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

Do not set it and forget it. I see companies do this where they labor over designs and features, and they build this perfect product that's delightful to use, and then pricing sort of plucked out of thin air, and then they don't revisit it. This was Evernote. It was many, many years before we went back and, and overhauled the pricing. So think about your pricing just like you do your roadmap. So every six to 12 months, there's probably something meaningful that you're launching for users, so treat that as an opportunity to revisit your monetization strategy and making sure you're compensated appropriately.

(instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny, and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. Today my guest is Naomi Ianita. Naomi was one of the first early leaders in product-led growth and monetization, having built early teams and infrastructure over a decade ago at Evernote. She was also an early contributor to Reforge when it was just getting started and helped create some of their early programs. She was also VP of growth at Invoice2Go, and currently she's a full-time VC at Menlo Ventures. In her work as a full-time investor, she gets to see what works and doesn't work across many companies, and one area that she spends a lot of time on is monetization, when it's best to start charging for your product, how to decide what to charge, and how to evolve your pricing. And that's what we spend the bulk of our conversation around. We also touch on a really interesting framework Naomi has been developing that she calls the modern growth stack, which is essentially all the areas that new startup products can help take load off your plate and help your product grow. Naomi is awesome, and I'm excited to share this episode with you. With that, I bring you Naomi Ianita right after a word from our wonderful sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Miro. Creating a product, especially one that your users can't live without, is damn hard, but it's made easier by working closely with your colleagues to capture ideas, get feedback, and being able to iterate quickly. That's where Miro comes in. Miro is an online visual whiteboard that's designed specifically for teams like yours. I actually used Miro to come up with the plan for this very ad. With Miro, you can build out your product strategy by brainstorming with sticky notes, comments, live reactions, voting tools, even a timer to keep your team on track. You can also bring your whole distributed team together around wireframes, where anyone can draw their own ideas with the pen tool or put their own images or mockups right into the Miro board. And with one of Miro's ready-made templates, you can go from discovery and research to product roadmaps to customer journey flows to final mocks. Want to see how I use Miro? Head on over to my Miro board at miro.com/lenny to see my most popular podcast episodes, my favorite Miro templates. You can also leave feedback on this podcast episode and more. That's m-i-r-o.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Notion. If you haven't heard of Notion, where have you been? I use Notion to coordinate this very podcast, including my content calendar, my sponsors, and prepping guests for launch of each episode. Notion is an all-in-one team collaboration tool that combines note-taking, document sharing, wikis, project management, and much more into one space that's simple, powerful, and beautifully designed. And not only does it allow you to be more efficient in your work life, but you can easily transition to using it in your personal life, which is another feature that truly sets Notion apart. The other day, I started a home project and immediately opened up Notion to help me organize it all. Learn more and get started for free at notion.com/lennyspod. Take the first step towards an organized, happy team today, again, at notion.com/lennyspod. Naomi, welcome to the podcast.