是清晰的，但它仍然是副驾驶模式。在这种情况下，混合定价模型是最佳选择——你仍然为副驾驶类用例保留一个按席位的模型，但同时也叠加一个消费模型，实际上就是说有一定数量的 AI 额度或 token 可以体现用量方面的计费。所以如果你用得越多，在消费层面就付得越多。混合模型在这里是适用的。

再看左上角象限，这些产品自主性很强但归因能力较弱。这些大多是后端或基础设施类产品，对企业的运营至关重要，可以自主运行，但并不直接影响企业追踪的关键绩效指标（KPI），因此无法有效证明归因。在这种情况下，你需要采用按用量付费（pay-for-what-you-consume）的用量计费模型。按席位计费不合理，因为它是自主的——没有人类参与其中。但正因如此你才采用用量计费模型，即用得越多，收费越高。使用量成为了你所带来价值的代理指标。

黄金象限：基于结果的定价

你真正想进入的是黄金象限，也就是右上角。那就是基于结果的定价模型（outcome-based pricing model），兼具高度的自主性和高度的归因能力。我认为这正是 AI 可以真正施展魔力之处。这意味着你不仅是在为交付的工作成果付费，而且是为由 AI 全程无人类参与所交付的工作成果付费。这就更接近于一种基于结果的定价模型。

一个经典案例是 Intercom 的 Fin 产品。他们的做法是根据 AI 解决率来收费。如果 AI 能完全独立地解决一个工单，无需人类介入，他们就收费；如果需要人工干预，则不收费。所以他们的模式更偏向基于结果的定价。又比如 ChargeFlow 这样的公司，对于他们能够成功追回的拒付金额，最高收取 25% 的费用，因为这些是你通过 AI 带来的实实在在的成本节约。这种情况下归因能力极强，自主性极高，因此可以逐步转向基于结果的定价模型。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 纵观 AI 目前的状态——截至录制本期播客的今天——最主流的模式是混合定价模型。这其实也在意料之中，因为此前的 SaaS 经典打法通常是基于席位的模型，但现在它们都已至少转向混合模式，以纳入 AI 额度和用量等因素。截至目前，大概只有大约 5% 的公司采用了真正意义上的基于结果的定价模型。但这些公司中，最优秀的一些能够捕获它们实际创造的 25% 到 50% 的价值。

在经典 SaaS 时代，我们常说如果你能收取价值的 10% 到 20%，那就已经非常好了。但在 AI 领域，你实际上可以收取 25% 到 50%，因为它是自主运行的，由 AI 完成，没有人类参与其中。你正在为企业指标创造增量价值，你正在产生硬性成本节约，还有机会成本——这一切都可以合理论证。归因是清晰的。所以你确实可以拿走你所带来的价值的 25% 到 50%。

许多基准测试和研究都表明——这也是我个人的信念——在未来三年内，这个 5% 的比例将增长到 25%。这意味着，如果你想在 AI 时代获胜，就要想办法进入那个象限，因为那才是黄金象限。如果你能真正做到基于结果定价，你就实现了并解锁了巨大的价值。

Lenny Rachitsky： 哇。好的，让我再暂停一下。这太精彩了。Madhavan，非常感谢。我很喜欢你花了数年、数十年研究这些东西，然后来到这里，把我们该做的事情的答案一股脑告诉我们。这真的太棒了。

顺便说一下，对于没有在 YouTube 上看视频的朋友——你在黄金象限、基于结果定价那个位置放的公司是 Sierra、Fin 和 ChargeFlow。Sierra 和 Fin 的创始人很快也会上我们的播客，到时候我们会和他们深入讨论这些话题。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 太好了。

Lenny Rachitsky： 那么使用这个 2×2 矩阵的方法是不是先确定你的模型？比如说，“好吧，我是 Cursor，我进入这个象限”？还是说，“我无论如何都要走向基于结果的定价，那才是我的目标”？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 这是个很好的问题。首先，要根据你目前的实际情况来确定适合你的原型。我认为这是最重要的。如果你急于转向基于结果的定价模型却无法证明归因，你会失败的。所以要确定基于你当下所做的事情哪种原型是正确的，但同时也要用这个 2×2 矩阵来思考：“我如何描绘一幅通往基于结果定价的愿景？我能否接近那个目标？或者我能否完全采用基于结果的模型？我如何演进到那一步？”

这意味着——我如何在产品中构建能够展示归因的功能，如何构建更多代理式 AI 的能力来将人类从流程中移除、实现更高的自主性，并且深思熟虑地规划你的愿景和战略，从而让自己朝着基于结果的定价模型方向演进。因此，当你思考如何提升归因能力时，首先要了解客户的关键绩效指标（KPI）是什么，他们如何追踪业务表现，你能否影响这些指标，能否在产品中将这些产品化，以展示你正在对这些 KPI 产生积极影响？能否构建仪表板来展示价值归因？能否持续进行我们之前讨论的价值审计（value audit），来展示你正在带来大量价值，并且这些价值可以归因于你？如何创建这类归因机制变得至关重要，同时还要通过构建更多代理式 AI 能力来实现基于自主运行的形态。

所以，选择正确的原型，并规划一条尽可能接近基于结果的定价模型的路径——这就是我建议使用这个 2×2 矩阵的方式。你实际上可以在某些行业中看到这种趋势正在发生。以编程这个整体品类为例——早期 GitHub 的时代，大家都从按席位定价（seat-based pricing）开始，现在已经随着 Cursor 等产品转向了混合定价模型，但自然的演进方向将是更加接近基于结果的定价模型——届时 AI 代理可能可以同时完成所有编码工作、调试工作，你几乎就像是在雇用一个 AI 开发者或 AI QA 人员。那就更接近基于结果的模型了，因为归因清晰且高度自主。所以选择正确的原型，然后找到你的演进路径，是解读这个 2×2 矩阵的关键方式。

Lenny Rachitsky： 这就解释了为什么所有人都在推出代理。钱就在那里——这就是你告诉我们的。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 是啊。这将是《黑客帝国》的时代。太多的代理了。

Lenny Rachitsky： 到处都是 Agent Smith。他们的结局可不怎么样。

以 Canva 为例：如何提升定价权

Lenny Rachitsky： 所以我听到的是，如果我是 Canva……在你的模型中 Canva 处于右下角，采用混合定价模型——有基础费用加消费费用。如果你在帮助 Canva，你会做什么？你会问：你能构建什么来创造更高的自主性，打造一个自主版本的 Canva？并不是说你必须这样做——只是如果你能在这方面找到突破，你就会拥有更强的定价权。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 完全正确。Intercom 的 Fin 产品就是一个很好的例子。因为传统上，所有这类公司都是按代理人数定价的——有多少客服代理在使用产品？过去是按席位的，但他们构建了 Fin，一个完全由 AI 解决客服工单的产品，这就使他们能够进入基于结果的定价模型象限。

Lenny Rachitsky： 太精彩了。那么假设你是今天的一位 AI 创始人，你在思考自己的定价策略、长期的变现策略。你的建议是——与设计伙伴合作，创建这些概念验证（POC），在其中与他们一起构建 ROI 模型，理想情况下找到某种基于结果的定价策略。这个总结准确吗？你还有什么要补充的？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 是的。至少要能够将商业案例（business case）具体化。即使你不打算转向基于结果的定价模型，也要清楚你实际为客户创造了什么结果——通过这个商业案例——这将使你能够为该结果收取一个公平的价格。如果客户认同你的商业案例，你就可以从中获取一部分。

Intercom Fin 的定价故事

Lenny Rachitsky： Fin 其实是他们播客的新赞助商，我了解到……我之前不知道这一点，他们每解决一个工单只收 99 美分。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 通过 AI 解决的。

Lenny Rachitsky： 对，通过 AI。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 完全正确。如果需要人工介入，他们就不收费。

Lenny Rachitsky： 对。就是那种——什么？这个故事太简单了。你的客服代理成本是 20 美元，这个只要 99 美分。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 是的，这把书里两个章节合二为一了——美观简洁的定价（beautifully simple pricing）和基于结果的定价模型（outcome-based pricing model）。

Lenny Rachitsky： 有趣的是，他们最初的定价模型是最被讨厌的。我曾在 Twitter 上做过一次调查，问”你为哪些产品付的钱最多？“，答案总是 Intercom。所有人都讨厌他们的定价，然后他们找到了解决方案。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 我觉得他们找到了一个很好的解决方案。

AI 公司的打包策略

Lenny Rachitsky： 好。那么在这些方面，你还有什么想分享的吗？尤其是 AI 公司在考虑定价时应该思考的问题，在我们聊其他话题之前？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 我觉得我们基本涵盖了大部分话题。就像我们说的，要对概念验证（POC）深思熟虑，选择正确的定价原型或定价模型，这些在早期阶段非常关键。但当你开始规模化，比如说你成了一家多产品公司时，你就需要开始关注：“我应该采用什么样的打包策略（packaging strategy）？是平台加附加模块的模式？还是应该把产品分成不同版本，比如好、更好、最好？是否应该针对不同用例进行区分，因为现在我的 AI 既能解决保险用例也能解决医疗用例？是否应该将不同用例产品化？这是否就是我的打包策略？还是应该完全模块化，让人们自己挑选组合？”

这类问题会变得更加关键，这就是为什么书中关于打破早期打包方式、为规模化阶段制定新打包策略的章节变得非常重要。所以我认为创始人们接下来会面临的挑战就是，当他们构建了多个产品时，需要思考整个打包、交叉销售（cross-selling）、向上销售（up-selling）的体系。

定价策略的调整频率

Lenny Rachitsky： 这正好触及我接下来要问的问题，就是定价策略的变更。成功改变定价方式的可能性有多大？我知道我们刚才谈的是 AI 公司需要从一开始就做对。根据你的经验，如果有人在听这期节目，心想”糟糕，我们已经有了一套定价策略”——成功改变定价方式需要什么条件？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 过去我们常说，你应该至少每两年重新审视一次定价策略，包括整体定价模型和收费标准。但在 AI 时代，这个周期可能缩短了一半，因为公司建设和竞争的规模和速度都大大加快了。

所以我想说，定价是一个持续的过程。不是你在第一天解决掉、填好表格就忘掉的东西。你必须从一开始就深思熟虑，但同时也要准备好调整和迭代，你会在这个过程中不断学习。核心是把定价也看作早期阶段的试错学习机会。

其中有些东西你会更频繁地调整，有些东西你大概不想改得太频繁。比如定价模型，除非你真的改变了归因（attribution）和自主性（autonomy），否则没必要切换定价模型。留在那个原型里，不要搞乱。

但像价格水平这类东西——是不是该涨价了，因为已经过了六个月一年了？是的，应该涨。因为一年之内，你消费的所有东西价格大概都会上涨 3% 到 5%。但你如何真正涨价并深思熟虑地去做？所以书中关于如何聪明地涨价的那个章节，在规模化阶段变得非常重要。

定价权与沃伦·巴菲特

我觉得沃伦·巴菲特总结得非常好。他说，一家公司的真正定义就是定价权（pricing power）。如果你需要开一个祈祷会才能做 10% 的涨价，那你的生意就糟透了。你必须能够在一段时间内逐步提价。但如何战略性地做到这一点——既不会导致太多流失（churn），又能够将涨价作为价值交换传递出去——这些变得至关重要。

