Insights from Chris Mele’s Business of Software AMA
Pricing is often treated as an afterthought in SaaS companies. Founders focus on product-market fit, customer acquisition, and engineering scale long before they turn serious attention to monetization. But according to pricing expert Chris Mele, that approach can cost companies millions in unrealized revenue.
So when is the right time to invest in pricing?
Chris Mele, managing partner at Software Pricing Partners, shared his perspective in a recent Business of Software AMA. Drawing from his experience advising over 400 companies on pricing strategy, Chris outlined why pricing shouldn’t be delayed, and what to do instead.
1. You Need a Monetization Strategy Before You Scale
Chris emphasized that pricing is not a one-time decision, but a system. And just like any core system (sales, product, support), it must mature with the business.
“Pricing isn’t something you do once before launch and forget. It’s something that evolves quarter by quarter with product strategy, customer understanding, and value delivery.”
Companies that treat pricing as static usually discover too late that they’ve created confusion, inconsistency, and revenue leakage.
2. The Warning Signs You’re Too Late
Many companies don’t invest in pricing until something breaks:
- Sales teams create custom deals with huge discounts
- List prices are ignored or negotiated away
- Customers are confused by tiers or offerings
- The same product is sold for wildly different prices
Chris calls this the “blood-spatter pattern”: A chaotic map of inconsistent pricing outcomes across customers.
The longer you wait, the more difficult it becomes to standardize and rebuild trust in your pricing.
3. The Ideal Time: Right After Product-Market Fit
According to Chris, the best time to begin investing in pricing is when you’ve confirmed that people want your product and are willing to pay for it. That’s the moment to shift from survival mode to sustainable monetization.
At this point, you can:
- Validate willingness to pay across segments
- Align packaging with actual customer value
- Create pricing logic that scales with growth
“Don’t let your first few customers dictate your pricing forever,” Chris warned. “They may not represent your future market.”
4. Pricing = Product Strategy
Chris argues that pricing is tightly coupled with product strategy. In fact, he often advises companies to design offerings around how they want to package and price them.
“You can’t separate monetization from product. Good pricing drives product clarity and vice versa.”
This means product and pricing teams must collaborate early, not only to set price points, but to determine feature bundles, usage thresholds and customer tiers.
5. Start Small, but Start Smart
You don’t need a pricing PhD to get started. Chris recommends beginning with a few focused questions:
- What are our competitive alternatives?
- How do our best customers measure value?
- Are our current price levels justified by outcomes?
- What’s the path to evolve pricing over the next year?
By treating pricing as a core competency early, you’ll avoid painful repositioning later, and capture more of the value your product already creates.
Key Lessons from Chris Mele’s Talk
- Don’t wait until pricing problems emerge. Get ahead of them early.
- Invest in pricing once product-market fit is validated.
- Collaborate across product, sales, and pricing teams to align monetization strategy.
- Treat pricing as an evolving system, not a set-it-and-forget-it exercise.
- Use real data and customer feedback to guide pricing decisions.
The right time to invest in pricing is sooner than most founders think. Before you scale sales. Before you expand your team. Before you set prices in stone.
Because how you monetize is how you grow.
Want to explore more from Chris Mele’s conversation? Here are a few other standout topics he covered:
- Why Most SaaS Pricing Is Chaotic (And How to Fix It): Based on Chris’s point that net prices vary wildly and erode trust—just like a “blood‑splatter” of deals, explore diagnosing pricing chaos, building pricing systems, and restoring credibility.
- The 3 Fundamental Pricing Errors B2B Software Companies Make: Build on Chris’s experience to outline common pricing missteps, ignoring customer buying behavior, overcomplicating tiers, and failing to enforce list prices. Offer actionable solutions.
- From Proof-of-Concept to Profitable Pricing: A CEO’s Journey: A story of Chris’s own startup pivot, from struggling with monetization to learning the science of pricing after selling to SPP, to emphasize the importance of pricing maturity
- Continuous Monetization: Why Pricing Isn’t a One-Time Project: Chris’s expert advice (via his published articles) to show how pricing should evolve with your product, quarterly adjustments, iterative hypotheses, and value-based packaging .
- Simple vs Precise Pricing: Finding the Balance: Chris highlights between precision (engineer desires) and simplicity (sales needs). Best practices for sweet‑spot pricing that’s easy to sell and profitable
- Decoding Your Real-Pricing Data: Build a Trustworthy Pricing Strategy: How to analyze your transaction data list-to-net spreads, discount variance, customer segments, and use that to inform structured pricing models.
- Packaging Before Pricing: Why Your Product Design Needs a Pricing Lens: Based on Chris’s quote: “design products around their packaging and pricing,” explore product-led and packaging-driven development for better monetization.
- Scaling Pricing for Enterprise: How to Avoid Discounts That Hurt: Highlight pitfalls of enterprise deals with 80%+ discounts and inconsistent price realization. Strategies to structure enterprise pricing sustainably .
Stay tuned. We’ll be unpacking more of these lessons in upcoming blog posts.
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This article draws on excerpts from Chris Mele‘s AMA talk at Business of Software Conference.