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Everyone recognizes this graph from their high school econ class. It's your basic supply and demand curve.

A few years ago, a private equity investor was interested in a minority investment in our business and suggested that we do some pricing experiments to draw this graph.

On the surface it sounds so smart. There are numbers! Graphs! Data! We're doing biz-econ, baby.

It was the worst pricing advice I'd ever received.

First of all, we're 100% bootstrapped and will never take an investment. Second, the S&D curve has nothing to do with your app (or at least it better not!). Here's why:

• ICP: Maybe you get more or fewer users at a given price point but are they the right users?
• Statistical significance: You'll never have enough time or traffic or sign ups to draw conclusions at a useful confidence interval
• Assumption of perfect competition: Is your app undifferentiated? Does it have a perfect substitute?

The last point is the real kicker. The S&D curve is a model that assumes perfect competition: an undifferentiated product with undifferentiated consumers. Good apps solve problems with a specific approach and ICP in mind. It's these points of differentiation that make this Econ 101 model completely useless.

Attempting to draw a supply and demand curve for an app’s pricing is often more performative than practical. A smarter approach is:

• Understand your core users and what they value.
• Price based on outcomes delivered, not on chasing volume.
• Focus on differentiation and positioning rather than modeling theoretical price elasticity.

-- This is excerpt from my talk, “Pricing Power: How SaaS Companies Can Grow More by Charging Right,” at Mantle’s Techtonic event on May 28, 2025 — hosted by Mantle, Gadget, and Cleverific.

Tu Pham and I started working together in 2009. If you’re ambitious and work hard, I feel like you naturally gravitate towards people with the same outlook. At first, it was just one-off freelance projects where if I needed a designer, she was the first call; if she needed a dev, I was hers. The classic designer-developer dynamic duo.

Over the years, we’ve established a rhythm and process that have ensured our longevity and continued collaboration. One of the most important is our weekly 1-1s.

Every Wednesday morning at 8am, you’ll find us at Handlebar Coffee Roasters in downtown Santa Barbara. Tu orders an oat latte and never finishes her pastry. I crush an oat cortado and then a regular coffee for good measure.

We have meandering conversations about our lives, the world, and, of course, every aspect of our business. We come prepared and leave with todos and decisions that we hold each other accountable for.

There is otherwise no agenda. Depending on what’s been going on, our 1-1 can last from one to three hours. Sometimes we leave early only to hop on Zoom so that we can get right to the code or figma.

Could we be more efficient? Get through our agenda in a more structured way? Probably. It’s one thing to be efficient with your team and ICs. But that’s not the point of this meeting. The point is to be on the same page.

Cofounder relationships are the number one reason why startups fail. When the relationship falls apart, the business falls apart. One aspect of having a great cofounder is how you can motivate each other to do the work.

The journey, at times, feels Sisyphean. But great cofounders energize and lift each other up. Not by doing the work for you or by being your therapist, but by helping to clear the uncertainty inherent in charting any new path forward.

We founded our SaaS company, Cleverific, over 10 years ago. I’ve learned over the years that success is about staying flexible, listening to customers, and bringing teams together to tackle meaningful challenges. It’s not just about building great products—it’s about growing a vision that’s bigger than what you initially started with.

When founding a company, it's important to have what you can consider your own superpowers. Mine is my ability to execute on all aspects of product, technology, and sales to bring new solutions to market, unlock growth, and push the boundaries of what’s possible. There are many paths to success. And no founders ever start or run any one company the same way. This makes it even more important to operate and execute in a way that is authentic to yourself and your own vision of your company.