Jul 6, 2023
In case you missed it, PricePoint launched a free version of Mover2Mover this year. I wish that were possible from the outset, but bootstrap realities didn’t offer an ideal freemium path in the early days. I wish we’d done this sooner, but that’s hindsight talking. Read on if you’re interested in a startup retrospective of PricePoint’s launch strategy, good and bad decisions along the way, and the current overdue pivot to free.
Inception insight
I should first briefly review the context of our founding vision, vague as it was. It was 2007. I’d been in the industry for 10 years when a thought hit me like a thunderbolt. The insight hit hard because it seemed to abstractly resolve a problem I’d been pondering for at least half of my career. Granted, I couldn’t even articulate the problem, but I knew the symptom: pricing was a dysfunctional mechanism in the international moving industry. Maybe that reality perturbed me more than others because I tend to lean heavily toward the value of free markets. (An efficient well-functioning marketplace is a sort of hive-mind intelligence in which supply vs demand and cost vs quality produces the output of Price, which is foundational to all economic activity.)
However, as I’ve written about more extensively, price wasn’t rational in our industry. Pricing was inefficient, distorted, manipulated, and fake. This led to downstream consequences in which price vs quality was irrational, rendering quality of service as a secondary externality determined by arbitrary price levels.
So, what was the thunderbolt insight? As I’ve detailed before, pricing protocols within the industry (wholesale) were disconnected from pricing methodologies to external corporate buyers (retail). I realized that this was a source of pricing dysfunction, and that a platform solution was hiding in plain sight. A well-designed platform could unify internal wholesale pricing with external retail pricing, creating a more holistic rational marketplace. I was immediately attracted to the idea of solving two problems with one solution, while exponentially reducing administrative levels of effort for all market participants.
But how…?
The vague idea was to establish a wholesale marketplace as a phase one base layer. If that proof-of-concept was successful, the same pricing engine could be redeployed as a phase two retail marketplace to external buyers.
The industry’s internal wholesale marketplace is defined by its participants as buyers (“bookers”) and suppliers (“agents”). Experience taught me that bookers wielded more power, so PricePoint catered to that audience in terms of design, and therefore eventual source of revenue. Since inception we have allowed agents to offer their services/price via PricePoint for free. Our revenues came in the form of paid subscriptions from bookers who wanted to access those prices in a faster, more efficient, secure, and error-free method than conventional email/PDF pricing protocols.
This approach attracted hundreds of participating companies around the world, and respectable 6-figure annual revenues which allowed us to keep the Amazon servers on. We meanwhile demonstrated proof-of-concept and credibility to our phase two clients: corporate buyers. Long story short, that path was successful. I’m still kinda amazed and proud that our Portal platform has been adopted by many Fortune 500 clients.
In hindsight, however, the corporate success distracted us, understandably so since the revenue potentials were much higher. Our dev resources and hiring were almost exclusively focused on supporting the corporate path, including expansion of the corporate Portal platform into the US domestic moving space. Unfortunately, the wholesale Mover2Mover marketplace was neglected and stagnated.
Pivot back to basics
The launch strategy would have been different if not for the disadvantages of being a bootstrap startup. If we were investor-funded and not so desperate to find an early path to revenue, then the top priority would have industry adoption. We would have made PricePoint free for all, agents and bookers, focusing first on maximizing network effect and worrying about monetization later.
As we’re more financially secure now, it’s time to make the long overdue pivot by offering a free version to bookers. That said, the model is still freemium, but the distinction of free vs paid is no longer role-based (agent vs booker). Instead, we are now aligning paid subscriptions according to a feature that has historically mattered greatly to moving companies: Privacy.
In other words, as of 2023 any agent can offer public pricing in PricePoint for free, and any booker can access that public pricing and award moves to marketplace agents (I repeat, this is now free!) If either agent or booker values pricing privacy, or “exclusive pricing” for certain clients, then either party can opt into that premium privacy feature via tiered subscription levels.
Another problem with the original free (agent) vs paid (booker) structure is that it suffocated the marketplace and hindered industry adoption. For example, the booker pay wall limited the number of buyers in the marketplace, which naturally limited value to agents who were offering their services to a relatively small audience of buyers. I’m interested to see what happens now that we’ve removed that booker pay wall, as there is no longer a cost objection to participating in Mover2Mover.
I’m likewise curious to see if how privacy-as-premium plays out. The moving industry is abnormally sensitive to pricing privacy (overly so IMO) because copying a competitor’s price doesn’t mean you can copy their internal execution to achieve that price. PricePoint staff often hear me joke about movers regarding their price tariffs as “missile launch codes”. Whispered or secretive pricing is contrary to market efficiency. Nonetheless, appreciating how movers think, we have accommodated privacy concerns since launch, and will continue to do so. However, we are now attaching a reasonable cost for private pricing, while allowing free public pricing for all agents AND bookers. Will movers demonstrate with premium opt-in that privacy really does matter, or will more flock to the free public marketplace? As in nearly all things, I’m happy to let the market decide.
Founder and President. After a career pricing for the largest international movers, Ryan observed that price manipulation was a more critical success factor than customer service or logistical expertise. He created PricePoint to fix a broken system.