Scaling Innovation 公理

Lenny Rachitsky： 太棒了。把视角拉远一点，我很喜欢你这本书的一个特点是，你围绕公理来组织内容。你有很多非常巧妙的公理，它们会留在你脑海里，帮助你思考定价。你能分享几个你最喜欢的吗，也许是书里两三个你特别推荐的公理？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 你之前提到 Sierra 的创始人，我不知道是不是 Clay，这里要向 Clay 致意。Clay 确实读了整本书并给了反馈，在他手里的那本 Scaling Innovation 就是那个版本。我在整本书中把这些称为 Scaling Innovation 公理。公理的核心思想是，最终你只要把所有公理拿出来，打印出来贴在桌旁，就是整本书的精华。就像便利贴一样，你一看就能记住该做什么。

然后他提出了一个想法，说”嘿，与其只是笼统地叫它们 Scaling Innovation 公理，你应该给每条公理起一个品牌化的名字。“我觉得这是个绝妙的主意。于是我开始为每条公理构思独特的名字，他还为其中一些命名贡献了灵感，我们最终给每条公理都起了独特的名字。

还有一个有趣的事实，可能我太极客了。当我数了一下公理的数量，总共有 42 条。我不是故意凑成这个数的。如果你是《银河系漫游指南》的粉丝，你就知道那是”终极答案”。

不开玩笑了，让我展开讲几条公理。我最喜欢的第一条，我叫它 20-80 公理。尤其在科技公司中，你构建的功能中有 20% 驱动了 80% 的支付意愿（willingness to pay）。但讽刺的是，这 20% 往往是最容易构建的部分。所以创始人会把这个 20% 做出来，几乎免费地投放到市场上，然后拼命追赶着去构建那 80% 只驱动 20% 支付意愿的东西。如果你没有深思熟虑过这个问题，你就在无意中把最值钱的东西白白送人了。

所以真正理解你的产品中什么驱动了支付意愿是至关重要的。我觉得大家说的 MVP，我们应该改变它的定义。它不应该是最小可行产品（MVP），而应该是最有价值产品。深思熟虑你早期实际给出的是什么产品，我觉得这是关键。这就是 20-80 公理。

我的第二条大概是价格瘫痪（price paralysis）公理。它的意思是，你对涨价的抗拒往往是内部的、情感性的，而不是外部的、逻辑性的。这又回到了刚才说的——需要开祈祷会才能涨价。如果你需要大家手拉手祈祷才能涨价，那你的生意就糟透了。所以这主要是内部的情感问题，如何深思熟虑地处理涨价就变得很重要。

在流失发生之前阻止它

Madhavan Ramanujam： 我大概第三喜欢的是在流失（churn）发生之前阻止它，也就是阻止流失公理。要阻止流失，你需要吸引不会离开的客户。这听起来有点反直觉，但这才是真正阻止流失的最好方法。这具体意味着什么？大多数公司会在客户真正说”我要走”的时候才试图阻止流失。那时候已经太晚了，你只是在被动应对。最多你扔出一些优惠，他们会再留六个月，然后离开。他们已经做出了决定。

阻止流失的方法是开始获取不会离开的客户，这是最重要的事。如果你回看数据，问：“哪些类型的客户实际上倾向于留得更久？他们有什么特征？我怎样才能把获客资金集中在获取更多这类客户上？“这样你就在流失发生之前阻止了它。这就是关键。

落地与扩展

Lenny Rachitsky： 这很有趣。我很惊讶你没说到我最喜欢的那个，大概是……”如果你落地了，一定要确保扩展。”

Madhavan Ramanujam： 对。

Lenny Rachitsky： 那条真的让我印象深刻。也许可以谈谈那个。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 当然。所以如果你落地了，你需要同时确保自己在扩展，意思是如果你在入门级产品里把所有东西都给了出去，后面就没有什么可以变现的了。所以要深思熟虑你的落地产品之间的围栏是什么。是一个免费体验吗？让与索取（gives and gets）中的索取是什么？索取通常基于你是按功能索取，还是也按使用量索取？你如何深思熟虑地处理这个问题，从而为扩展留下空间。

创始人最大的教训

Lenny Rachitsky： 好，再拉远一点，作为总结，你认为创始人应该带走的最大教训是什么——他们以为自己懂了但其实可能并没有？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 我觉得这回到了你一开始说的。直觉上人们能理解他们在增长时需要同时考虑市场份额和钱包份额。即使你问他们，他们也会说”对对，我在考虑钱包份额”，但他们真的同等程度地思考过并投入了同等的注意力吗？他们是否推迟了其中一个？他们是有意还是无意地在执行单引擎策略？我觉得这就是我的核心要点。

反直觉的观点不是在两个引擎上同时投入同等的努力。在你公司的某些阶段，你可能需要更以市场份额为主导。在某些阶段，你可能需要更以钱包份额为主导。努力不一定相等，但注意力要相等，真正培养出作为一名盈利增长架构师的思维方式。这就是我对大家的主要建议。如果你还没有进入那种思维模式，有一本书适合你。

Lenny Rachitsky： 我会引导他们去读。为了让听众知道该怎么做——“好的，我需要更多地关注钱包份额”——主要工作是找到一个与定价权契合的定价模型吗？在钱包份额思维方面需要投入的工作有哪些？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 实际上这些全都是相关的。市场份额、钱包份额、获客、变现、留存，它们都是相互关联的。你不能孤立地思考它们。我不会说只为了钱包份额你需要做什么。如果你想在市场份额和钱包份额两方面都增长……比如说，你需要有正确的落地和扩展（land and expand）策略。落地帮助你获客，扩展帮助你提升钱包份额。

如果你有定价模型，你需要一个能让你更快获取客户的定价模型，因为它直观易懂，但它也应该帮助你回收价值，这就是你的变现。如果人们理解你的定价模型，他们实际上会留下来。所以一切都是相辅相成的。我不会孤立地单方面思考。这就是为什么那九个策略实际上非常强大。因为如果你遵循那些策略，你不会陷入单引擎陷阱。这些都是经过验证的策略，教你如何以深思熟虑的方式构建业务，同时对市场份额和钱包份额给予同等关注。

总结与推荐

Lenny Rachitsky： 好，这是一个非常合理的回答。Madhavan，在我们进入非常令人兴奋的快问快答环节之前，你还有什么想分享的或者想留给听众的吗？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 按顺序读这两本书，Monetizing Innovation 和 Scaling Innovation。因为打造一款好产品是一回事，打造一家好企业是另一回事。你不可能用一款不那么好的产品建立一家伟大的企业，反过来也一样。所以我认为尽早思考定价，尤其是对于 AI 公司，深思熟虑这件事，在产品之前先定价，然后思考如何真正地规模化，培养盈利增长思维。所有这些都变得至关重要。我期待听众的反馈。

Lenny Rachitsky： 我觉得你的书已经是创始人必读书目之一了。有太多你不知道自己在做什么的事情。而有少数几本书就像”好吧，这里有所有的建议，能回答你那么多问题，省去你那么多痛苦”。所以我真的很高兴你为这个书架增添了新的内容。说到这里，我们已经到了非常令人兴奋的快问快答环节。准备好了吗？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 好，开始吧。

Lenny Rachitsky： 开始。你最常推荐给别人的两三本书是什么？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 第一个想到的是 Alex Osterwalder 的 Business Model Canvas（商业模式画布）。这是一本经典，也是我最喜欢的书之一。我推荐很多人去读，因为我觉得它很好地从一个更具战略性的商业模式角度把我们看到的很多东西串联了起来。

我喜欢 Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow（《思考，快与慢》）这本书。我觉得那也是一本经典，因为事情中总有人为因素。无论你在 B2C 还是 B2B，理解客户心理都很重要。因为在 B2B 场景下，也是人在进行人际对话。所以它既是行为层面的，也是数字层面的。我非常喜欢那本书，里面有很多精华，我经常推荐。

第三本我推荐的书是 Jonah Berger 写的 Contagious（《疯传》）。我很喜欢那本书。他曾在斯坦福攻读营销学博士，写了一本关于如何让信息病毒式传播的书。他研究了最好的病毒式信息，并将其提炼为一个框架。如果你遵循那个框架，就能让信息病毒式传播。我在自己的对外沟通等方面尝试运用了其中一些方法，我觉得这是一本非常棒的书。

Lenny Rachitsky： 哇。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 你读过吗？

Lenny Rachitsky： 得去看看。我没读过。我甚至都没听说过。好，我们要病毒式传播了，因为我们拿到了攻略。

Madhavan Ramanujam： Contagious，这就是书名。

Lenny Rachitsky： Contagious。好，我们会附上链接。最近有没有哪部电影或电视剧让你特别喜欢？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 电影的话。好，那就选电影。我确实很喜欢《碟中谍》最后一部，系列第八部。我觉得整个……我喜欢这一整个系列，从一到八。但我特别欣赏的一点是，我的支付意愿在这段时间里持续上升。第八部电影他们想收多少钱都可以，只要我想看，我大概都会去看。所以我觉得这是一个很有趣的持久品牌案例——你的变现能力实际上会随着时间的推移而增强。所以我觉得这部电影很棒。很好看。

顺便说一句，我刚意识到 MI 既是 Monetizing Innovation 的缩写，也是 Mission Impossible 的缩写。也许潜意识里这也是我喜欢它的原因。

Lenny Rachitsky： 而且你就是里面那个 Tom Cruise 角色。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 没错，就是那样。

Lenny Rachitsky： 我太喜欢了——你是世界上唯一一个从变现和支付意愿的视角来看《碟中谍》的人。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 就是说啊。我发现很多餐桌上的对话最终也会滑向定价和变现的话题。我觉得这已经成了我的人生。

Lenny Rachitsky： 天哪。我们需要一个这样的电影版本，一部 Madhavan 版的 Mission Possible。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 当然。

Lenny Rachitsky： 我愿意为此付任何价钱。好，下一个问题。你最近有没有发现一个特别喜欢的产品？

人生座右铭

Lenny Rachitsky： 好的，下一个问题。你有没有一个最喜欢的人生座右铭，经常回到它并在工作或生活中觉得有用？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 在你触及的一切事物中创造价值。其他一切都会随之而来。这就是我的人生座右铭。

Lenny Rachitsky： 这深深引起了共鸣。好，最后一个问题。你最近进入了投资领域。很酷的一点是，以前在 Simon-Kucher 与你合作是非常昂贵的。非常昂贵。大多是大型企业的项目。现在更多的创始人可以接触到你了，因为你在投资创业公司。聊聊这个吧。聊聊你最近在做什么。

转型投资早期 AI 创业公司

Madhavan Ramanujam： 当然。在 Simon-Kucher，我有机会与超过 250 家公司合作。我现在的联合 GP Josh Bloom，他也有机会与我们合作过的 250 家公司打交道。所以加起来，我们与超过 500 家公司合作过，其中包括 50 多家独角兽。那是一段很棒的经历。

而且很多时候，我们实际上是在非常后期才与他们合作的——D 轮融资、Pre-IPO、Post-IPO、私募股权公司等等。但我们两个人现在创办了一家风险投资公司，明确的目标是与早期 AI 创始人合作。这回到了我们一开始讨论的话题。AI 公司需要从第一天起就处理变现问题。但对于这些公司来说，按服务收费的交易模式并不一定行得通。这也是我们转向风险投资的原因。

