a single source, nothing corroborates it

Fake the checkout to test a price in an afternoon

Show real prices, let people walk the entire funnel, and reveal at the final step that no charge applies yet. Ten minutes of work returns drop off data at each price point without incorporation, bank accounts or a payment integration. Read the result as permission to build billing rather than as revenue, and note that wiring up the real thing turns out to take under a day anyway.

The method

1. 01

   Test a price without building any payment infrastructure: display the prices, let people walk the whole funnel to the paid option, and count reaching the end as your signal instead of collecting money.

2. 02

   Skip the payment integration for a first pricing test: display the paid options normally and only in the final step reveal that no charge applies yet.

3. 03

   Put fake prices on the live site and read the drop-off before building the payment flow, accepting that the early signal may tell you the answer is no.

4. 04

   A faked checkout only measures whether people will consider paying, not whether they will pay, so treat a positive result as permission to build real billing rather than as proof of revenue.

5. 05

   Stop deferring payment plumbing on the assumption it is hard: wiring up Stripe end to end took less than a day.

What it returned

• $5

  Two of the twelve people who converted picked a paid template, both at the $5 tier, which Zue counted as a signal but not as validated willingness to pay.

• Zue had spent a week on SSL, bank accounts, incorporation and state selection before realising the fake-price version of the test took about ten minutes of work on the site

• Adding one extra line of text at the end of the flow took Zue about ten minutes, versus building a Stripe checkout.

• Interaction with the fake prices on placecard.me made Zue pessimistic about the monetisation test before he had built anything

Sources

• MVP PricingCory Zue · coryzue.com · MVP-ing the Test · 2017-06-11
• Week 12 RetrospectiveCory Zue · coryzue.com · Comments · 2017-06-12
• Week 9 RetrospectiveCory Zue · coryzue.com · Comments · 2017-05-22
• I Spent a Week Yak Shaving Instead of Running a Pricing TestCory Zue · coryzue.com · Differentiating your yaks · 2017-06-02