Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

How to price your product | Naomi Ionita (Menlo Ventures)

January 12, 2023

AI Summary

5 min read

Naomi Ionita, a partner at Menlo Ventures with experience at Pinterest and Square, explains product pricing as a process rooted in customer-perceived value rather than costs or competitors. She emphasizes testing prices iteratively while considering psychological factors like anchoring and decision fatigue.

Capturing customer willingness to pay

Ionita stresses measuring what customers actually value through methods like conjoint analysis or van Westendorp surveys, which ask about price thresholds for "too cheap" or "too expensive." This reveals the price elasticity curve. For example, at Pinterest, they used surveys to identify that users valued time savings over feature counts, leading to tiered plans priced by usage tiers. Avoid assuming value from internal metrics; test with real customer segments to find the intersection of high willingness to pay and broad adoption.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **🎙️ Introduction: Dr. Jordan Peterson**
2 (03:45) **The Crisis in Higher Education**
3 (11:20) **Masculinity and Personal Development**
4 (22:10) **Biblical Lessons for Modern Life**
5 (34:55) **The Dangers of Totalitarianism**
6 (47:30) **Mental Health and Therapy Culture**

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Show Notes

Naomi Ionita is a Partner at the venture capital firm, Menlo Ventures. She started her career in engineering in 2002, shifted to product in 2006, and built product growth and monetization teams starting over a decade ago as one of the first PLG leaders in B2B. She was an early mentor at Reforge and her expertise is in building full-stack growth teams and cultures, launching new products, and helping existing products monetize and retain their users. Consider today’s episode a master class on monetization and pricing. We talk about common mistakes made by founders, specific experiments for how to determine pricing, and why initial growth sometimes comes at the expense of revenue. Naomi also introduces the concept of the Modern Growth Stack, how AI will play a role in growth, and what she’s most excited about for the future.

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Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-price-your-product-naomi-ionita-menlo-ventures/#transcript

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• Miro—A collaborative visual platform where your best work comes to life: https://miro.com/lenny

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Where to find Naomi:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/npilosof

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naomipilosofionita/

• Website: https://www.menlovc.com/naomi-pilosof-ionita