Lighthouse update February 9th
During the past week I finished the most important onboarding improvements. For new users it’s now easier to get into Lighthouse. The biggest updates were
- An onboarding email drip which explains the features of Lighthouse
- Feed subscribe changes, now showing a suggestion list of topics and curated feeds, and a search for websites and feeds to subscribe to
The next step becamse clear after talking to users and potential customers.
The insight was that even if the structure and features of Lighthouse are much better for content curation, it doesn’t matter if not all relevant content can be pulled into Lighthouse. This means first and foremost websites that don’t have a feed or newsletter.
So the next feature will be a website to feed conversion. That websites can be subscribed to even if they don’t have a feed or newsletter.
Pricing
Big parts of the indie business community give the advice to charge more. “You’re not charging enough, charge more” is a generic and relatively popular advice. I stopped frequenting these (online) places as much, so I’m not sure they give the same advice in the current environment, but for a long time I read this advice a lot.
I’m sure in some areas this holds true, but I since realized that the content aggregator space is different. It’s a relatively sticky type of product, people don’t like to switch. Even if OPML exports and imports make it easy to move feeds, additional custom features like newsletter subscriptions, rule setups, tags, and so on make it harder to move.
So people rightfully place a risk premium on smaller products. Pricing it close to the big ones is too high, and I now consider this a mistake. So I’m lowering the price from 10€ to 7€ for the premium plan.
Another issue is the 3-part pricing structure. Everyone does it because the big companies do. And maybe at this point the big companies do it because “it’s always been done that way”. But as a small company I don’t yet know where the lines are, which features are important to which customer segment. Therefore I’ll remove the 2nd paid plan, to only have a free and one paid plan.
I’m worried that the pricing changes are seen as erratic, but honestly too few people care yet for this worry to be warranted or important.
What I find interesting is that I’m much more confident on the product side than on the business side. On the one hand this is clear, because I’m a software engineer. But on the other hand I believe it’s also because (software) products are additive. In the sense that features can always be added. For pricing there is always one. The more time I have the more features I can add, so the only decision is what to do first. For pricing it doesn’t matter how much time I have, I must always choose between one or the other. It doesn’t really have a consequence, but I found it an interesting meta-thought.