610 - Knowing Your Audience, Making Mistakes, and Pricing Products vs Services with Jack McDade

Today’s co-host is Jack McDade. Jack is the founder and creator of Statamic, a CMS that makes building a website better and easier to manage. Jack created Statamic in 2012, and though it started as a side project, it has grown into a platform, community, and profitable company. He’s currently working on version three of the software.

Jack started his career at an agency creating HTML templates and doing other work for large corporations. He slowly started to focus more on CMSs and WordPress development, before going out on his own almost a decade ago.

n this episode, we dive into his approach and strategy on pricing products versus services. We talk about Jack’s pricing mistakes, the pricing parity, and much more around productizing your services.

Jack is also a family man, and we talk about how becoming a father as affected him and his career.

In this episode Jack talked about:

• How he got started in digital products and his path to Statamic.
• His strategy for pricing products versus services.
• The mistakes he made pricing Statamic and how he dealt with the fallout.

Main Takeaways

• Don’t just copy what big tech companies are doing. Figure out how to speak directly to the customers that you have the answers for.
• How your customers use the product and how you price your product need to be aligned. If not, customers will be incentivized to circumvent your product, or try to spend less money on it.
• If you’re selling a digital product, be prepared to deal with customers in other parts of the world. You need to have a plan for how you will price your product for regions of the world with lower average incomes.

Important Mentions in this Episode

• Jack McDade’s Website
• @jackmcdade
• Statamic