Why a Biologist Started a Pricing Company?

You’ve heard countless tales about startups that began their journey in a garage. In our case, a Garage was an upgrade! Before that, it was the four of us in back room of my house in Indore— a small, peaceful and semi-ambitious town in the centre of India. Sleepless nights were spent chiselling away code with bare fingers and tattered keyboards. We had started an online pharmacy. We were selling medicines by the day and being knocked in the teeth by a BIG question every night, How much do we focus on Discounts?

All the advice we got — Do what you feel best or Do what the other pharmacy is doing. How do we know if our gut feel or our competitor is correct? This got us thinking. Not how to fix our pricing, but to fix the problem of mis-pricing.

Here at Techstars, we are often asked — “why are we doing this? What brought us to the world of pricing?” When we started our first company — TrueMD which later morphed into HealthOS (acquired by Tatwa Technologies), we were selling medicine —So why pricing now?

Come to think of it — Pricing is a huge problem. We spoke a lot of companies about how they currently manage the process of pricing. The results were shocking! Most companies still resort to one of the three traditional approaches — guesswork (read ‘gut-work’), cost plus margin or competition undercutting.

An ineffective pricing model will affect your conversion rates, your sale volumes and cause you to leave money on the table without realising it.

Companies often takes scientific approach and spend a tremendous amount of money on various aspects of business — sales, marketing, customer communication and engagement etc. And there are some amazing tools out there to do just that. Hubspot has solved Sales and Marketing for businesses, Intercom has solved communications, and so on.

Indeed, most players in the pricing space are catering to huge enterprises like airlines and hotels. We have the Mckinseys and Deloittes of the world having a high-touch consulting approach.

But building a truly great pricing platform means empowering the sales, product, and growth teams, and putting the developers first. This is how Greendeck is changing the game.

Successful companies innovate on pricing. When starting out, you will most likely make mistakes with your pricing model. Everyone does. The equation of What You Do x What You’re Worth can be difficult to crack. You must evaluate and adjust quickly, because pricing is extremely important to get right early in the game.

There are a lot of so-called “Bibles” of pricing and a lot has been spoken and written on the subject. But what is still needed is a tool to implement and test whatever has been said.

A successful business is usually built upon testing and perfecting its pricing model — Needless to say, we shouldn’t be afraid to experiment, gather data, and use this result to make necessary adjustments to our pricing model, and continually optimise as our business grows!

We believe that pricing is not about feeding data to an AI engine to come up with a magical price point, and that’s it. It has to be a continuous process of collecting data, adding context, analysing, and acting on that data, and repeat.

For any company, the Price is the crudest and the most subtle, message you can send about your product or service. It’s worth getting right. Greendeck is helping businesses do just that.

Every day my team and I learn a ton of things. We read. We listen. We take advice from great people. Not a day goes by when we don’t feel daunted by the massive challenge ahead. We experiment. We fail. We succeed. And we go again.

We couldn’t be more excited to continue this journey. Let’s go!