所以我们的商业模式目前相当标准。你进入 cap table。我们撸起袖子与创始人一起在变现的各个方面工作。所以我们在他们的成功中投入了精力，也将分享价值创造。没有服务费，在这类事务上没有摩擦。但另一方面，我们在一期基金中集中精力，大约投资 20 到 25 家公司，这就是我们将投入时间的地方。

Lenny Rachitsky： 真是划算。Madhavan，最后两个问题。如果有人想联系你讨论这个合作机会，去哪里找你？听众怎样能帮到你？

Madhavan Ramanujam： 找到我的方式，我觉得只要搜索 Monetizing Innovation 和 Scaling Innovation 就行。你可能会找到很多页面。如果你想购买的话也可以去 Amazon。实际上，Scaling Innovation 现在已经开放预购了。我觉得这期播客会在书正式出版之前发布。书将于 8 月 5 日上市。所以有机会预购。

也许我会从你的 master bundle 中汲取灵感——我真的认为那是世界上最好的捆绑方案——然后搞一个我自己的捆绑方案来鼓励用户预购。如果你喜欢 Monetizing Innovation，我可以告诉你你一定会喜欢 Scaling Innovation。所以为你的团队买吧。为你自己买。

这是我的方案。对于任何购买超过五本的人，把你的预购订单截图发给我们。把截图发送到 promo@49palmsvc.com。也就是 promo，promotion 的缩写，@49palmsvc.com。

这是我的捆绑方案。将有 10 个人通过抽奖获得捆绑包，捆绑包将包括一本 Scaling Innovation 签名版、一个 30 分钟的问答环节、一个 Scaling Innovation 新书发布会的独家邀请，还有一件 Scaling Innovation 的 T 恤。这就是我推出的捆绑方案。我还没拉上 Granola 和其他产品来一起凑，但我希望这足以让人兴奋去买书。

结语与致谢

Madhavan Ramanujam： 还有，如果你喜欢这本书，请在亚马逊上留下评论。这总是很有帮助的。因为评论越多，这本书就会有自己的生命力。我也非常感谢多年来创始人和投资界对 Monetizing Innovation 的支持。过去八年里，有成千上万的书迷。他们做了很多事情——谈论这本书、写评论、在 LinkedIn 上发帖，把”先定价再定产品”（price before product）和”产品市场定价契合”（product market price fit）这些概念变成了创始人词汇的一部分。我非常感激大家真的这样做了，也非常感谢他们。所以这也是对等的。如果你对 Scaling Innovation 感到兴奋，我很希望你能谈论这本书。

Lenny Rachitsky： 太棒了。我觉得人们愿意这样做，是因为你免费分享了那么多内容。你无偿分享了这么多智慧，帮助了这么多人，一切都会回馈到你身上的。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 我刚才就是想策划一下我的让与索取（gives and gets）。

Lenny Rachitsky： 这就对了。天哪，漂亮的回调。Madhavan，这次访谈太精彩了。非常感谢你来。

Madhavan Ramanujam： 非常感谢你，Lenny。很荣幸。

Lenny Rachitsky： 我也是。大家再见。

感谢你的收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值，可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你最喜欢的播客应用上订阅。也请考虑给我们评分或留下评论，这真的能帮助其他听众找到这个播客。你可以在 lennyspodcast.com 找到所有往期节目或了解更多关于这个节目的信息。下期再见。

术语表

原文	中文
20-80 axiom	20-80 公理
acquisition	获客
affirmation loops	确认循环（affirmation loops）
agentic AI	代理式 AI（agentic AI）
Alex Osterwalder	人名保留原文
attribution	归因（attribution）
attribution problem	归因问题
autonomy	自主性（autonomy）
beautifully simple pricing	美观简洁的定价（beautifully simple pricing）
Bill Gurley	人名保留原文
business case	商业案例
Business Model Canvas	商业模式画布
cap table	cap table
churn	流失（churn）
Clay	人名保留原文
community builder archetype	社区建设者（community builder）原型
consumption model	消费模型（consumption model）
Contagious	《疯传》
cost dynamics	成本动态
cross-selling	交叉销售
Dara	人名保留原文
Delphi	产品名保留原文
disruptor archetype	颠覆者（disruptor）原型
gives and gets	让与索取（gives and gets）
GP	GP（General Partner）
Granola	产品名保留原文
hybrid pricing model	混合定价模型（hybrid pricing model）
Jonah Berger	人名保留原文
Josh Bloom	人名保留原文
labor budget	劳动力预算
land and expand	落地和扩展（land and expand）
lead qualification mechanism	线索甄别机制
Lenny Rachitsky	人名保留原文
Lennybot	产品名保留原文
Madhavan Ramanujam	人名保留原文
market share	市场份额（market share）
monetization	变现
Monetizing Innovation	书名保留原文
moneymaker archetype	赚钱者（moneymaker）原型
outcome-based pricing model	基于结果的定价模型（outcome-based pricing model）
packaging strategy	打包策略
pay for access	为使用权限付费
pay for work delivered	为交付的工作成果付费
pay-for-what-you-consume	按用量付费（pay-for-what-you-consume）
POC	概念验证（POC）
price paralysis	价格瘫痪（price paralysis）
price premium paradox	价格溢价悖论（price premium paradox）
pricing power	定价权
profitable growth architect	盈利增长架构师
Rahul	人名保留原文
retention	留存
ROI model	ROI 模型
Sam	人名保留原文
Scaling Innovation	书名保留原文
seat-based pricing	按席位定价（seat-based pricing）
Simon-Kucher	机构名保留原文
Superhuman	产品名保留原文
Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow	《思考，快与慢》
tire kicker	凑热闹的人（tire kicker）
unicorn	独角兽
up-selling	向上销售
value audit	价值审计（value audit）
value capture	价值捕获
value selling	价值销售（value selling）
wallet share	钱包份额（wallet share）
willingness to pay	支付意愿

此文档由 AI 分片翻译（translate_long_document）

Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam

Madhavan Ramanujam: The good founders need to be able to dominate both market share and wallet share. It is not a choice. You need to get better at both.

About the Guest

Lenny Rachitsky: It feels like every company wants to be an AI company these days. How is AI pricing different?

Madhavan Ramanujam: The winners in AI will need to master monetization from day one. If you’re bringing a lot of value to the table and you start at training your customers to expect $20 a month and you anchored yourself on a low price point, you’re in trouble. 20% of what you build drives 80% of the willingness to pay. But the irony is that that 20% is the easiest thing to build often.

Back on the Show: Scaling Innovation

Lenny Rachitsky: What would you say is the biggest lesson you want founders to take away?

Madhavan Ramanujam: If you think about market share and wallet share, let’s think about it as a two-by-two. The quadrant that you really want to be in is the outcome-based pricing model, the top-right quadrant where you have great autonomy and great attribution. About 5% of companies are probably in a true outcome-based pricing model. If you want to win in AI, figure out a way to get to that quadrant.

Why Write a Second Book

Lenny Rachitsky: Do you feel like the popular IDE startups, they’re going to be in trouble down the road?

Madhavan Ramanujam: Some of them, yes, without naming names.

The Core Thesis

Lenny Rachitsky: Today my guest is Madhavan Ramanujam. Madhavan is the smartest person I know on pricing and monetization strategy. As managing partner at Simon-Kucher, he’s worked with over 250 companies, including 30 unicorns, to help them figure out how to price, package, and grow their products.

He’s also the author of the book on pricing called Monetizing Innovation. And now he’s back with a new book, a sequel, called Scaling Innovation, which teaches you how to architect your business for long-term profitable growth and also how to avoid the common traps that teams fall into that keep them from building real, durable, sustainable businesses.

Bill Gurley wrote the foreword. I had a chance to read an early copy. I absolutely loved it. It’s a book that every founder needs to read. And in this episode, Madhavan shares many of the biggest lessons from the book, including how pricing strategy is very different for AI companies, why you need to get your pricing model right from the start in today’s market, a very simple two-by-two to help you pick your pricing model, how to gain pricing power, a ton of tactical advice for negotiating more effectively, the most common traps founders fall into, and so much more.

If you order five copies of the book, Madhavan is offering a chance to win a free conversation with him, a signed copy of the book, an invite to the book launch, a t-shirt, and more. Just send a copy of your purchase receipt to promo@49palmsvc.com.

And some more good news, Madhavan is now more accessible. He left Simon-Kucher. He’s now investing full-time with his own fund. He focuses on early-stage AI companies. If you want to work with them, check him out at 49palmsvc.com.

If you enjoy this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. With that, I bring you Madhavan Ramanujam.

What makes Enterpret unique is its ability to build and update a customer-specific knowledge graph that provides the most granular and accurate categorization of all customer feedback and connects that customer feedback to critical metrics like revenue and CSAT. If modernizing your voice-of-customer program to a generational upgrade is a 2025 priority, like customer-centric industry leaders like Canva, Notion, Perplexity, and Linear, reach out to the team at enterpret.com/lenny. That’s E-N-T-E-R-P-R-E-T .com/lenny.

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Learn why some of the world’s most iconic companies, like Etsy, Dropbox, Twilio, Vercel, and Webflow rely on DX. Visit DX’s website at getdx.com/lenny.

Madhavan, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Madhavan Ramanujam: It’s exciting to be back, Lenny. Thanks so much for hosting me again.

Common Founder Pitfalls

Lenny Rachitsky: This is a very rare second visit to the podcast. You’ve got a new book coming out. I’ve got a very early copy right here. If you’re watching on YouTube, here’s the copy you sent me. It’s like 200 pages. Did you print this out on your printer, by the way?

Madhavan Ramanujam: Yes, I think I ran out of printer ink after that, I guess.

Clean and Simple Pricing

Lenny Rachitsky: I appreciate the early copy. It’s amazing. What we’re going to be doing with this conversation is going through some of the biggest lessons that you shared in this book to give people a sense of many of the things that you share, many things you’ve learned since writing the first book.

Let me start with this question. Why’d you decide to write another book? And what is the difference between Scaling Innovation, which is the name of this book, and Monetizing Innovation, is the name of the first book?

Mastering Negotiation Skills

Madhavan Ramanujam: So Monetizing Innovation, we actually wrote it eight years ago. Time Flies. And the core thesis of that book was, how do you build products that are not just cool but are products that people need, value, and are actually willing to pay for? And I think that took a life of its own.

And over the years, we kept getting another question from entrepreneurs that, “Hey, we built a great product, we know there is willingness to pay, but how do we build a great business? How do we scale this?” And the brutal truth is that even if you have a great product, you might actually not figure out a way to grow fast and grow profitably. So we wrote Scaling Innovation in an effort to actually solve that puzzle.

So you can think of this as a sequel to Monetizing Innovation. And Monetizing Innovation. Talked about how to build great products. Scaling Innovation talks about how to build a great business. And writing a book is… There needs to be a purpose for this. For me, the reason for writing books is about giving a bit back based on what I know to founders. And book writing is hard. Writing a good book is even harder.

And just like Monetizing Innovation, Scaling Innovation is not marketing fluff. It actually has real actionable stuff packed in that you can go on Monday morning and start implementing. And we wrote this book to give back a bit of what we know and to help companies scale and architect towards profitable growth.

Give and Take

Lenny Rachitsky: I love people like you that do the work for, I don’t know, decades at this point, learn from real life experiences over and over and over, and then just share all this stuff with people. This is the most… the highest ROI way to learn, is letting you do all this work to learn all these things and then you share all your answers with us. So that’s why I love these books.

