The magic should be free

I have been the first Marketing VP at 3 dev-facing unicorns: Neo4j, Sourcegraph, and JFrog. I write about creating developer categories for startup founders.

Founders love to price their products like cars. There is a base product and a fancier version that costs a bit more. And then the high-end Turing Extreme product can cost a bundle, with everything thrown in.

This is entirely wrong.

All of the magic belongs in the free-forever product.

This is the edition that you want devs to download or sign up for. Devs need the magic — that’s why they are willing to try your product. But they have no money, so don’t ask for any from them.

The middle edition of your product, you can charge for.

This is often called the Professional or Team edition. The buyer here is the development middle manager. They usually are trying to solve the problem of dev team collaboration, and they have a budget to spend.

But they won’t buy a product before the devs adopt it. Too risky. So if you can get multiple devs on a team to use the product individually and be successful, you can pitch their manager to solve the collaboration problem and buy the Teams edition.

But you make money with your enterprise edition.

This is sold to the VP of Engineering, CTO, or the chief architect. All the boring stuff goes in here. Security, reliability, performance, failover, archiving, disaster recovery. All the things CTO are paid the big bucks for to worry about before it becomes a problem. And they have big budgets to make sure those problems never happen.

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