Hello there!
Software pricing is getting out of hand. With that belief, I want to discuss two things: luxury prices and cutting the middle man.
Commodity software charging luxury prices
You see, the cost of software is getting just ridiculous. You start with a freemium plan, and before you know it, you're forced to upgrade to a more expensive tier, and suddenly you're paying a lot more than you expected.
Now, if the software is truly complex, I get that it'll come with a high price tag. But what baffles me is that even when there are several competitors in the market, the prices aren't dropping.
Take scheduling software as an example. By the time I launched NeetoCal, it had 30 competitors. When you have 30 players in a market, and all of them can do the same job, you're in the commodity business. Typically, commodities are priced low. But that's not what's happening here. What I'm seeing is commodity software being priced like it's a luxury item.
NeetoCal, along with the other products we're creating under Neeto, was developed to counter this trend, where commodity software companies feel justified in charging luxury prices.
Growing Neeto with the support of users
Neeto is a startup, and like any business, I want to see it grow and reach more customers. But let's be real—attracting new customers isn't easy. Most companies have entire marketing teams dedicated to running ads on Google, LinkedIn, and other similar sites.
The usual playbook is simple: companies take the money they make from existing customers and funnel it into Google ads to bring in new customers.
I've got two problems with that. First, it never felt right to hand over money to a trillion-dollar company. Second, I'm terrible at marketing. Not only am I not good at it, but I also don't have the energy or interest to keep up with monitoring keyword performance across multiple platforms week after week. It's just exhausting.
So, at Neeto, I decided to do things differently. We're going to price our products in a way that lets our existing customers help us attract new ones, cutting out the middleman. The money that would've gone to Google ads will instead be used to offer our customers lower prices.
Every time a NeetoCal customer shares a booking page, they're helping to spread the word about NeetoCal. Similarly, whenever a NeetoRecord customer shares a video, they're promoting NeetoRecord.
My marketing strategy is simple—offer Neeto products at low prices in exchange for organic, customer-led growth.
All business books say that competing on price is a bad idea. Well, the way I see it, "competing on price" is a core tenant of capitalism. How can you go wrong by "competing on price". I guess we'll find out.
I hope you enjoy using Neeto products, and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].