If you had to boil down the thesis of this book into just a simple thought so that we can just start to plant this in founders’s heads, what would that be?

Value-Based Selling

Madhavan Ramanujam: So if I have to boil down the core thesis of the book, it is basically that if you want to build an enduring business, you need to be able to architect towards profitable growth. What that means is you need to be able to master two engines: market share and wallet share.

It sounds simple on the surface, but it’s actually quite complex. Because if you unpack that, for gaining market share and wallet share, you need to be good at acquisition, monetization, and retention, as in get customers, make an initial money on them, but also make money on an ongoing basis and have your customers actually refer more customers.

Many companies, actually, what they do is they focus on a single engine strategy. So they focus on one of those two topics and pretty much exclude the other one. That leads to all kinds of situations. You see companies saying, “I’ll grow at all costs and postpone monetization.” You see some who would say, “I’m going to monetize earlier on,” but they might miss out on acquisition opportunities. Or yet others who are so focused on a small set of loyal customer base that they’re neither monetizing nor are they actually acquiring.

So the good founders need to be able to dominate both market share and wallet share. It is not a choice. You need to get better at both. But this does not mean that you’re putting equal effort on market share and wallet share at all given points in time, but it means you’re putting equal attention on both those topics and being thoughtful about the trade-offs and saying, “How can I actually look at these two topics together so that I’m architecting towards profitable growth?” That’s the core thesis of the book.

We actually showcase nine strategies that actually allow companies to architect towards profitable growth. And every chapter ends with how this particular strategy circumvents a single-engine problem and helps you focus on market share and wallet share at the same time. And there’s also CEO questions and leadership questions that people should reflect on when they architect towards profitable growth and are they on the right track? I mean, think about this ways. If you’re flying a aircraft, you don’t want to flight on one engine. Why do you actually want to do that for your business?

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. So I imagine many founders or people thinking about starting a company are not feeling like they’re in one bucket or another. Intuitively, you’re not like, “Oh, Of course. We’re going to just focus on growth forever, and that’s all that matters.”

You had these kind of traps that founders fall into that you referenced a bit. Can you just talk again about just the common traps you find founders fall into that people may recognize like, “Shit, that’s what I’m doing probably”?

Three Key ROI Dimensions

Madhavan Ramanujam: So let’s unpack the traps that are correlated to the archetypes. If you’re a disruptor archetype, you might fall into one of two traps. The first one is you might land, but you might not expand. As in your eagerness for acquiring, you might have actually given away a lot at less and you have given the farm away, but you don’t have anything to expand to. That’s the first trap you’re likely to fall into.

The second trap that you actually fall into is you start… A market share that won, is different from a market share that is actually held. If you’re so acquisition focused, you’re actually focused on getting more and more customers, but you’re not spending enough time with customers that you actually got to keep them, upsell them, keep them happy, et cetera. So you might fall into that trap.

If you’re a moneymaker, you fall into one of two traps. The first one is you might nickel and dime your customers to death. Because you’re focused on monetization, you might come up with a very differentiated pricing model, different levels, hidden fees, things to charge for many different things and come across as just trying to nickel and dime your customer.

The second trap that a moneymaker actually falls into is that you fall into the price premium paradox where you think that pricing high actually indicates value, but your price is so high that you actually start hurting your acquisition, so it just becomes irrelevant for most people.

If you’re in the community builder, you actually fall into two common traps. The first one is you’re focused so much on the foundation that you actually miss the frontier, which is you’re so focused on your loyal customer base that you forget to attract different types of customers and you’re not acquiring.

And the second trap that you fall into if you’re a community builder is you train your customers to expect more for less. Because you’re so eager to satisfy your loyal base, you start giving them more and more, and you’re training your best customer base to expect more for less.

So these six traps are very common across these archetypes. Being a profitable growth architect means that you’re avoiding these traps. In other words, you’re simultaneously being a disruptor, a moneymaker, and a community builder all at the same time. And how do you actually have that archetype and the right strategies to actually go about your business?

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. So this is what you want to not do. You mentioned you have nine strategies for how you actually want to approach pricing, monetization, scaling, monetization, and innovation. Can you share a couple of these strategies, maybe two or three, maybe some of your favorites?

Strategies for Negotiation

Madhavan Ramanujam: Sure. So I will unpack a couple of strategies. Maybe the first one I would take is what we call as beautifully simple pricing. So in your early days it is by far more important to have pricing that is really simple and it’s not creating too much friction in the sales conversation. I mean, the asset test that you probably should go back on Monday morning and do is take some of your early prospects or customers and ask them to articulate the pricing strategy back to you, right? If they were to actually sell on your behalf, how would they describe the pricing strategy? And if they cannot contextualize that in a simple manner and actually explain, you don’t have a simple pricing strategy. It’s as simple as that.

And having a simple pricing strategy also means that your pricing needs to be able to tell a value story, as in you need to contextualize your price based on the value that you actually bring to the table.

A great example here is Superhuman. When they started, they were actually competing with free email products and they were coming up with a premium email experience. And how do you actually price that? And I thought the team at Superhuman with Rahul and others did a pretty good job. They came up with a $30 price point per month, which was pretty simple. But the way they kind of told the story was that you pay a dollar a day for actually getting four hours of productivity back in the week, and then suddenly the pricing doesn’t look too off. I mean, it’s like the price for a latte in a week to actually get four hours back. Why wouldn’t I actually do that, right?

And pricing contextualization and value story doesn’t need to just apply for premium products. If you take another example, like the Subway $5 footlong is a different way to say a story with pricing that, oh, for$ 5, you get a lot of value actually back. So beautifully simple pricing really means coming up with a simple pricing strategy that your customers immediately get and your pricing is actually telling a value story and how do you actually get that. So in the book, we have a checklist of 10 different things that you actually need to look at to make sure that your pricing is beautifully simple.

Lenny Rachitsky: As we go through these strategies, is your advice try all these things, like you should do as many of these strategies as you can, or is it maybe pick a few that work for you or just one is enough?

Creating Options via Pricing

Madhavan Ramanujam: So there are nine strategies. We have organized that into strategies that apply during your startup phase, like just when you get started, and strategies that apply to you in your scale-up phase. So there are four strategies that you need to do in your startup and five in the scale-up, so it’s quite manageable. I would argue that all four apply in the startup and all five actually apply in the scale-up phase, but it’s not like you need to start focusing on nine things from day one.

Lenny Rachitsky: So this first one was the startup phase?

Anchoring and Diminishing Concessions

Madhavan Ramanujam: Yeah. The beautifully simple pricing is the startup. Exactly. And so in the scale-up phase, I think one of the most important strategies is to master negotiations and really get better at acing negotiations, especially if you’re in a B2B situation. And how do you actually do that? Because you need to be able to talk about the value and contextualize your price based on those kind of conversations.

So to master negotiations, it comes down to actually three things. Mastering gives and gets, being good at value selling, and third, having the right negotiation strategies. So let’s unpack that each at a time.

So giving and getting, why is that important? Because in a negotiation, typically you’re giving. I mean, you’re giving concessions. People are asking. If you don’t get anything back, you’re basically indicating to the other person that they can keep beating you up and you need to keep giving. But if you’re giving something but you ask for something in exchange, then you’re basically bringing authenticity into the negotiation because it actually means something to you to give, so you’re asking something back. It actually makes the negotiation way more effective.

And in the book we actually talk about the top 10 gets in B2B and the top 10 gets in B2C. One of my favorite gets in the B2B situation is what I call as conducting a value audit. So what this means is if you’re giving a concession, ask for a value audit in exchange where every six months a team internally from your customers would be commissioned to actually conduct a value assessment of your products so that it becomes their business case and you co-create it with them saying how much value is actually produced. And this is great because if they actually engage in that, that gives you tremendous pricing power for renegotiations because it is their business case, they’re championed it internally, and you’re pretty much making your products pretty sticky. So it’s a pretty harmless get, but it could be very powerful for future negotiations. So being good at-

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s really smart.

Why AI Pricing Differs

Madhavan Ramanujam: … gives and gets is… Thank you. Being good at gives and gets is really critical.

The second thing in mastering negotiations is being good at value selling. And for being good at value selling, you need to do three things. First, you need to be able to create the needs. Second, you need to be able to create affirmation loops. And the third one is creating a good ROI model. And let’s talk about each of those. So creating needs is very important because many founders show up and try to understand what are the needs of the customers. That’s one way to look at it. But you need to be able to create needs rather than just discover them.

So for instance, if you’re a marketing automation AI product and you save, let’s say, three weeks of work that actually needs to be done to actually get stuff in a dashboard that can be analyzed by marketing managers, the way you create the need is ask about existing processes and say, “Okay, so just so I understand, all of this stuff actually takes you three weeks to put data together to actually have meaningful dashboards for your marketing managers to take action. What if that was available to you instantaneously?” Oh, you have now just created a need, right? So being in that mindset of creating a need as opposed to just discovering them.

The second thing is creating affirmation loops. And this is really important. I’ve seen a lot of founders get into negotiations. They’re so eager to talk about their products. They keep talking about the products without any affirmation from the other side. You need to pause and create affirmation loops, things like, for instance, “Okay, so far, you’ve seen all of this. How does this actually play out in your company? Do you see it as valuable? What about this dashboard do you actually like?”

So when you ask these kind of questions and your customers are playing back the value that they actually see in your product, you’re creating affirmation loops, which become tremendously useful when you start selling the product finally. Because if they’ve agreed that there’s value that is being produced, then you also have a better commercial discussion.

And the third one is creating a good ROI model. And I see a lot of founders work on a POC. And after the POC’s over, they’ll show up with an ROI model and try to defend a price. You’ve already lost the battle. I mean, no one is going to believe an ROI model that you just cooked up. Everyone is going to challenge you on assumptions.

The right way to think about an ROI model is to actually co-create it with your customers from day one, which means agree and validate on the assumptions and the inputs. So like, “Hey, how long does this process take today? How many engineers are there?” So you create ask questions that are all inputs to an ROI model. And if you have done that process and the customer agrees on all the inputs, they’re very unlikely to push back on the output of an ROI model. So a POC needs to be framed as the purpose of a POC is to build a business case, and we are going to co-create an ROI model with the customer as opposed to it being a tech and product functionality feature test and you show up with an ROI model.

And when you’re building an ROI model, there are many buckets to focus on, but there are three that are very critical. The first one is, what are the incremental gains that you actually bring to the table based on KPIs and metrics that your customer is tracking? So this could be things like incremental revenue, reduction in churn. These are the immediate, tangible, clear impact to the business line based on the products that you actually bring to the table.

The second bucket is cost savings. Are you reducing headcount? Are you reducing license costs? What are the tangible cost savings?

And the third one, which is often overlooked, is opportunity cost. For instance, if you save 10 hours of time for a team, what do they actually do with that 10 hours? That can also be quantified. So when you put all of these three things together, you start building a proper ROI model that you can actually use in your value selling to defend the right price.

So we talked about three steps in mastering negotiations. The first one was gives and gets. The second one was getting better at value selling. The third one is actually getting better at even negotiations and what strategies would you actually use. And there are a couple of strategies that we have found to be really productive.

The first one is to show up with options. Many founders rush with one product and one price and say, “Okay, this is a hundred K product, and that’s what we are trying to sell.” Inevitably, what will happen is the immediate focus of the conversation will be on the price, and you’re only talking about price.

