OpenAI co-founder, Andrej Karpathy, published a brief “love letter” to the notes app Obsidian, giving his approval to the product and the company’s approach to running a software business.

I agree with everything Karpathy said. Moreover though, Obsidian is a fascinating example of thoughtful pricing & product strategy, and the tradeoffs that follow.

Just because some companies act in ways which appear — and often are — wasteful, perverse and value-destructive, that doesn’t mean all their employees are blind to the inefficiencies. Ironically, at the heart of effective procurement, are decision makers’ profound understanding of the dysfunction inside their own organisation. It is the dysfunction that will prevent them from realising the full benefits of whatever they’re buying; but awareness of the dysfunction which gives them a truer understanding of the benefits.

The old proverb — about leading a horse to water — has a corollary: the horse won’t thank the person who showed them the pond.

This is a problem for companies who provide SaaS & software services which give customers AI-derived insights. If customers don’t act on those insights, then how much value will they place on the source of those insights? How long will it take them to ask why they’re paying so much?

A B2B founder recently asked how transparent he should be about pricing with early beta users who would initially enjoy free access to his company's proposition.

Other than always trying to avoid nasty surprises, there is no hard-and-fast answer because it will depend on what you’re selling and who you’re selling to. But there are some key points to keep in mind.

When users and decision-makers lack the usual incentives and motivation to hit targets or meet objectives, it can be hard to sell & deploy a product which enables them to do their jobs better.

This post describes why and where this happens, and what B2B SaaS & services vendors can do about it.

Internal startups tend to be drip-fed their funding by the mothership. This reduces the CEO’s agency to operate, has undesirable unintended consequences, and ultimately increases the probability of failure.

Employees in innovation groups, intrapreneur programs or internal startups are vulnerable to the fact that most other employees (i.e. those with no involvement in the internal startup) will perceive these projects quite differently from their main stakeholders — if they perceive them at all.

These perceptions are important because of the role they can play in determining the internal startup’s success.

In this post, I’ll define six common responses.

Every marketplace has at least two sides, but it’s not always obvious which side is really paying the fees. The key concept is the burden of the fee does not necessarily fall where the fee is collected.

So, understanding fee incidence is important because, as the marketplace operator, it can affect your approach to pricing, and impact the fundamental operations of your marketplace.

Why does an internal startup exist? Why would a large company go to the bother & expense of creating an internal startup? There are good answers to those questions. But, this post is about what happens when the answer isn’t clear, or it changes radically depending on who and when you ask.

Internal startups often suffer contractual, practical, cultural and emotional ambiguity regarding which company the founding team and employees actually work for. This has so many apparently small details, which then ripple out to a cumulatively big impact.

Varying risk and volatility associated with different material revenue streams should have a significant effect on the way a startup values itself.