Roast #22: Revised Pricing
It's not always just about the numbers
gotta do it for the marketing — buy coffee here, learn about the coffee box here.
Pricing is hard. I'll be honest; I was hasty in setting the price for V3. I applied my formula, and whatever came out, I went with it.
But looking back, there were better approaches than that.
It doesn't align with our goals
What spurred this reflection was when I saw multiple orders for over $40. It felt weird seeing orders come in at that high of a price. Never did I expect someone to pay $40 for my coffee — I don't think I'd pay $40 for my coffee.
Then I remembered the feedback I got about how the box has become too expensive, and that solidified the thought that my current pricing (for V3) was too high and that it would prevent people from being able to participate.
As for goals, the main focus of this project, and coffee roasting, is to generate a following to help de-risk opening a cafe (whenever that happens 🥲). So our decisions for this coffee club should be skewed toward exposure rather than profits.
I'd rather have 50 buyers buying at a lower price than 20 buyers at a higher price — which, in the end, is a loss for me since 50 buyers mean more packing time..., but you get the point.
Issues with the numbers
By buying the coffee club, you all are buying three different bags of coffee, which should warrant some discount. This grouping didn't occur to me as I initially went about pricing purely from a numeric aggregation standpoint -- apply the formula and then get an end price.
I should also eat the Shopify fees. I'm ultimately choosing the medium of payment, and because of this, it might not make sense to add that to the cost list. I bet that if I had an option for Venmo, or some other non-fee payment system, people would use that instead.
I found some rounding errors. The mailer cost was closer to $1 rather than $2.
End figures:
The final price is $28 per box.
I've removed the (0.3 * materials_cost) as a discount for buying the beans in bulk ($5), removed the Shopify fee ($1), fixed the mailer cost ($1), and applied better rounding logic (I was always rounding up).
If you were curious, the old pricing looked like this:
Please message me if you want to buy in but still find the price unreasonable or too high. I'll do my best to figure something out that'll work for you.
The mentioned 10% early bird discount (COFFEECLUB-V3-10) will still apply and work. I'll extend that coupon date until April 7th.
Thank you all for reading, and I look forward to sharing my coffee with you all!
Thank you’s:
All of you who bought in with the old pricing. It means a lot that you all were willing to support the coffee box at that price. Thank you, thank you, and thank you. <3
Anyone who engages with me in my many poll questions on Instagram. It really helps give me a sense of how I should steer the project. I check/consider all of your responses, so please keep engaging.