But if you have options on the table, let’s say if you have a good, better, best, if you’re a hundred K product, a 200K and a 300K option, then you’re not just talking price, you’re talking value. Because if your customer is budget conscious, they’ll say, “Hey, I like the hundred K price point, but I actually like the functionality in your 200K product.” Then your immediate question is, what in the functionality do you actually like? Why is that beneficial for you? So you switch the conversation back to value as opposed to just talking about price. And we have seen that with these kind of conversations, you’re by far more better off to actually land in a much better place than just showcasing one product and one price.

And showcasing options doesn’t need to be just different products. It could even be a pricing model choice. And I’d probably give a simple hack that people can try on Monday morning. I was talking to this founder who said, “Hey, I think the budget is about 100K. That’s what I believe from the key stakeholder, but my product really brings crazy value. I could even charge, let’s say, a 500K for this product, but I don’t have the courage to actually go and ask for a 500K price because I kind of know a hundred K is the budget. What should I do?” So for those kind of situations, actually show up with options in your pricing model.

So we coached him to go in with a hundred K, plus 10% on any incremental value that you bring, or it’s a 500K fixed. So now this is actually a great situation in negotiation. Because if you’re price sensitive, you’re focused on the hundred K. It’s a small fee to actually get started. But the conversation will gravitate towards, “What is that 10%? How do you measure value?” That’s a great conversation to have because now you’re talking about, “How you add value? Where’s the value generation? What portion would you take?”

And you see one of two situations. Either the customer say, “That’s great. You’re putting skin in the game. Let’s go with a hundred K and 10%,” or, 80% of the situations, you might actually want to avoid the outcome-based pricing as a buyer, but you’re not really fixated on the 500K at that point. It is the premium that you’re actually paying for the certainty. So no one is focusing on the 5K because of the hundred K option on the table, and you just put a 500K and got the courage to do that. And in this specific situation, that 500K got negotiated to 400K, and they just 4X the deal compared to where they would be. So having options on the table when you negotiate is critical.

And there’s also some tactics that we showcase in the book, like anchoring is important. If you start high, you’ll also end up higher. And also tapering concessions. How do you give concessions? I mean, the worst negotiators will start by giving a small concession and then give a bit more when someone asks like… You might give a 5% discount, and the procurement guy says, “That’s not enough.” “Okay, I’ll give you 10% more.” “Okay, that’s not enough.” “I’ll give you 15.” What are you indicating to the other person? You’re just basically indicating that I can keep beating you up and I can get more discounts.

The best negotiators who taper the concessions. So they would say, “I can give you 15%.” “Okay, I need more.” “I’ll give you five.” “I need more.” “I’ll give you two.” So you’re automatically indicating to the other person that the negotiation’s actually ending. So how do you taper concessions also become important.

So when you put all of these three things together, if you master your gives and gets, you get better at value selling, and you use the right negotiation strategy, you can extract full value from every deal. That’s probably way more important when you’re at the scale-up phase.

Lenny Rachitsky: This is such great advice. I love that this is just one small chapter of your book. This could make or break your company. It’s interesting that you have a whole thing on negotiation in a book about scaling innovation and growing your company. Is the assumption here that your pricing and monetization is so impacted by how well you negotiate because that changes your entire pricing structure and how much you’re making? Is that why you put so much effort into this part?

Attribution and Pricing Power

Madhavan Ramanujam: Exactly. I mean, in a B2B situation, you can set all the pricing you want, come up with great pricing models. But at least even today, it’s a human having a human conversation trying to negotiate. So if you cannot contextualize what you put on the table, how do you negotiate around value, how do you contextualize your price, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

So to us, negotiations is yet another monetization topic where you’re thinking about it as extracting full value from every deal. And this is not just negotiation tactics, like keep your boss at home and just negotiate and things like that. This is actual negotiation strategies that are rooted on value selling, gives and gets, and focusing on extracting full value from every deal.

Lenny Rachitsky: So useful. This idea of throwing out a third higher priced option, say 500K, it’s so interesting. Because usually the advice I hear is like, “Just throw out twice the number you used to… ” Just put it out there just in case, which is really scary to ask for like, “What about $50,000?” And this is like a much less scary way of doing that. “Okay, but we also have this 500K option. Here’s what you get.” And then they may be like, “Oh, that’s exactly what we want.” And you’re like, “Oh, wow. It worked.”

Redefining the POC

Madhavan Ramanujam: Exactly. It’s a very simple hack to get your courage.

Lenny Rachitsky: That is so cool.

Pricing Your POC Smartly

Madhavan Ramanujam: Put a good price point.

Handling Budget Pushback

Lenny Rachitsky: Wow, this is awesome. This is just like a golden nugget within golden nuggets of advice. Okay. So you have nine strategies. We’ve covered two. Let’s not get into them, but just what are a few more just so people know what else they might be able to learn?

Madhavan Ramanujam: Sure. We talk about how to land and expand, as in how to design your best free product in such a way that you are landing, but also expanding. We talk about things like how to have the right packaging strategy, how to stop churn before it happens, how to do price increases effectively. Because at some point in your scale-up journey, you need to increase price, but how do you do that meaningful fashion?

So we have various strategies that apply both for the startup and the scale-up phase. But in combination, all of those things help you articulate and architect towards profitable growth.

Risks of Low Price Anchoring

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. Okay. Let’s talk about AI for a bit. A lot of your book is about how AI pricing is very different from other previous traditional pricing strategies. And it feels like every company wants to be an AI company these days, so I think this is going to apply to a lot of people. How is AI pricing different?

Madhavan Ramanujam: Yeah, AI pricing is very different from the previous vintage of companies. Why is that so? Because AI founders need to tackle monetization from the very early days, like day one in their seed stage pre-seed kind of thing, which was not probably the focus for the previous SaaS companies. Why is that? So because of two reasons.

One, for the first time there’s cost dynamics to actually navigate. So you need to think about monetization from day one. But there’s also a more critical reason, which is value capture. Because with AI products, you’re actually bringing a lot of value to the table. And if you don’t capture that from day one, then you’re training your customers to expect more for less.

So for instance, think about this. If you’re building a agentic AI product that taps into labor budgets, labor budgets are 10X compared to software budgets. So if you use all the old playbooks, then you’re under monetizing, again, from day one and training your customers to expect more for less. So how do you come up with foundational models that actually allow you to capture the value that you bring to the table?

And why has this become critical? Because with AI, finally, founders can really solve the attribution problem. In the previous vintages… For instance, if you take Slack, you can say that the productivity went up, efficiency happened, but you cannot measure it, monitor it, attribute it to Slack. Okay, that’s probably why they were in a seed-based pricing model.

But in today’s situations, you see companies that say, “In a Fortune 100 company, I was able to improve throughput by 10%, reduce crap by 5%.” And when you get into those kinds of situation where an AI is creating core value and it’s attributable to the AI, you get a lot of pricing power.

So the two questions that we commonly hear from AI founders is, “How do I set the right pricing model?” as in, “How do I charge?” which becomes way more important than how much you charge. Because the underlining business model has changed. We have moved from software being a pay for access to now you’re paying for work delivered. So the monetization model’s become key. That is the first question that people actually ask us.

The second one is, “How do I navigate POCs, commercial discussions early?” Because the buyer on the other side also wants to see the value before they engage in a commercial discussion.” So those two topics become very critical, and we have showcased a lot of this in the book.

Pricing Matrix: Attribution vs. Autonomy

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Let’s talk about this POC piece because I think this is something a lot of people deal with. And then I want to talk about this two-by-two that you have in the book. And I’ll actually pull it up. So let’s talk about POCs first.

Golden Quadrant: Outcome-Based Pricing

Madhavan Ramanujam: So POCs, when we talk about POCs, many founders think about a POC as a proof of technical functionality, and is their product actually working in their customer environments. And they set up the expectation that we are saying, “Hey, we are going to put the product, and we’re going to see if it actually works.” And they would probably say, “Should I charge for a POC versus not?” And we’ll unpack that in a bit, should you or should you not.

And that’s actually a completely wrong way of framing it. The POC should be framed as the entire goal of the POC is to create a business case, period, full stop. It is not to demonstrate product functionality fit within your customer environment’s ability to integrate. All of that stuff is a consequence of the business case.

So if you frame it this way is you can say, “Look, it is a 30-day pilot for co-creating an ROI model and building a business case along with their users. If we see value at the end of the 30 days based on the business case, we can get to commercial discussions.” So that way you’ve actually not talked about your price. You’re only focused on co-creating a business case with the customer. And based on the business case, you can actually come up with a proper commercial agreement. And if they see value, they’re going to pay you for it. So thinking about the POCs in that kind of manner.

And the question that I often get asked is, “Should I charge for a POC?” And the answer is yes, but smartly. Let’s talk about why it’s important to charge. The reason you need to charge for a POC is you start isolating people who are just tire kickers versus serious buyers. It becomes a lead qualification mechanism. If you didn’t have that, you’re going to attract all of these curious buyers who are just curious about AI. They just want to see if it works or not. They will say, “Yes, I’ll engage with the POC.” They will take 30, 60, 90 days with you. They will burn a lot of resources, never buy. You’ve just wasted your time. Time is of the essence. So having a price tag to your POC actually indicates that there is seriousness on both sides, so you should charge.

But how do you actually charge for it? You need to charge for it smartly. What this means is that you need to make sure that your POC pricing is not a reflection of your actual commercial deal. Because let’s say if you just say it’s a 10K POC for a 30-day pilot. If you don’t talk about the fact that it is not the same as your commercial discussion, you have now set an anchor that, okay, it’s 120K per year kind of deal if the POC works. So you have to be clear that the 10K is only for building a business case. Commercial discussions will follow after that. It is not an indication of the actual commercial discussion.

But your buyer on the other side might still push you saying, “That’s all great, but I need a price or a budget, otherwise I won’t move forward with it.” So there are two ways to actually deflect those kind of questions. The first way is contextualize the price on the value. So you can say something like, if you’re pushed for price, “Hey, for customers such as yours, we have been able to at least unlock 10 million in very similar situations. And our pricing is… One is to 10X when it comes to ROI.”

So you basically said that you’re a million dollars to actually get started, but you actually didn’t say it. You just said, “It’s a 10 million, and I’m taking one in 10 in exchange for it.” So you’ve given the buyer an indication, but you’ve framed it in such a manner that actually is justifiable, right? A one in 10X ROI. So that’s one way to do it.

They might still say, “Yeah, that’s good, but I need a budget.” So then rather than just give them a budget saying, “It could be a 200K option,” don’t do that. That’s the worst thing you can actually say. Give them a range. You can say something like, “Look, the final pricing would be anywhere from 500K to a million. And based on the business case that we would co-create with you, we can pick a point in that range that justifies the value that we bring to the table.” So you’re giving budgetary ranges, right? So that’s the other way to actually go about POCs.

So how you navigate your early wins, who you choose is very critical when you’re building companies at scale and fast in AI because that actually dictates the destiny for the rest of your future. And picking those early wins is very, very critical. And having buyers who are serious, lead qualifying, having the right POC process, and thinking about POCs as, frankly, not just trying to see if your product actually works and delivers value, but it’s a great chance to have a commercial test-and-learn experiment and have fun with it and try to see what you can bring to the table in terms of your value and what portion can you actually take.

