How to Price Products Before You Build Them with Garrick van Buren

Garrick van Buren is the owner and principal consultant at Pricing from the Start, where he helps early-stage entrepreneurs and B2B SaaS companies create effective pricing strategies before they invest heavily in product development.

Since 2003, he has been launching and managing businesses that support entrepreneurial organizations. His diverse experience includes working with creative professionals and agencies, as well as time at a large corporation with established pricing practices. Garrick is also a certified Cicerone (beer sommelier), which gives him a unique insight into customer value and market positioning.

In this episode, Garrick shares his "Pricing from the Start" framework, designed to help entrepreneurs avoid the costly error of building products without fully understanding their value or pricing potential. He emphasizes the importance of qualitative customer research, explains the difference between foundational and detailed problems, and highlights why many entrepreneurs overlook pricing to their own disadvantage.

Alongside Mark, he explores how the Jobs-to-be-Done methodology intersects with traditional pricing strategies, debates various value frameworks, and delves into how to measure value in B2B settings.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Learn how to determine pricing before you build your product, avoiding costly over-investment in questionable features
• Discover the "Pricing from the Start" framework for early-stage entrepreneurs and established companies at inflection points
• Understand how to identify foundational vs. detailed customer problems and price accordingly

"They need to have a price, they need to be comfortable charging it, and they need to approach it in a way that they want it to be repeatable, that it gets at the customer value, and that they can make the decision in an ongoing way of, is there a sustainable business here that we're developing?"

– Garrick van Buren

Topics Covered:

01:53 – How Garrick transitioned from struggling creative professional to pricing consultant

03:36 – Why entrepreneurs need to know their price before building their product

05:38 – Why successful companies often don't understand the value they deliver to customers

06:37 – Using MVP and Agile principles to test value through service delivery before building products

08:58 – The "Pricing from the Start" framework: qualitative research and timeless persistent problems

11:57 – Jobs-to-be-Done vs. problem-solution-result-value frameworks: what's the difference?

15:42 – Foundational problems vs. detailed problems in market segmentation

20:48 – Why the McDonald's milkshake example may be hurting Jobs-to-be-Done adoption

23:21 – The single sentence framework: "I help [role] at [adjective company] struggling with [timeless persistent problem]"

25:38 – Working with B2B SaaS companies at inflection points and quantifying customer value

28:44 – The 10% rule: capturing value as a percentage of customer incremental profit

Key Takeaways:

"Because the alternative is that they burn hundreds of thousands of dollars on something that they were guessing at and then pushed, shoved, fought, and argued with the developers... because they didn't do the first few steps." – Garrick van Buren

"Your competitive set is wider than you think. And that I think really drives how I think about both products, solutions, jobs-to-be-done, pricing, all of those things." – Garrick van Buren

"If we're going to capture 10% of value and we're going to charge $10,000 a year, that means that somebody is expecting $100,000 worth of value in that year against this kind of problem." – Garrick van Buren

Resources and People Mentioned:

• Pricing from the Start: https://pricingfromthestart.com/
• Jobs-to-be-Done Canvas (referenced in discussion)
• LinkedIn for recruiting (used as foundational problem example)

Connect with Garrick van Buren:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrickvanburen/
• Website: https://pricingfromthestart.com/

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: mark@impactpricing.com