Lately I’ve been spending some time with local entrepreneurs who are looking for business advice. Inevitably, the topic of pricing comes up. “How do I know how much to charge?”

There are lots of answers.

You can make up a number and see if it works. You can test a few different prices at the same time. You can do traditional market research and see what you find. You can read pricing books and academic papers on pricing approaches, techniques, and behavioral psychology. You can see what others are charging.

The good news about pricing is that you can guess, be wrong, but still be right enough to build a great sustainable business. Maybe you’re leaving some money on the table, but, like my dad always says, no one ever went broke making a profit.

However, you are not allowed to ask people:

• “What would you pay for this?”
• “Would you buy this for $20?”
• “How much do you think this is worth?”
• “What’s the most you’d pay?”

And these are the questions I hear people asking over and over. You can’t ask people who haven’t paid how much they’re willing to pay. Their answers don’t matter because there’s no cost to saying “yes” ”$20” “no” ”$100”. They all cost the same – nothing.

The only answers that matter are dollars spent. People answer when they pay for something. That’s the only answer that really matters.

So put a price on it and put it up for sale. If people buy that’s a yes. Change the price. If people buy, that’s a yes. If people stop buying, that’s a no. Crude? Maybe. But it’s real.

You can dig into the why’s more deeply over time, but you have to start somewhere. And the best place to start is with real answers. This is why we picked $10 for a Basecamp Breeze email address.

Today we officially launch Basecamp Breeze, the simplest way for small groups to stay in touch via email. Check it out.

Breeze gives your group a permanent, easy to remember email address (like [email protected]) so anyone in the group can reach the entire group without having to remember a bunch of individual email addresses.

The Breeze backstory

Most people are part of a small group.

Maybe it’s a book club or a church group or a trivia team. Or maybe you’re on a softball team. Or maybe your kid plays little league.

Or maybe you have a team of mentors you often ask for advice. Or if you live in a condo, you’re part of a condo association.

Maybe your company has a board of directors. That board is a small group. Maybe you run a small company – your staff is a small group. Or if you’re a teacher, your classroom is a group.

And everyone has a family. Some larger than others, but all are small groups.

Small groups love email

Small groups usually use email to keep in touch. Email is the universal constant of communication. Everyone you communicate with has an email address. There’s no adoption curve, nothing complex. Even your grandmother has email.

But email has two flaws when it comes to groups

If you use email to communicate with your group, you’re probably intimately familiar with these two flaws:

1. You have to remember each person’s email address every time you want to make an announcement or start a group discussion. This means people get left out by accident.
2. If someone doesn’t “reply-all” when responding to a group email with multiple email addresses, then it all falls apart. People miss messages.

Something better, please

There’s got to be a better way. But it can’t be complicated. It can’t be “software”. It can’t be something people in your group have to sign up for or log in to. It can’t be hard to set up. And it can’t be hard to maintain.

Tools like Google Groups and Yahoo Groups are great on paper, but they’re often a hassle to set up and even messier to maintain. These tools are getting more complicated over time, not simpler. Check out this comparison.

This is why we built Basecamp Breeze

Breeze eliminates the two key flaws of group email. With Breeze, no one in the group has to remember everyone’s personal email address. And no one has to worry about someone forgetting to “reply-all” because any reply to the group email address automatically goes to everyone in the group. Simple. It always works. Nothing new to learn.

If you can use email, you can use Breeze. And that goes for everyone in your group.

A Breeze email address for your group only cost $10, one time. Pay once, and use it with your group of up to 50 people without ever having to pay again.

We think you’ll find Breeze incredibly useful. Let us know how you end up using it. Thanks!

Last week I wrote about Audi’s customer satisfaction survey. The numbers and words just didn’t mesh. And there were dozens of questions – many of which were difficult to rate according to their given scale. I didn’t end up filling it out and deleted it from my inbox.

This week I got another survey from another company. This one was from Zingerman’s – the famous Ann Arbor-based deli. I’d recently purchased some olive oil, vinegar, and mustard from their site.

