The fastest profit lever — most founders underprice, and customers care less than you think.
Sam co-owns a checklist/to-do software company making $50-70K a month. He bought it cheap and the only change he made was tripling the price, which made a lot more money.
“Yeah, to-do list. And what we did was we— I bought it. Yeah. And we tripled prices, and that's all we did. Yeah. And we just made a lot more money.”
Steal thisBuy an underpriced software product and just raise prices before doing anything else.
Sam's money trick: find an engineering-led software company (built by the person who coded it) where pricing is likely wrong. Buy at ~1x revenue, financing with a small business loan at only 10% down, so a $100K business costs $10K out of pocket.
“Find a business that's engineering-led. So someone who made the software, built it. And you could buy these companies for as cheap as $10,000 or all the way up to a billion. I mean, it doesn't matter. But you could buy— there's all these— Quiet Life Brokerage, who sponsored this, is one of them. You could find these widgets or whatever. You can buy them for 1x revenue. And if it's too expensive for you, you can put a small business loan. You could put only 10% down. So you could buy a $100,000 business for $10,000. And if it's engineering-led, the likelihood that the pricing is wrong is high.”
Steal thisBuy an engineer-built SaaS at 1x revenue with 10% down via an SBA loan, then fix the underpricing.
Sam's blunt pricing playbook: open the product, Command+F the price, and add a zero ($1/mo becomes $10, $10 becomes $100). Customers will complain but the numbers otherwise stay the same except revenue, which shocks most people.
“And put a zero. Like, so if it's like $1 a month, you make it $10 a month. If it's $10 a month, make it $100 a month. And if that's all you did, people will bitch and complain to you. Customers might bitch and complain to you. The numbers will likely stay the same except for the revenue will change. Yeah. That is like, most people are shocked by that.”
Steal thisTest adding a zero to your price; complaints rise but churn and the rest of your metrics usually hold.