Canva: Increasing Pricing Power

Lenny Rachitsky: So the core takeaway here is, for AI companies, you no longer can just grow and figure out monetization later. Your advice here is what you start with is what you’re going to end up with, and it’s very easy to under monetize because people aren’t realizing that they’re now helping with actual labor force savings versus just SaaS software that’s making people a little bit more efficient.

Madhavan Ramanujam: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I strongly believe that the winners in AI will need to master monetization, and they need to master it from day one. And when we talk to early-stage founders, it is a topic that keeps many people up at night, but that’s also why we wrote Scaling Innovation and other assets so that they can get some more courage to think about pricing correctly from day one. And it’s become very critical for AI companies to do that.

Intercom Fin’s Pricing Story

Lenny Rachitsky: Do you feel like the popular IDE startups, I won’t name names, do you think they’ve under monetized and they’re going to be in trouble down the road?

Madhavan Ramanujam: Some of them for sure have. I think they will probably run out of it because they might show a lot of, let’s say, fast revenue growth, but is that enduring revenue? Are people actually going to stay? And is there going to be churn? And so there are a lot of aspects to marketing profitable growth. It’s not just growing fast, but also growing profitably and having an enduring business. So some of them, yes, without naming names. But yeah, I think that’s why it’s important to be thoughtful about market share and wallet share.

AI Packaging Strategies

Lenny Rachitsky: Well, those are different. I think what you’re saying here is the retention may not work for some of these companies. But on the other hand, they’re really cheap. 20 bucks a month to help your engineer be 10 times more productive potentially, is that too good a deal? Do you think they should have priced a lot higher?

Madhavan Ramanujam: Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you’re bringing a lot of value to the table and you started training your customers to expect $20 a month and you anchored yourself on a low price point, I think there are companies that have actually done that. And they try to undo it with having more sophisticated, let’s say, products that are actually higher priced or much higher priced, et cetera. That’s one way to undo that situation.

So it’s really a trade-off between getting more customers and making money at the same time. That’s the whole point of the book, market share and wallet share, and how do you dominate both. So if they’re being thoughtful about both and have a vision to not just grow market share, but also have a clear strategy to land and expand and increase wallet share, those strategies might pan out for those types of companies. If you just threw out a $20 product hoping to just accelerate your market share, you’re in trouble.

How Often to Change Pricing

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. This is a great segue to this two-by-two, which goes much deeper into this. So it’s easy to be like, “Here’s what you shouldn’t do.” Here’s your advice on what to actually do. So I’m going to pull up on my screen this two-by-two that you have in your book. So if you’re watching YouTube, you’ll be able to see it.

So talk about this. This is essentially how to figure out the best possible pricing model and where you have the most power.

Madhavan Ramanujam: So when you talk about AI companies and monetization models, we get asked this question. “Should I be usage-based? Should I be outcome? Should I be a copilot mode? Or how do I actually think about my pricing model?” So we came up with this framework, which is a relatively simple, straightforward framework, but very powerful.

So there are two axes here. One is attribution, and the other one is autonomy. And when you have high attribution and high autonomy, that is when you have high pricing power, and we’ll come back to that in a bit, right?

So let’s take the first bottom-left quadrant. That is the quadrant where your attribution is low and your autonomy is low. In that situation, the best pricing archetype that actually fits is it is actually a seed-based or a subscription model because there’s not much to do about it because you’re not being able to attribute a lot of value to what you bring, but you’re in a copilot mode and you’re not in an autonomous mode, so a seed-based pricing would actually make sense.

But if you’re at that quadrant, the immediate thing to think about is, how do you actually build more attribution and move to the right so that you actually get more pricing power? So if you think about the bottom-right quadrant, those are companies that have actually done that. They can prove more attribution to what they actually bring to the table, but they are still not in a fully autonomous mode, as in there is still humans in the loop.

If you take Cursor, for instance, it definitely improves productivity, can actually bring down the time to actually do code, the attribution is clear, but it’s still in a copilot mode. In those kind of situations, a hybrid pricing model is the best option where you still have a seed-based model for the copilot kind of use case, but you also layer in a consumption model which actually says there are a certain number of AI credits or tokens that can layer in the usage aspects. So if you use more and more, then you’re actually paying more on consumption. So it’s a hybrid model that actually works there.

If you look at the top-left quadrant, those are products that are very autonomous but are not strong on attribution. So these tend to be mostly backend or infrastructure kind of products that are core critical to run businesses, can be autonomous, but they’re not directly impacting the KPIs that businesses are tracking, and hence cannot prove attribution very effectively. So in that situation, you need to be on a pay-for-what-you-consume and a usage-based model. A seed-based model would not make sense because it’s autonomous. There’s no human in the loop. But that’s why you’re also in a usage-based model, saying the more you use it, the more you’re actually charged. And usage becomes a proxy for the value that you bring to the table.

The quadrant that you really want to be in is the golden quadrant, which is the top-right one. That’s the outcome-based pricing model where you have great autonomy and great attribution. And here is where I think AI can be really magical. So this means you’re not only charging for work delivered, but you’re charging for work delivered that was delivered by AI without no humans in the loop. So that becomes more of an outcome-based model situation.

So a classic example here is Intercom for Fin. What they actually do is they charge based on an AI resolution. So if an AI is able to resolve the ticket completely independently without a human in the loop, then they charge for it. If a human intervention is needed, they don’t charge for it. So they’re more on an outcome-based model. Or companies like Charge Flow would charge up to 25% on a charge bag that they’re able to actually recover, because these are core savings that you actually bring to the table based on your AI. It is highly attributable, highly autonomous so you can start moving towards an outcome-based pricing model.

If you look at the state of where AI is today, as of the day of recording this podcast, now, the most popular model is right now a hybrid pricing model. So because this is also expected, because the previous SaaS playbook was usually on the seat-based model, but they’ve all now moved on to at least a hybrid to actually incorporate AI credits and usage, et cetera, about 5% of companies are probably in a true outcome-based pricing model as of today. But those companies, some of the best ones are able to recover 25 to 50% of the value that they actually bring to the table.

In the classic SaaS situation, we used to say if you can charge 10 to 20% of the value, that’s actually great. But in AI, you can actually charge 25 to 50% because it is autonomous, you’re doing it with the AI. There’s no humans in the loop. You are creating incremental value to the business metrics. You are producing hard-cost savings. There’s opportunity costs. You can justify all of that. It’s attributable. So you can actually take 25 to 50% of what you bring to the table.

In a lot of benchmarks and studies that actually show, and this is also my belief, that in the next three years that 5% number will move to 25%. So what this really means is if you want to win in AI, figure out a way to get to that quadrant because that’s a magic quadrant. If you can truly price based on outcomes, you’ve achieved and unlock tremendous value.

Warren Buffett on Pricing Power

Lenny Rachitsky: Wow. Okay. I’m just going to pause again. This is amazing. Madhavan, thank you so much for it. I love, again, that you just spent years, decades studying this stuff, come here, tell us all the answers of what we should be doing. This is incredible.

Let me ask you this. By the way, for folks not watching on YouTube, the companies you have in the golden quadrant, outcome-based pricing, Sierra, Fin, and Chargeflow. We’ve got the founder of Sierra and Fin coming on the podcast soon, so we’ll talk about all this with those guys.

Madhavan Ramanujam: Awesome.

Scaling Innovation Axioms

Lenny Rachitsky: So is the way to use this two-by-two figuring out your model? Is it like, “Okay, I’m like Cursor. I’m going to go in this quadrant,” or is it, “How do I get to outcome-based no matter what? That’s where I need to be”?

Preventing Churn Before It Happens

Madhavan Ramanujam: Yeah, so that’s a great question. The first one is to actually figure out what is your right archetype based on where you are today. I think that is most important. If you try to rush into an outcome-based pricing model but cannot prove attribution, you will fail. So it is really coming up with what is the right archetype based on what I’m doing today, but also use this two-by-two to say, “How do I paint a vision to actually get to outcome based? And can I get close to that? Or can I be purely an outcome-based model? How do I evolve into that?”

What that would mean is, how do I build functionality in the products to actually show attribution, how do I build more agentic workforces to take the human out of the loop and be more autonomous, and being thoughtful about your vision and strategy so that you will orient yourself towards more outcome-based pricing models. So when you think about increasing attribution, that means, first of all, understanding what are the KPIs of your customers. How do they track their business performance? Can you impact it? Can you productize things in your product that showcase that you are actually affecting those KPIs in a positive manner? Can you build dashboards to show value attribution? Can you do those value audits that we talked about on an ongoing basis to actually show that you’re bringing a lot of value to the table and is attributable to you? So how do you create these kind of attribution mechanisms become important and also autonomous based on building more agentic workforces that can actually be on an autonomous mold?

So pick the right archetype and plan to get to as close as you can to the outcome-based pricing model. That’s how I would use the two-by-two. And you actually kind of see this happening with certain industries, right? If you think about coding as a overall category… Like back in the day with GitHub, everyone, they started with a seed-based model. They’ve now moved to the hybrid-based pricing model with Cursors and everyone else, but the natural move would be more towards a outcome-based pricing model where a AI agent can probably code everything at the same time, debug it, and you’re kind of almost hiring a AI developer or AI QA person. And that actually becomes more closer to a outcome-based model because it’s attributable and autonomous. So that is picking the right archetype and then figuring out your pathway is the key way to interpret this two-by-two.

Implementation and Scaling

Lenny Rachitsky: This explains why everyone’s pulling agents. That’s where the money’s at, what you’re telling us here.

Madhavan Ramanujam: Yeah. It’s going to be the age of The Matrix. Too many agents.

Biggest Lessons for Founders

Lenny Rachitsky: Agent Smiths everywhere. They didn’t turn out too great. So what I’m hearing is if I were Canva… So Canva here in your model is bottom right. They’re in a hybrid pricing model. They have a base fee and consumption fee. What you would do if you were helping Canva is what can you build that creates more autonomy, an autonomous version of Canva? And it’s not like you need to do this. It’s just you have more pricing power if you figure something out there.

Madhavan Ramanujam: Exactly. And a good case for that is the Fin product from Intercom. Because traditionally, all of those kind of companies used to price based on an agent basis. How many customer service agents are actually using the product? It used to be seed based, but they built out Fin, which is a completely AI resolution for those kind of support tickets. And then that actually enables them to move to the outcome-based pricing model quadrant.

Recap and Recommendations

Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. So say you’re an AI founder today. You’re thinking about your pricing strategy, your monetization strategy long term. Your advice is work with design partners, create these POCs where you work on this ROI model with them to ideally find some outcome-based pricing strategy. Is that a good way to summarize it? What would you add to that?

Latest Favorite Products

Madhavan Ramanujam: Yes. I mean, at least be able to contextualize the business case. Even if you’re not moving to an outcome-based pricing model, be clear on the outcome that you’re actually creating for your customers through that business case, which actually will enable you to charge a fair price in exchange for that outcome. And if your customers agree with the business case, then you can actually take a portion of that.

A Personal Life Motto

Lenny Rachitsky: Fin, actually, they’re a new sponsor of the podcast, and I learned… I didn’t know this. It costs 99 cents for every support ticket they solve [inaudible 00:49:51].

Shifting to Early AI Investing

Madhavan Ramanujam: Through AI.

Lenny Rachitsky: Through AI.

Outro and Acknowledgments

Madhavan Ramanujam: Exactly. If it needs a human intervention, then they don’t charge for it.