Here’s the email they sent:

That’s a fantastic email. Short, friendly, clearly written by someone who understands tone, brand, and how to get feedback that’s useful. No tricks. Yes, it’s automated, and signed by a team, but that’s fine. It was originally written by someone who cares. It’s consistent with Zingerman’s casual catalog voice, too.

They have a 0-10 scale just like Audi. Except they only have one question. “How likely are you to recommend Zingermans?” That question sums up just about everything. They consider 0 “not a chance” and 10 “in a heartbeat”. The rest is up to you.

And they don’t ask you to click over to a web-based survey somewhere. They just say, hey, reply to this email with a number and, if you have time, let us know why you gave us this rating. Your reply is your answer, that’s it. There’s nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. Easy.

Then they say: “We are a small crew in the service center, we read every word and we try to do better all the time.” That alone makes me want to give them feedback. I know I’ll be heard. I believe I’ll be heard. The Audi survey? It feels like it’s going straight into a database. I’m an aggregate stat, not a person, not a customer.

It would be easy to say that Audi’s survey will give Audi more detailed feedback. More data points attached to specific experiences. And it would be easy to say that Zingerman’s question is too broad, too difficult to act on a “7” with no other information.

But I’d wager that Zingerman’s gets more useful feedback than Audi gets. That one question – answered simply with a reply to an email – probably leads to more valuable, subtle feedback than the dozen-question, extremely detailed , slippery Audi survey.

The Zingerman’s survey feels like it’s written by someone who’s curious about the answer. The Audi survey feels like it’s written by someone who’s collecting statistics. Which company do you think really cares more?

There’s a lot of talk about how important details are. But what’s often left out of the discussion is timing. Details and timing are intimately related.

God, the devil, beauty, perfection, precision – these aren’t the only things you’ll find in the details. You’ll also find stagnation, disagreement, meetings, and delays. These things can kill morale and lower your chances of success.

How often have you found yourself stuck on a single design or code element for a whole day? How often have you realized that the progress you made today wasn’t real progress? This happens when you focus on details too early in the process. There’s plenty of time to be a perfectionist. Just do it later.

Don’t worry about the size of your headline font in week one. You don’t need to nail that perfect shade of green in week two. You don’t need to move that “submit” button three pixels to the right in week three. Just get the stuff on the page for now. Then use it. Make sure it works. Later on you can adjust and perfect it.

Details reveal themselves as you use what you’re building. You’ll see what needs more attention. You’ll feel what’s missing. You’ll know which potholes to pave over because you’ll keep hitting them. That’s when you need to pay attention, not sooner.
(Reprinted from Getting Real, The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application.)

Tell us about yourself

I recently purchased a new car. A few days later I got an email from Audi asking me to rate my experience. I clicked the link to the survey and ended up seeing this:

Ok, this should be easy.

“Ease of looking at dealer’s inventory” – great, no problems there. A 10, right? Well… was it OUTSTANDING? How about TRULY EXCEPTIONAL? No, it wasn’t those… I can’t say someone’s inventory was truly exceptional. I can’t put my name on that sort of endorsement. So…?

Comfort in the office where we cut the deal? It was fine – I couldn’t imagine it to be better, but was it TRULY EXCEPTIONAL? No. That doesn’t fit. So does that make it a 6 or 7? No, it was better than that… But… So…?

I see this sort of thing in surveys all the time. A simple 1-10 scale (or 1-5, it doesn’t matter), but the labeling of the numbers is so sensationalized that it turns me off. As far as the number goes, I’m happy to give something the highest rating, but the language overshoots the number and then I don’t know how to respond.

I find these sorts of things great reminders of how important it is to choose the right words. Don’t overshoot, don’t sensationalize. Be modest with language. Find the right fit and leave it alone.

When visitors come to our office, one of the first things they notice is how quiet it is. Naturally, one of the first questions they ask is “how do you keep it so quiet?”

My answer is “library rules.”

Everyone knows how to behave in a library. You keep quiet or whisper. You respect people’s personal space. You don’t interrupt people who are reading or working, learning or studying. And if you need to have a full-volume conversation, you hit a private room.

So if you want to keep things quiet at the office, treat it like a library. It works surprisingly well.