Roster had one customer for its first four months: a physiotherapy practice with nine staff and a whiteboard they photographed every Friday. I charged them forty euros a month, which was a number I made up while writing the email.
The first price is a question
With one customer there is no market rate to find. What there is instead is a single, answerable question: is this worth more to them than the effort of switching back to the whiteboard? Everything else — comparables, competitor pages, value-based pricing frameworks — is a way of avoiding asking it.
Forty euros was too low, and I knew within three weeks. Not because they complained, but because they had started scheduling around it. When a tool gets folded into how a business runs, its price stops being about features.
What I would do differently
- Start higher and discount loudly. A “founding practice” rate is a gift you can give once; a raise is a conversation you have to have forever.
- Price the whole practice, not the seat. Nine people at five euros invites them to count heads and prune.
- Put the number in the first email. Doing it later turns a product conversation into a negotiation.
One customer cannot tell you what the market pays. One customer can tell you whether you have built something a business would rather not lose, which is the only thing that matters at the beginning.
Raising it
I put it up to ninety-five in month five, told them plainly that the original number had been a guess, and offered to hold the old rate for a year if that was easier. They took the new one without pausing, and asked whether I could add holiday cover.
The lesson was not that I should have charged more, though I should have. It was that the price had been quietly telling both of us how seriously to take the thing, and I had set it while distracted.