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. And it’s just like, what? That’s such a simple story. Your agent costs 20 bucks. This thing costs 99 cents

Madhavan Ramanujam: Yeah. That is two chapters in one beautifully simple pricing and an outcome-based pricing model.

Lenny Rachitsky: And interestingly, they were the most hated pricing model initially. I did a survey on Twitter ones, like, “What products do you pay the most for?” and it was always Intercom. And everyone hated their pricing, and they found a solution.

Madhavan Ramanujam: I think they found a great solution.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. So is there anything else along these lines that you think companies, especially AI companies, should be thinking when they’re thinking about pricing that you’d want to share before we move on to other stuff?

Madhavan Ramanujam: I think we’ve covered most of the topics. Like we said, it’s being thoughtful about POCs, choosing the right pricing archetype or the pricing models. Those things become very critical in the early stages. But when you start scaling and, let’s say, you become a multi-product company, then you need to start focusing on, “What kind of packaging strategy should I have? Is it a platform plus add-ons? Should I have versions of the products like good, better, best? Should I tackle different use cases because now my AI can solve an insurance use case and a healthcare use case? Should I productize to different use cases? Is that my packaging strategy? Or should I keep it completely modularized for people to pick and choose?”

So these kind of questions become more critical, and that’s why the chapter on blowing up your packaging from your early days and coming up with your packaging strategy for your scale-up phase become very critical. So I think that’s the next thing that founders would be hit with, as in when they build multiple products, they need to think about the whole packaging, cross-selling, up-selling motion.

Lenny Rachitsky: This touches on something I was about to ask, which is a change in your pricing strategy. How often is it a success to change the way you price? I know we’re talking about you need to get it right from the beginning if you’re an AI company. In your experience, how often… What does it take to successfully shift the way you price down the road if people are listening to this and are like, “Shit, we already have this pricing strategy”?

Madhavan Ramanujam: Back in the day, we used to say that you should revisit your pricing strategy, overall pricing model, how much you’re charging at least once in two years. With AI, that’s probably reduced in half because of the scale with which and the speed with which companies are built and competing.

So I would say that it is an ongoing journey. It is not like you just solve it in day one, fill it, and forget it. You have to be thoughtful from day one, but also be ready to pivot, iterate, and you’re going to learn along your journey. So the whole point is to think about pricing as also a test-and-learn opportunity in your early days.

And there are things that you would change more often, and there are things that you probably don’t want to change too often. Things like pricing model, unless you really changed your attribution autonomy, there is no need to shift your pricing model. Stay within that archetype. Don’t confuse things.

But there are things like price points. Should I increase my price because it’s been six months a year? Yeah, you should. Because in a year there’s probably prices go up three to 5% for everything that you consume. But how can you actually increase your prices and be thoughtful about it? So that entire chapter on how to do price increases smartly become very important in the scale-up phase.

I think Warren Buffett summarized this really well. He said the true definition of a company is a pricing power. And if you have a prayer session for doing a 10% price increase, you have a terrible business. So you have to be able to increase prices over a bit of time. But how do you do it strategically that does not affect too much churn, but you’re also able to pass on the increase as a value exchange, those things become critical.

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. Zooming out a little bit, something that I love about your book is you structured it around these axioms. You have a bunch of these really clever axioms that get stuck in your head and help you think about pricing. Can you share some of your favorites, maybe two or three referred axioms from the book?

Madhavan Ramanujam: You talked about Sierra being in your park founders. I don’t know if that’s Clay, but here’s a shout-out for Clay. So Clay actually read the entire book and gave me feedback, Scaling Innovation, the similar copy that he actually had. I called it Scaling Innovation Axioms throughout the book. And the whole point of the axioms was that at the end of the day, if you can just take all the axioms, put it in a printout next to your desk is the summary of the book. And it’s like PT statements that you’ll just remember what to do.

So he came up with this idea that, “Hey, rather than calling them just generic scaling innovation axioms, you need to brand each and every axiom.” And I thought that was a brilliant idea. So I went about coming up with a unique… He even contributed to some of the names. We came up with some unique names for each axiom.

And here’s the other fun fact. Probably I’m geeking out too much. But when I counted the number of axioms, there were 42 axioms. And I didn’t try to make this up. And if you’re a Hitchhiker’s fan, then you know that’s the answer to everything.

But jokes apart, let me unpack a few axioms. One of my first favorite axioms, what I call is the 20-80 axiom. Especially in tech companies, 20% of what you build drives 80% of the willingness to pay. But the irony is that the 20% is the easiest thing to build often. So what founders do is they take this 20%, build it, put it out in the market almost for free, and then they’re chasing their tails to build 80% stuff that’s only driving 20% willingness to pay. So if you have not been thoughtful about that, you’ve given the farm away unintentionally.

So truly understanding what drives willingness to pay in your product is critical. And I think people call it the MVP. I think we should change the definition of MVP. It shouldn’t be minimum viable product, it should be the most valuable product. And be thoughtful about what are you actually giving out as your early products I think is key. That’s the 20-80 axiom.

Probably my second one is the price paralysis axioms. So what that means is your reluctance to do a price increase is often internal and emotional and it’s not external and logical. This goes back to the same prayer session to actually do a price increase. If you’re holding hands, you have a terrible business. So it’s mostly internal and emotional, and how do you be thoughtful about price increases become important.

Probably my third favorite one is stopping churn before it happens, so stopping churn axiom. So to stop churn, you need to attract customers who won’t leave. That sounds counterintuitive, but that’s the best way to actually stop churn. What does this actually mean? Most companies will try to stop churn when someone actually says, “I want to go.” It is too late, and you’re being reactive. At the most, you’ll throw some offers. They will stay for another six months, and they will leave. They’ve already made that determination.

The way to stop churn is to start acquiring customers who won’t leave. And that is the most important thing. So if you look back at your data and say, “Who are the types of customers who actually tend to stay longer? What are their characteristics? How can I focus my acquisition dollars in getting more of those?” then you stop churn before it happens. And that’s the key.

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s interesting. I’m surprised you didn’t say what was my favorite, which is… I think it’s like, “If you land, make sure to expand.”

Madhavan Ramanujam: Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: That one really stuck with me.

Madhavan Ramanujam: That’s a good one, too.

Lenny Rachitsky: Maybe talk about that one. Yeah.

Madhavan Ramanujam: Sure. I mean, so if you land, you need to also make sure you’re expanding, in the sense that if you give the farm away in your entry-level product, you don’t have much to actually monetize later. So being thoughtful about what is the fence between your land product. Is it a free experience? What is the getting? And the getting is typically based on are you getting based on features? Are you also getting on usage? And how do you be thoughtful about that? So you leave stuff for the expansion.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. So zooming out even further, to kind of wrap up, what would you say is the biggest lesson you want founders to take away that they think they understand but they probably don’t?

Madhavan Ramanujam: Yeah, I think this comes back to what you started with. I think intuitively people get it that they need to think about market share and wallet share if they’re growing. And even if you ask them, they’ll say like, “Yeah, yeah, I’m thinking about wallet share,” but have they really thought about it equally and paid equal attention? Have they postponed one of them? Are they operating in a single-engine strategy consciously or subconsciously? I think that’s the key takeaway I have.

So the contrarian take is not to put equal effort on both the engines at the same time. In certain stages of your company, you might need to be more market share dominating. In certain stages you might need to be wallet share dominating. It’s not equal effort, but it’s equal attention and really developing that mindset of being a true profitable growth architect. And that is the main takeaway that I have for people. And if you are not in that mindset already, there’s a book for you.

Lenny Rachitsky: I’ll point them to it. So just so folks know what to do when they’re like, “Okay, I need to focus on wallet share more,” is the main focus figure out a pricing model that aligns well with pricing power, what’s in the bucket of work to do to invest more in wallet-share thinking?

Madhavan Ramanujam: So it’s actually all of those. Market share, wallet share, acquisition, monetization, retention are all kind of correlated. You can’t think about them in isolation. So I wouldn’t say only for wallet share what do you need to do. If you want to grow on both the market share and wallet share… Let’s say, for instance, you need to have the right land-and-expand strategy. The land helps you with acquisition. The expansion helps you with wallet share.

If you have a pricing model, then you need to have a pricing model that lets you acquire faster because it’s intuitive, but it should also help you recover value, which is like your monetization. And if people understand your pricing model, they’re actually going to stay. So it’s all sort of goes hand in hand. So I wouldn’t isolate thinking one way or the other. That’s why the nine strategies actually are very powerful. Because if you follow those strategies, you are not going to fall into the single-engine strap. These are tried and tested strategies of how to build businesses in such a way that you’re being thoughtful and paying equal attention to both market share and wallet share.

Lenny Rachitsky: All right. That is a very reasonable answer. Madhavan, is there anything else you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to a very exciting lightning round?

Madhavan Ramanujam: Read the two books in sequence, Monetizing Innovation and Scaling Innovation. Because it’s one thing to build a great product, it’s yet another thing to build a great business. You cannot build a great business with a not-so-great product, and you cannot do it the other way around either. So I think it’s thinking about pricing early, especially for AI companies, being thoughtful about it, price before product, and then thinking about how to actually scale, developing a profitable growth mindset. All of these things become critical. And I’m looking forward to the feedback from the audience.

Lenny Rachitsky: I feel like your books are in the staple of founder reading. There’s all these things you just don’t know what you’re doing. And there’s a few of these books that are like, “Okay, here’s all this advice that’ll answer so many questions and save you so much heartache.” And so I’m really excited you’re adding something to that bookshelf. With that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

Madhavan Ramanujam: Okay. Let’s go.

Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s go. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

Madhavan Ramanujam: The first one that comes to mind is Business Model Canvas by Alex Osterwalder. It’s a classic and one of my favorite books. I recommend a lot of people to read that because I think it nicely ties a lot of what we are also seeing from a more strategic business model angle.

I like this book, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. I think that’s also a classic because, again, there’s always a human element to things. And understanding the customer psychology is important whether you’re in B2C or in B2B. Because if you’re in a B2B situation, it’s humans having a human conversation. So it’s as much behavioral as it’s actually numbers. So I love that book, and there’s a lot of nuggets in there, so I recommend a lot.

And probably the third one that I recommend is a book called Contagious by Jonah Berger. I love that. He was in the PhD program at Stanford in marketing, and he actually wrote this book on how to make messages viral. And he’s actually seen the best viral messages and boiled it down to a framework. And if you follow that, then you can make those messages viral. And I’ve tried to use some of those in my own outreaches and things of that nature, so I think it’s a fantastic read.

Lenny Rachitsky: Wow.

Madhavan Ramanujam: Have you read it?

Lenny Rachitsky: Got to check this out. I have not. I haven’t even heard of it. All right. We’re going to go viral because we got the playbook.

Madhavan Ramanujam: Contagious. That’s the name of the book.

Lenny Rachitsky: Contagious. Okay. We’ll link to that. Is there a recent movie or TV show you’ve really enjoyed?

Madhavan Ramanujam: I guess a movie. Sure, let’s pick a movie. Definitely enjoyed Mission Impossible, the final one, eighth in the sequence. I think I find that a whole… I love those, the entire genre, one through eight. But what I kind of like about it is my willingness to pay has constantly increased over a period of time. They could have charged me whatever they wanted for the eighth movie. I would’ve probably gone and seen it, when I wanted to. So I thought that’s an interesting example of a durable brand where your monetization power actually increase over a period of time. So I think I enjoyed the movie. It was great. Yeah.

