TLDR: Talk price with customers while the product is still a sketch. The teams that win ask what buyers will pay first, then build only the things people already agreed were worth paying for.
Most products fail because nobody priced them before the build
I have sat on both sides of the table, as an operator shipping products and as an investor deciding which teams to back. The failure that ends the most companies arrives quietly. A team spends a year building, launches with confidence, and only then learns the market will not pay what the business model always needed. By that point the roadmap is set, the burn is real, and the pricing lever has almost no travel left.
The scale of this is not anecdotal. Simon-Kucher, the pricing and growth advisory firm, found that 72% of innovations fail to meet their financial targets or fail entirely. Their partners Madhavan Ramanujam and Georg Tacke wrote the definitive account of why in Monetizing Innovation. Their core argument reads as an instruction: design the product around the price, and hold the willingness-to-pay (WTP) conversation at the beginning of development rather than at the end.
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