When increasing your price it’s natural for customers to ask the question “What additional value am I getting for the price?”
Companies tend to address this with a well worded announcement email which covers:
- key improvements made since the previous price was established,
- key goals that the company looks to achieve, and if it's relevant
- meaningful increases in expense.
While the announcement message MUST be well thought out, a majority of customers will want to see these improvements for themselves. The best case scenario is them getting to scroll through a long list of new features, fixes, and improvements since the day they agreed to pay the original price.
I’ve learned this lesson the hard way.
The last time I announced a price increase sent customers flying to our changelog, which just so happened to have a four month gap. The price increase announcement email was sent April first (yes, seriously) and the newest update was posted January 10th.
Clearly there were a large number of mistakes here, but the most painful part was that in reality we had deployed several dozen features, updates, and fixes since January 10th—this was the fastest development velocity that we had ever had as a team. However, we skipped the step where we decided to tell our customers and get credit. It's possible to dig yourself out of this hole by explaining all the recent improvements, why put yourself in that position in the first place?
The Three Paths
I'm assuming you’re reading this article because you’re both planning a price increase and aren’t already updating a public list of product improvements. Moving forward you have three paths infront of you:
- Path 1: launch the price increase with a barren changelog and incur the wrath (and churn) of angry customers (hereinafter referred to as “the dumb way.”)
- Path 2: push back the price increase to give yourself time to write, review, edit, and publish dozens of changelog entries (hereinafter referred to as “the hard way.”)
- Path 3: use a tool to automatically generate well written updates which populates your changelog, allowing you to stay on schedule and minimize churn (hereinafter referred to as “the smart way.”)
The Dumb Way
There aren’t many positive aspects to this approach.
If forced, I’d point out that being dumb takes no additional time or effort: you will keep on schedule and not need to change your price increase launch plan.
The negative aspects of the dumb way are numerous, voluminous, and ominous (pronounced “oo-MAN-ouse” to maintain rhyme scheme.)
The two most obvious downsides are that:
- Your customers will be (rightly) frustrated with you because they feel like they’ve entered into a bait and switch arrangement, and
- Frustrated customers churn.
It can be challenging to maintain perspective in a price increase, however take a moment to consider what your customers see. The customer is (hopefully) happily using the product, despite thinking that there aren’t many updates being made, then, out of the blue, they get an email about “how hard you’re working” and that they need to pay 2-3 times more for “the same” product!
This is taking the continuous, low grade mistake of not updating your customers on improvements and layering on the high grade, acute mistake of asking them for way more money!
To close, if you’re set on taking the dumb way: the most I can say is that you will not literally perish (despite what it feels like) and you have entered into a great learning experience that you’ll reflect on for years.
The Hard Way
The hard way is hard because if you already had a great process for getting updates in the hands of your customers and the public you’d already have a great changelog.
In addition, it’s much easier to write about new improvements as they happen. The further you are from a specific change, especially a small fix, the further your team is from the context around that improvement. It’s trivial to talk about the motivation behind a small bug fix the day it’s launched, you probably still have the email in your support inbox where the customer requested the fix.
Months or years later? Good luck.
It’s like the Blade said in the movie Blade: some of my friends are always trying to ice skate uphill.
If you’re truly committed to this approach, I have the following pieces of advice:
Demonstrate Consistency
One of the benefits in consistently updating your changelog is demonstrating consistency to your customers. Given that, if you were limited to writing just 10 updates, instead of doing 10 updates from last month, I’d do 2 updates for each of the past 5 months.
One update a week for the last two years would be ideal, but since you’re doing things the hard way I imagine you’ll tap out before 100 updates.
Tomes Not Required
Each update doesn’t need to be a 12 page essay—some customers appreciate updates that have no "fluff” and simply outline the improvement they’re getting access to. (I'm personally a fan and champion of fluff, but I digress.)
Since we’re on hard mode you may have to settle for 2-3 line updates. This is fine, but make sure the update at least hits which benefits the customer is getting. A potential template would be:
- A line describing what changed (eg, "We've launched a new feature that allows you to publish updates hosted by us.")
- A line describing the benefits to the customer (eg, "This saves you time by not needing to publish on a third party CMS, allowing you to spend time on each update.")
- A line describing why the customer is better from the benefits (eg, "This means more updates, which means happier and higher retention customers and easier to close customers in the top of funnel.")
Make it a Team Sport
Everyone has something to add, and let’s be honest: you don't have the time to get this done on schedule with only one person working on it.
Brainstorm a list of the updates you want to publicize, assign an owner, and let it rip.
The Smart Way
Ah, so you’ve chosen the smart way: you are a true connoisseur of the entrepreneurial arts.
Here’s where our story takes a twist—we’ve talked about the importance of product updates in a price increase, and we’ve discussed how to write all these updates manually… but you are not going to believe this coincidence.
Not only am I aware of a product that will write product updates for you automatically.
Not only will that product write those updates lovingly, considering the entire context of your business.
Not only will that product host those updates for you, or publish them to a blog of your choice.
Not only will that product also write updates for changes earlier in history to backfill your product updates.
But you are on the blog of that very product.
1.1 billion websites exist on the internet, and the blog with this article is the same product that solves the problem. They say it's good to be good, but it’s better to be lucky.
Here’s what you can do to solve this customer updates problem now, in the past, and forever into the future:
- Sign up for your Changebot account here.
- Connect your Github account
- Changebot will start working to understand your company, product, features, benefits, and customers, then write a handful of updates for you to review.
- You can review, edit, approve, and publish those updates and you’re already much closer to having a rich source of product updates to share with your customers.
- After upgrading to a paid plan you can specify how far into the past you want to generate updates for.
Changebot will go to work again, we repeat the publication process, and you’re ready to move forward with a price increase knowing that you have the receipts for all the hard work your team is putting in. What’s even better: you’ll use changebot to update customers at least once a week so you’re never behind the empty updates eight ball ever again.
