Think Big and Launch Small

One of the early entrepreneurial challenges is the need to think big and envision huge success, while also narrowing in on a small but critical wedge to enter the market. Investors want to believe it’ll be a home run, and customers want an immediate solution to an acute problem. Entrepreneurs need to thread that needle.

Fynn Glover at Schematic just launched his new startup, focusing on managing pricing and packaging for B2B software companies. He discusses the development of the idea in his blog post, How to Operate Pricing & Packaging in B2B Software. Here’s how Schematic positions the new product: 

With just a few lines of code, businesses can implement pricing and packaging into any application, end-to-end—from feature delivery through billing and customer experience.

– Quickly roll out new features and tie them to your pricing plans.

– Target specific plans to customers and adjust them without engineering support.

– Experiment, scale, and manage pricing & packaging operations: trials, plans, limits, entitlements, metering usage, handling exceptions, provisioning customers, and embedding front-end purchasing components—all without code changes.

I’ve really enjoyed watching the thinking evolve.  

The initial thesis centered around pricing and packaging as a standalone module that needed to be managed separately from the codebase. After conducting customer discovery to refine and narrow the focus, and following a few iterations, the launch is now focused on B2B software companies that use Stripe for payments. These companies have made enough progress to value flexibility and extensibility in pricing and packaging but aren’t yet locked into massive amounts of custom code to manage it.

The combination of extensive customer discovery and thoughtful iteration is key to the startup-building process. Start with the big idea, then narrow it down to a small but important wedge to enter the market. Go small before going big.

Also, support a fellow entrepreneur and check out Schematic to manage pricing and packaging.