Engineering Founders
Pricing is the API Between Your Business Model and Customers & Great Product Experiences are Made in the Margins w/ Michael Grinich @ WorkOS
Episode Summary
What sets a great product experience apart? How do you design a business model and pricing strategy that truly works? Michael Grinich (Founder & CEO of WorkOS) shares his journey from founding Nylas to building WorkOS, revealing the lessons that have shaped his approach to product experiences, business models, and pricing. We explore why your business model should be designed—and your pricing iterated—just like your product, and how pricing serves as the API between your business and its customers. Michael also dives into the trade-offs of pricing decisions, navigating pricing changes, and what to consider when revisiting or adjusting your pricing strategy.
Episode Notes
Michael is the founder and CEO of WorkOS, a developer platform that enables companies to become Enterprise Ready through features like Single Sign-On (SAML). Their customers include many of the fastest-growing startups including Webflow, Drata, Loom, and +200 others. Before WorkOS, Michael co-founded Nylas and studied CS at MIT.
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SHOW NOTES:
- Michael’s first journey as a founder @ Nylas (2:21)
- Great product experience happens in the margins (6:09)
- Why prioritizing the details of the last 3% of your product is key (7:17)
- How obsession, taste, care, and the intangible wow factor impact your product experience (9:24)
- Study and design the business model like you would the product experience / system architecture (12:59)
- Designing WorkOS’s early business model & prioritizing early product decisions (16:39)
- The Philosophy of 'You Pay When We Create Value For Your Business' and Why It Works (20:04)
- ”Pricing is the API between your business model and your customer” (22:10)
- Why you should iterate on pricing the same way you iterate your product (24:18)
- How to navigate making a pricing decision - and think through options like public pricing, tiers, usage, etc. (27:21)
- Questions Michael asks to determine pricing of different WorkOS products (30:54)
- Pricing is all about considering trade-offs - start with “what’s the ideal buying experience and pricing structure for your consumer?” (32:53)
- Factors to consider when changing prices or revisiting pricing assumptions (34:00)
- Rapid fire questions (36:28)
LINKS AND RESOURCES
- ACQUIRED - Every company has a story. Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor.
- The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation - The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades.
- Founder-Led Sales: Sales Simplified for Startup Founders - Founder-led sales can be challenging, as it requires expertise and charisma to sell a product or service. Potential customers may be skeptical of the founder's intentions. However, founder-led sales can also be rewarding, providing valuable feedback and insights to improve the product or service, building strong customer relationships, and leading to repeat business and positive recommendations. It's a powerful tool for business growth.
This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:
Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host
Jerry Li - Co-Host
Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/
Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/
Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/