Hey, by the way, I just realized MI stands for Monetizing Innovation and also Mission Impossible. Maybe subconsciously that’s why I liked it, too.

Lenny Rachitsky: And you’re the Tom Cruise character.

Madhavan Ramanujam: Yeah, exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: I love how you’re the only person in the world that thinks of Mission Impossible through a monetization, willingness-to-pay lens.

Madhavan Ramanujam: Exactly. I think there’s too many of these dinner conversations also gravitate towards pricing and monetization. I think it’s become my life.

Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, man. We need a version of this movie, like a Mission Possible of Madhavan.

Madhavan Ramanujam: Sure.

Lenny Rachitsky: I’d pay anything for that. All right. Next question. Do you have a favorite product you’ve recently discovered that you really love?

Madhavan Ramanujam: I would probably talk about two products. The first one is Delphi, the Digital Mind representation. There’s a Lennybot that you actually, I think, put out. I find that product fascinating, and I also love the founders, Dara and Sam there. I truly believe that that is going to be the future for thought leadership and how thoughts are consumed by consumers.

And I’ve used your Lennybot. I really enjoy it, like if I can co-create some thought leadership piece with talking to you, but it’s not you, your AI, and it’s actually living and breathing your brain. How cool is that? And I think that I really love the product category. There’s a lot of different use cases, longevity, extension, use cases, things of that nature. I’m excited about the product. I think it’s been great. I plan to, taking inspiration from you, plan to create a Delphi of myself-

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. I was going to ask.

Madhavan Ramanujam: … at some point.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay.

Madhavan Ramanujam: I think it should be [inaudible 01:05:17]-

Lenny Rachitsky: So that one would… Yeah.

Madhavan Ramanujam: … the book maybe. I’ll try to. That’s the promise. Try to keep it ready. So I think if you want to talk more about the book or things of that nature and talk pricing, you can talk to my AI, too, right? I mean, I find the product fascinating.

The second one I would probably say that’s been super useful in terms of just productivity is Granola. We love that product. I think just the ability to take notes and during all the meetings and organize it and being able to query things, et cetera. I think it’s been a great product that we recently started trying and we’ve been really liking it.

Lenny Rachitsky: Cool. That’s been the most mentioned product recently. How cool is that? Love Granola. Get a year free of Granola if you’re a paid subscriber to my newsletter, lennysnewsletter.com. Click bundle, one year free for not just you, your whole team. What an offer they offered. It’s crazy.

On Delphi, what’s interesting about LennyBot is it’s not just my knowledge, it’s every single podcast guest’s insights and lessons also fed into it. What an oracle of knowledge this thing’s become. And it’s free at this point, completely free. Lennybot.com. No, I get nothing from it. It’s just out there.

Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to and find useful in work or in life?

Madhavan Ramanujam: Create value in everything and anything that you touch. Everything else will follow. That’s my life motto.

Lenny Rachitsky: That resonates deeply. Okay, last question. You recently moved into investing. So what’s cool is it used to be very expensive to work with at Simon-Kucher, I think it was called. Very expensive. A lot of big company stuff. Now a lot of more founders have access to you because you’re investing in startups. So just talk about that. Talk about what you’re doing these days.

Madhavan Ramanujam: Sure. I mean, at Simon-Kucher, I got to work with over 250 companies. And my co-GP now, Josh Bloom, he also had an opportunity to work with our 250 companies. So combined, we worked with our 500 companies, more than 50-plus unicorns. It was a great ride.

And often, we were actually working with them in much later stages when series D or pre-IPO, post-IPO, private equity companies, et cetera. But the two of us actually now started a venture firm with an explicit goal of working with early-stage AI founders. And it goes back to the topic that we started with. AI companies needs to deal with monetization from day one. But for those kind of companies, fee-for-service transaction model doesn’t necessarily work. And that’s also why we pivoted to venture.

So our business model is pretty standard right now. You get access in the cap table. We roll up our sleeves and work with the founders in all things monetization. So we are invested in their success and we will partake in the value creation. There’s no fee for service, no friction on those kind of manners. But on the flip side, we get to concentrate our efforts in fund one and probably 20 to 25 companies, and that’s where we will be spending our time.

Lenny Rachitsky: What a deal. Madhavan, two final questions. Where can folks find you if they want to reach out and talk about this offer? And how can listeners be useful to you?

Madhavan Ramanujam: Ways to find out, I think just google for Monetizing Innovation and Scaling Innovation. You’ll probably land in a lot of pages. You can also go to Amazon, I think, if you want to purchase the books. Actually, Scaling Innovation is now available in pre-order. I think we’ll have the pod released before the book is actually out. The book is going to be out on August 5th. So there’s an opportunity to pre-order.

And maybe I will take an inspiration from your master bundle, which I really think is the world’s best bundle, and come up with my own bundle for getting users to pre-order. So if you love Monetizing Innovation, I can tell you you would really love Scaling Innovation. So go buy it for your teams. Buy it for yourself.

And here’s the offer. So for anyone who’s able to buy more than five copies, send us a screenshot of your purchase pre-order, right? Send us a screenshot of your purchase to promo@49palmsvc.com. So that’s promo, as in promotion, @49 P-A-L-M-S-V-C .com.

And here’s the bundle offer that I have. 10 people will get access to bundles as a raffle, and the bundle is going to include a signed copy of Scaling Innovation, a 30-minute ask-me-anything session, an exclusive invite for a Scaling Innovation book launch, and also a Scaling Innovation t-shirt. So that’s my coming up with a bundle. I didn’t get Granola and others to put in for me just yet, but I think this hopefully suffices and is exciting for folks to buy.

And, yeah. I mean if you like the book, please do leave a review on Amazon. That always is helpful. Because if more people review it, the book takes a life of its own. And I’m really thankful for also the support that I got over the years from founder community, from the venture community for Monetizing Innovation. I think there’s been, over the last eight years, thousands and thousands of fans of the books. They’ve done a whole lot talking about it, writing reviews, posting on LinkedIn, and making things like price before product or product market price fit and things as a part of founder vocabulary. So I’m very passionate that people actually did that and very thankful for them. So there’s also probably an equal measure. If you’re excited about Scaling Innovation, I would love for you to talk about the book.

Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. And I think the reason people do that is because you give away so much for free. You just shared so much wisdom for free that is going to help so many people, so it all comes back to you.

Madhavan Ramanujam: I just tried to plan my give and get right there.

Lenny Rachitsky: There we go. Oh my God. A good callback. Madhavan, this was incredible. Thank you so much for being here.

Madhavan Ramanujam: Thank you so much, Lenny. Was a pleasure.

Lenny Rachitsky: Same. Bye, everyone.

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Glossary

English	中文
20-80 axiom	20-80 公理
acquisition	获客
affirmation loops	确认循环（affirmation loops）
agentic AI	代理式 AI（agentic AI）
Alex Osterwalder	人名保留原文
attribution	归因（attribution）
attribution problem	归因问题
autonomy	自主性（autonomy）
beautifully simple pricing	美观简洁的定价（beautifully simple pricing）
Bill Gurley	人名保留原文
business case	商业案例
Business Model Canvas	商业模式画布
cap table	cap table
churn	流失（churn）
Clay	人名保留原文
community builder archetype	社区建设者（community builder）原型
consumption model	消费模型（consumption model）
Contagious	《疯传》
cost dynamics	成本动态
cross-selling	交叉销售
Dara	人名保留原文
Delphi	产品名保留原文
disruptor archetype	颠覆者（disruptor）原型
gives and gets	让与索取（gives and gets）
GP	GP（General Partner）
Granola	产品名保留原文
hybrid pricing model	混合定价模型（hybrid pricing model）
Jonah Berger	人名保留原文
Josh Bloom	人名保留原文
labor budget	劳动力预算
land and expand	落地和扩展（land and expand）
lead qualification mechanism	线索甄别机制
Lenny Rachitsky	人名保留原文
Lennybot	产品名保留原文
Madhavan Ramanujam	人名保留原文
market share	市场份额（market share）
monetization	变现
Monetizing Innovation	书名保留原文
moneymaker archetype	赚钱者（moneymaker）原型
outcome-based pricing model	基于结果的定价模型（outcome-based pricing model）
packaging strategy	打包策略
pay for access	为使用权限付费
pay for work delivered	为交付的工作成果付费
pay-for-what-you-consume	按用量付费（pay-for-what-you-consume）
POC	概念验证（POC）
price paralysis	价格瘫痪（price paralysis）
price premium paradox	价格溢价悖论（price premium paradox）
pricing power	定价权
profitable growth architect	盈利增长架构师
Rahul	人名保留原文
retention	留存
ROI model	ROI 模型
Sam	人名保留原文
Scaling Innovation	书名保留原文
seat-based pricing	按席位定价（seat-based pricing）
Simon-Kucher	机构名保留原文
Superhuman	产品名保留原文
Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow	《思考，快与慢》
tire kicker	凑热闹的人（tire kicker）
unicorn	独角兽
up-selling	向上销售
value audit	价值审计（value audit）
value capture	价值捕获
value selling	价值销售（value selling）
wallet share	钱包份额（wallet share）
willingness to pay	支付意愿

Reformatted by reformat_english.py

AI 产品定价：来自 400+ 家公司与 50 家独角兽的启示 | Madhavan Ramanujam

访谈实录

嘉宾介绍

重返播客：新书《Scaling Innovation》

为什么写第二本书

核心论点

创业者常见的陷阱

美观简洁的定价策略

掌握谈判技巧

让与索取

价值销售

ROI 模型的三个关键维度

掌握谈判的策略

用定价模型创造选项

锚定与递减让步

AI 定价为何与众不同

归因问题与定价权

重新定义概念验证（POC）

如何聪明地为概念验证（POC）定价

化解预算追问的两种策略

低价锚定的风险

定价模型矩阵：归因与自主性

黄金象限：基于结果的定价

以 Canva 为例：如何提升定价权

Intercom Fin 的定价故事

AI 公司的打包策略

定价策略的调整频率

定价权与沃伦·巴菲特

Scaling Innovation 公理

在流失发生之前阻止它

落地与扩展

创始人最大的教训

总结与推荐

最近最喜欢的产品

人生座右铭

转型投资早期 AI 创业公司

结语与致谢

术语表

Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam

About the Guest

Back on the Show: Scaling Innovation

Why Write a Second Book

The Core Thesis

Common Founder Pitfalls

Clean and Simple Pricing

Mastering Negotiation Skills

Give and Take

Value-Based Selling

Three Key ROI Dimensions

Strategies for Negotiation

Creating Options via Pricing

Anchoring and Diminishing Concessions

Why AI Pricing Differs

Attribution and Pricing Power

Redefining the POC

Pricing Your POC Smartly

Handling Budget Pushback

Risks of Low Price Anchoring

Pricing Matrix: Attribution vs. Autonomy

Golden Quadrant: Outcome-Based Pricing

Canva: Increasing Pricing Power

Intercom Fin’s Pricing Story

AI Packaging Strategies

How Often to Change Pricing

Warren Buffett on Pricing Power

Scaling Innovation Axioms

Preventing Churn Before It Happens

Implementation and Scaling

Biggest Lessons for Founders

Recap and Recommendations

Latest Favorite Products

A Personal Life Motto

Shifting to Early AI Investing

Outro and Acknowledgments

Glossary