How to Price Your Product When You Don’t Have Benchmarks

Pricing is one of the first decisions founders make — and one of the hardest to undo.

What makes it worse is that in the early days, you’re usually pricing without benchmarks. No competitors you trust. No clear category. No market norms that actually apply to what you’re building.

So founders guess.

And those early guesses quietly shape everything that comes next.

When there are no benchmarks, founders often default to what feels reasonable.

Low enough to remove friction.
Low enough to avoid awkward conversations.
Low enough to feel “fair.”

The logic sounds sensible. In practice, it usually anchors the product in the wrong place.

Early pricing decisions often reflect fear more than value — fear of rejection, fear of being compared, fear of hearing “that’s too expensive.”

Underpricing doesn’t just affect revenue. It affects behaviour.

Customers treat the product as disposable.
Feedback becomes vague or shallow.
Churn feels confusing because people weren’t truly invested in the first place.

Founders then respond by adding more features, more promises, more complexity — trying to justify a price that was misaligned from day one.

The issue isn’t the product. It’s the signal the price sends.

When benchmarks don’t exist, founders look sideways.

They compare themselves to:
– tools solving a different problem
– companies at a completely different stage
– businesses with entirely different cost structures

This leads to false confidence or unnecessary panic.

Pricing isn’t about matching what exists. It’s about positioning what you are building and who it’s for.

In the absence of benchmarks, pricing decisions need to start with judgment and clarity.

Ask:
– What problem are we actually solving?
– How painful is it for the customer today?
– What decision becomes easier because we exist?
– What does success look like for them, not us?

Early pricing is less about optimisation and more about learning. But that learning only happens if the price reflects real value — not politeness.

Founders often treat pricing as a spreadsheet exercise.

It isn’t.

Pricing is a positioning decision. It shapes who takes you seriously, how customers engage, and what kind of business you end up building.

Without benchmarks, the goal isn’t to be “right.” It’s to be intentional.

That’s something we see repeatedly when working with early-stage businesses inside Nudge. Pricing decisions improve when founders stop asking, “What should we charge?” and start asking, “What decision does this price support?”

The difference matters more than most people realise.