🗞 What's New: Psychology-backed pricing hacks

A few simple tweaks to your website can help increase your sales:

• Pricing your product successfully requires considering human psychology around buying things. Use price anchoring, charm pricing, and bundles.
• These two tips can make marketing easier: You don't have to shout to sell, and build something you can spend a lot of time talking about.
• Leaving his VC-backed startup to go full-time on his side project required Andris Reinman to sell his stock to create runway. He's now at $45K ARR.

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by Jordan Ostrikoff

These simple tweaks on your website could increase your sales.

Price anchoring

Have you ever gone to buy a car and the salesperson shows you something way out of your price range? Then, the next car they show you has similar features, but is less expensive?

That's price anchoring. If you show the most expensive package first, your other packages will seem like a good deal in comparison.

List the most expensive bundle or products first on your website. If you don't have an expensive product, make one. Not only will you sell more of your other products, but you will also have customers who buy the expensive thing, because it's expensive.

Charm pricing

Have you ever gone into a store and noticed that every price has a "99" behind it? $4.99, $9.99, etc. The prices never have a zero behind them.

That’s charm pricing. When your brain sees a number, it processes that information fast. If there are smaller numbers behind the first number, the first number feels bigger. But, if there are larger numbers behind the first number, the first number will feel smaller.

You increase perceived value if you price your product at $10.99 vs. $10. If you go on Apple's website right now, you will see that every iPhone price ends with a 9.

Make sure the last numbers of your price are bigger than the first.

Bundles

You're watching late night TV, and you see a commercial offering 11 knives for $39.99. They tell you that the entire set is actually worth $250, but you can take advantage of the special bundle pricing and get it for much less.

Implement this tactic by splitting up your product or service, and offering the other components as "free" bonuses. It will increase perceived value.

As you can see, a few simple changes can increase your sales. Make sure you always A/B split test these changes one at a time to see if they improve conversions on your site.

Discuss this story.

from the Growth Trends newsletter

🔎 Reddit expands interest targeting for ads.

📗 TikTok's new guide to ad campaign fundamentals.

⬆️ A growth flywheel to level up your content marketing.

🏷 LinkedIn rolls out brand partnership tags.

🧘‍♀️ Alleviating stress is big business for brands.

🦄 Heroku alternative offers a 30 day free trial. #ad

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

by Wentin

It's been two years since I quit my job to build my startup, Typogram. Over the course of this journey, I have realized two important things about marketing and selling.

Don't shout to sell

It's called a marketing and sales funnel for a reason.

When I first learned about marketing, I thought that marketing and sales was similar to standing in the town square, shouting at the top of your lungs.

Boy, was I wrong. In fact, shouting at the top of your lungs doesn't work. You have to nurture relationships with your potential customers. Of course, you occasionally come across a hardcore fan, but usually, a potential customer needs persuasion to buy the product.

As an introverted developer, this realization made me feel better. Successful marketing is more about quiet approaches.

Once I got into this line of thought, it became easier to do marketing. Not everything has to scream "Buy my product!" Share mini-products, information, and other things that help people. Do this continuously, and people will want to stay in touch and check out what you are building.

Build something you can spend a lot of time talking about

Many people say that you should build for a market that has a desperate need for your solution. I believe that you should build around a problem and audience that you are passionate about.

As a startup founder, you must advocate for the product you build. With Typogram, we write a lot of content about what and how we are building. We have a newsletter sharing our startup journey, a newsletter for design, and a blog covering branding topics.

We spend a lot of time in Google Docs writing about our product, and time thinking about how to create helpful design learning materials for non-designers. This is all because we are passionate about the problem we are solving: Logo design for beginners and non-professionals.

Discuss this story.

🚀 Results from launching on Reddit. Posted by Alexander Chen.

💻 Building in public on LinkedIn. Posted by Karthik.

🪄 Is having an audience on social media an illusion? Posted by Goutham.

🌟 My successful Product Hunt launch. Posted by Jijo John.

😔 It's so hard to get real feedback. Posted by Ilai Szpiezak.

🛠 I developed a solution to a niche problem. Posted by Jordan.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

by James Fleischmann

Andris Reinman left his position as cofounder and CTO of a venture-backed startup to go all-in on his side project, EmailEngine.

Taking the leap

Andris had a lot of money tied up in tech stocks and, at the beginning of 2022, he noticed that it was quickly withering away. Instead of continuing to watch his money disappear, he sold them.

At the time, Andris was the cofounder and CTO of a martech startup. He'd been a part of it for four years, but didn't feel comfortable in his leadership role since he preferred to do everything himself.

Meanwhile, his side hustle hit $500 MRR, which he viewed as validation. Instead of investing in public companies, he decided to invest in his own company. So, he sold all his stocks and started paying himself a salary from the sale. He had $50K, enough for one year of runway.

Breaking even

Since quitting his startup a little over a year ago, Andris has 10x his revenue.

Here's what he brings in:

• Revenue: $4.6K per month.
• Founder take home pay: $45K per year.
• Personal bank account: $100.
• Business bank account: $30K.

Here are his monthly expenses:

• Hosting fees: $355.
• Various business tools: $113.
• Co-working space: $359.
• Stripe payment fees: $152.
• Miscellaneous: $99.

It's worth noting that his monthly revenue isn't true MRR. He sells license key subscriptions, and charges yearly. Therefore, his income goes up and down from month to month, falling anywhere between $3.5K to $7K. He uses calculated revenue to pay himself each month, meaning that payments stay the same (until MRR is consistently up). His Stripe account is configured to pay him once a month.

He says it's barely enough to get by with a family of four, but he hopes to increase it as his revenue increases. And, he doesn't have to take money from his stock sales anymore.

Advice for indie hackers

Don't use credit cards to pay for your business unless you are 110% sure.

Andris used credit cards for a business once, and it failed. Luckily, his limit wasn't very high, so he was able to pay it off in a little under a year. But he knows of founders who weren't so lucky. Some even had to move to a new country to find pay that could cover their debts.

Discuss this story.

by Tweetmaster Flex

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Jordan Ostrikoff, Darko, Wentin, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing