Product and Price
Product is the minimum mechanism the Promise requires. Price is a fraction of the value, not a multiple of your costs.
Your job: scope the smallest mechanism that delivers the Promise, and price it to the value.
Design my Product and Price Read `business_model://current`, `offer://current`, and `competitive://current`. Define the minimum Product that delivers my Promise (consider a service-first delivery), then price it: quantify what not solving the problem costs my segment from the interview evidence, anchor to it, and propose flat, per-unit, and outcome-based structures in the 10–20%-of-value band. claude mcp add --transport http leanspark https://leanspark.ai/mcp Connect first →
What you get back
Derives the minimum Product from your Promise and feature cocktail — delivery mode included, with a service-first option — then computes the value anchor from the costs your interviews surfaced and proposes a Price in the 10–20% band, in three structures: flat, per-unit, and outcome-based with the risk reversed.
A three-to-five sentence Product definition, a stripped MVP-of-the-offer call, and a priced exchange with its anchor stated — plus the "feels expensive" read.
Product: features on a leash
The fourth P is Product, and here features finally enter the conversation. But they enter on a leash: Product is defined by what the Promise requires, not the other way around. For each element of the Promise, ask what’s the minimum thing that has to exist for it to come true. That’s the product definition. Everything beyond it either doesn’t belong in this offer or belongs in a later cycle.
The right instinct is to strip Product down. Every feature you describe is a feature the prospect expects you to deliver; each one adds to their evaluation and your build cost. Your feature cocktail from Chapter 2 keeps this honest: the Product is the delighter, the one or two performance dimensions your hiring criteria say matter, and the must-haves your firing criteria say are non-negotiable. Everything else waits.
Deliver it as a service first. Product also answers how the value is delivered: self-serve software, managed service, pure service, or hybrid. Early on, a service almost always beats pure software. You can deliver a service before the software is built, making the Promise real while the product develops — and managed delivery puts you inside the prospect’s workflow, so you see what the software actually needs to automate instead of guessing.
The stripe-it-down test: “If I could only build one thing in the next 30 days, which single element delivers the biggest chunk of the Promise?” That one thing is the MVP of the offer. In the end, Product is three to five sentences about what’s delivered, how, and why it maps to the Promise. It is not a feature list, an architecture, or a 12-month roadmap.
Price: designed, not discovered
The fifth P is Price, the element founders most commonly over-agonize, under-research, and set on a gut feeling that’s nearly always wrong. The default instinct is to price from cost: development hours, hosting, a modest margin. Backwards. The prospect doesn’t care what it cost you to build. They care what the Promise is worth to them. Start from value and work back.
From your interviews you can answer: what does not solving this cost the prospect, in time, money, or credibility? Convert the strongest-expressed cost to a number. If slow ramp costs a team roughly $40k per cohort, that’s the anchor. Pricing at 10–20% of the value delivered leaves the prospect a clear win; above 30% the decision gets hard; above 50% prospects stall. For the $40k example, that’s a defensible $4k–$8k.
One anchor, clearly. Anchor against the cost of the status quo (“you’re already losing $40k per cohort; this is $6k”), or a pricier existing alternative, or a round credible number when the value argument carries itself. Pick one. Multiple anchors read as equivocation.
The “feels expensive” test: read your Price aloud. If it feels uncomfortable, if your instinct is to apologize for it, it’s probably about right. Prices that feel comfortable to the founder are usually too low, and underpricing telegraphs that you don’t believe your own Promise.