What if your product is used twice a year?

Then a monthly price will bleed it. Match the shape of the payment to the shape of the value. If people get value twice a year, a monthly charge sits on their bill for 10 months as a reminder that they're paying for nothing, and they cancel.

The stock-take planner

Small shops count their stock properly once or twice a year: every item, every shelf, every box in the back. It takes a weekend or 2, it's miserable, and it's always planned badly, because it happens too rarely for anybody to remember how they did it last time.

I built a planner for it. It split the count into sections, gave each helper a list on their phone, and flagged shelves where the count and the records disagreed. It took a week. I launched it before the post-Christmas stock-take season, where independent shopkeepers talk, and it went well. On the Monday after the count, several wrote to say it had halved the misery.

I priced it monthly, because monthly is what I always did.

The cancellation emails

In months 2 and 3 they came, one after another. I didn't use it enough. Not really needed at the moment. Will come back when we do the next one.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to read them as data. More than half said a version of the same thing. They had used it intensely for 2 weekends. The value arrived twice a year. The charge arrived 12 times. I closed it in month 6.

What the cancellations were worth

I wrote to the shopkeepers who'd cancelled and asked whether anything about their week annoyed them more than the stock-take. 3 of them, who didn't know each other, said almost the same thing: their online listings drifting away from what was on their shelves. That happened every night.

Later that year I built a tool that checks a shop's listings against its stock every night. It's still running.

Before you price

Write down how often your customer gets value. If it's different from how often you charge, change one of them: a price per use, a yearly price, or a product that gives value as often as it bills.

Nobody Bought It has the autopsy. The Second Product has the product it led to.