Accelerating WorkHound Week 13: Pricing and Press

5 min readSep 9, 2015

Pricing the product

A few months ago I was talking with a mentor of mine about pricing and wanted to know what I should charge potential customers. He quickly asked “what do you currently charge?” and I bumbled through a list of rationals and explanations that led to what I may charge a company… maybe.

He quickly retorted words that have stuck with me —

“Give me something I can buy!”

These words crossed my mind this past week as I talked with trucking companies about how much we charge for WorkHound. I confidently shared our current pricing, despite the possibility our pricing could evolve. Our team started with an initial price of $19 / driver / month, but this may evolve as we roll out additional product offerings.

We’ve spent a significant time learning the intricacies of pricing (we still have a ways to go), but thanks to some amazing pricing content out there, there were a few insights that stood out in our research:

Pricing strategies

Decoy pricing — Placing less-desired pricing options guides potential customers to the option you want them to select.

Left digit anchoring / 9-ending prices — Placing the cents at the end of a price will make the option seem more appealing. Another approach is adding “9s” to the end of prices. Many of us know this from a visit to Walmart, but some studies have shown a sales increase of 24% because of this addition.

Anchoring — I rarely buy a $10 cheeseburger, but if it’s placed next to a $25 cheeseburger, it’s a great buy! Anchor pricing achieves the goal of guiding the possible customer. In conversations this approach has been articulated as “the ridiculous thing you offer that you don’t expect anyone to buy… but make sure you can deliver if they buy.”

Rounded prices vs. precise prices — The debate between rounded prices ($1000) vs. precise prices ($989) is one that we are currently working through. The simplest way to sum up whether to do one or the other: rounded prices are best for emotional decisions, precise prices are best for logical, rational decisions.

A/B testing pricing — It can be done legally, but it’s not recommended, as negative customer sentiment will appear if (when) the company is caught with different pricing. To remedy this, it’s best to try different pricing approaches across two different products. For example, if we sold t-shirts we would sell the red shirt at $19 and sell a yellow shirt for $39 and measure the conversion rate.

Pricing to encourage behavior vs. pricing to cover cost

When creating a pricing model, we also need to consider the effects it might have on how potential customers use the product, as well as the economics of our business. Pricing does two things: covers our cost to provide service and provides profit to grow the business.

If we don’t cover the cost of providing service, selling the product actually costs us money. Not ideal. For WorkHound, our costs increase as the number of users increases, so pricing per driver makes sense. But trucking companies (our customers) will want to control cost. So they may be tempted to pick and choose drivers to add to the platform in order to reduce the total number of drivers, and thus cost.

However, the WorkHound platform works best when every single driver is participating, so perhaps we should price in a way that companies are not worrying about individual drivers when calculating cost. Tiered pricing is popular in this scenario.

Pricing vs. Value

Finally, we believe that a company must provide greater value than it charges in price.

Regardless of our eventual strategy, this is our commitment at WorkHound. Creating great return-on-investment is how you make every customer a repeat customer.

Many of the above findings were inspired by this great article:

How Strategy and Psychology Work Together to Perfect Pricing (well, almost)

Earning press coverage

After WorkHound won Truck Tank in Dallas two weeks ago, we knew it was important to share the story.

Rather than scramble to build a list of press contacts, we strategically engaged a list of press contacts early in the accelerator. Here’s the steps we took to get coverage for Truck Tank and build relationships for other possible articles down the road:

Set up calls with press contacts

We built a list of press contacts from blogs, print/online publications, industry publications, local publications and national publications. Our first touch point was setting up calls with as many of these contacts as possible simply to establish a relationship. Most of these calls led to a stronger bond with the writers at some key publications and a deeper understanding of our vision for WorkHound

Write a press release when something meaningful happens

If something important happens to the business, write a press release and send it out to the list of press contacts. This isn’t a press release every time a new feature or new customer signs on, it has to be a significant update. Press releases are a great tool because they quickly convey information and make it easier for writers to provide an update on their site.

Out of all of the press contacts, only 5% of them may be interested in writing something about your update. The more meaningful contacts on your press list, the higher chance you’ll have an article written.

Share and recognize any press

We had an awesome mix of national, local, industry-specific, online, radio and print coverage of the Truck Tank win. New leads are coming in as a result.

It is important to close the loop and we make sure to thank each writer for their time and sharing our story. We then make sure to share the content through our social channels, as we want our community to link back to the folks that help us out.

Quick Overview

(See Week 1 post for more details)

At WorkHound, we’re tackling a big issue in the trucking industry: the 97% driver turnover rate. We’re building a platform to allow drivers to share feedback with their companies. Companies then receive the aggregated feedback to improve the driver experience.

This is our weekly post highlighting our learnings and actions each week in the Straight Shot accelerator out of Omaha.

Other Updates:
Week 1 Update // Week 2 Update // Week 3 Update // Week 4 Update //
Week 5 Update // Week 6 Update // Week 7 Update// Week 8 Update//
Week 9 Update // Week 10 Update // Week 11 Update // Week 12 Update //