Iris Shoor, Oribi
From $79 to $500/Month: SaaS Pricing Against a Free Competitor
Iris Shoor is the founder and CEO of Oribi, an AI-based web analytics tool that gives you actionable insights to help you make better data-driven marketing decisions. In 2016, Iris had an idea for a new SaaS product. She'd already built two successful startups and was ready for a new challenge. As a marketer, she knew how hard it was to make good data-driven decisions and so she decided to solve that problem. She spent the next year talking to people and researching her idea. She had one big question: why is nobody doing something about this problem? During that year she also hired a developer and started building an MVP. She used Facebook ads to get her first customer for less than $50. The product was clearly solving a pain point because it didn't take long to find more customers. She had a great product, early customers, and was ready to raise money. But then Iris decided to kill the product. She shut it down and started looking for a different product idea. The decision came after investors warned her that Facebook would improve its own analytics UI. Four years later, that UI still looks the same - and Iris still regrets killing a working product based on investor concerns. Eventually, Iris built Oribi around a completely different technology - codeless data collection that eliminates the developer bottleneck in marketing analytics. Her SaaS pricing evolved from free (to avoid showing weak metrics to investors) to $79 per month, and then to $500 per month after discovering that higher-paying customers retained better and invested more in the product. Today Oribi has 60 employees, several thousand customers, and $28 million in funding.
