GTM Sauce

Coconote · B2C · AI lecture note-taker

Charge students $99/year and push the annual plan

~80% chose annual

Workedpricing

What they did

Launched at $99/year and $19.99/month, pushing the annual plan hard; positioned as premium partly to signal reliability, since users trust the app with exam-critical recordings. Ignored the conventional wisdom that students won't pay.

What happened

~80% chose annual; one of the most expensive apps in the category.
Stage
launch

In their words

Bootstrapped to $6.7M ARR and an Exit to Quizlet in 2 Years – Brett Bauman & Zack Hargett, Coconote

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Brett BaumanYeah, great question. Definitely did a lot of experimentation. I think we've tried to always have something running. Even at launch, we were testing should there be a free trial or not? The college student archetype, I would say, didn't really get to us. We didn't want that to limit us from charging a lot of money. We wanted to be a premium product and be seen as a premium product.

Brett BaumanI think that Zack and I kind of just are product builders who feel like we want to put something out that has a lot of craft and charge for it is part of it. Probably also not knowing what our costs would be was also part of it. So we put the app out charging $99 per year and $19.99 per month.

Brett BaumanI think around 80% of people subscribe to the annual tier, so we push that pretty hard. And I think part of the price too is we want to be seen as premium so that we also are seen as reliable. I kind of talked about it a little bit earlier, but there's a huge amount of trust you have to gain to get someone to stop writing their notes and instead trust that you will take care of it, because they're going to have to take an exam on it either way. And I think that the premium feeling helps with that to believe that we're not going to lose their recording.

Jacob EitingYeah. I mean, I don't know, David, you probably have a better sense, but just in terms of the utilities for students, not that, that's full what you guys are, but that's a high price point. I think if the ones in my head I can think of off the top, it's like third of that maybe for an annual, right? 50 would be high, which I don't know. If it works, it works.

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Tags: premium-pricing, annual-plan, students