Pricing... every founder instinctively knows it matters, but almost no one treats it like the growth lever it really is.
I had the chance to sit down with Gaurav Vohra; he's a startup growth advisor, founding team at Superhuman, and one of the sharpest minds I’ve met on growth strategy. We dug into the story of Superhuman’s long-overdue price change (from $30 to $40 a month) and why it became the single biggest revenue driver they’d seen in years.
What struck me most is how much hesitation there is around pricing… even at companies building world-class products. Founders delay, they overcomplicate the process, they worry about churn... and in doing so, they miss out on transformational upside.
Why prioritization (not strategy, not data) is usually the biggest blocker to making a pricing change
How Superhuman structured its forced migration from $30 to $40 without pissing off its customer base
The bad advice startups should ignore when it comes to “pricing committees”
When it makes sense to offer free tiers (and when it absolutely doesn’t)
The common mistakes founders make with individual vs team SKUs
Fynn Glover: Pricing is a huge topic for almost every startup, yet it’s amazing how much push it takes to get founders to pull a lever that could make them a lot of money. The core lesson is prioritization. Don’t accidentally deprioritize pricing just because you’re not used to changing it. For us, one pricing change became the single most impactful revenue driver of the year. Why didn’t we do it sooner? Prioritization. We had a collective blind spot.
Gaurav Vohra: I’m a startup growth advisor and part of the founding team at Superhuman. I spent close to a decade building Superhuman with my brother, Rahul Vohra. I now advise about ten startups at a time — Clay, Replit, WhisperFlow, and others — which gives me a wide view of what’s working. Pricing comes up constantly.
Before Superhuman, I did strategy consulting with a lot of pricing work. At Superhuman I led pricing early on and again recently for a major update that was exceptional for growth. I’m also hands-on with pricing at several clients right now. Where it’s landed, results have been excellent — and where it hasn’t landed yet, I’m confident it will be.
Fynn: I’ve been a Superhuman customer since 2018. You didn’t raise price until 2024 — from $30 to $40. Why wait six years, and what exactly changed?
Gaurav: The original price was $29. An intern, Cam, rounded it to $30 — which literally made the business ~3% more valuable overnight. From 2017 to 2024 the public price stayed $30, with a few exceptions (students/charities at $10, enterprise negotiated pricing). Meanwhile the product kept getting better: collaboration features, AI, sales features, HubSpot and Salesforce integrations. Inflation happened too. But we didn’t prioritize a change. That’s lesson one: don’t deprioritize pricing.
We moved everyone on $30 to $40 via a forced migration. We also introduced:
A $30 “backfill” plan with 2–3 years of innovation removed.
A clearer enterprise SKU to frame $40 as a strong value.
A limited-time option to move to annual to approximate the old effective rate.
This one shift drove the largest YoY revenue impact last year. It created a step-up in revenue and a higher ongoing trajectory as more customers started and expanded at the new price.
Why not sooner? Again, prioritization. Organizationally, we didn’t make it a priority.
Gaurav: Common bad advice: create a “pricing committee” with product, engineering, marketing, CEO, etc. That slows you down. One or two people close to the problem should drive it. At Superhuman, that was me (growth) and Alex (product marketing).
Fynn: How did you decide on $40? And how did you communicate a forced change?
Gaurav: I suspected $40 from the start. We hired a pricing expert who ran conjoint and Van Westendorp surveys and customer interviews over 3–4 months. The data supported $40 based on willingness to pay and our premium positioning. We wanted a price individuals could justify and teams wouldn’t blink at. There’s still headroom — $45 or even $55 for price-insensitive segments — but $40 fit our strategy.
Three months’ notice (August email for a November change).
Clear math: “You’re on X, moving to Y.” For teams, seat math was explicit.
Framing: You’ve received significant value over time; the price will update on date Z.
Options: move to $40; or reply to downgrade to the backfill $30 plan; or (for some) switch to annual to lock in a lower effective rate.
Only email. No in-app banners. Minimal reminders.
Churn impact was modest: maybe 1–2% above baseline for 60–90 days.
Support volume was light.
Revenue impact was immediate and meaningful.
Gaurav: We were entering a category with free/cheap alternatives but a much better product. We chose a premium “Tesla/Apple” position — top of willingness to pay. In 2017 Van Westendorp data segmented strongly: operators/ICs at $15–20, founders/CEOs at ~$30, VCs at ~$45+. We anchored to founders/CEOs and set $29 (should’ve been $30), accepting we’d exclude some operators initially and capture more value later via teams.
Gaurav: The principles I use with clients:
Customer-first value: ensure product value is clear and increasing.
Capture value: price is the share of created value you retain.
Keep it simple: avoid burning engineering cycles; use the “Occam’s razor” path.
Audience Q: What was NPS? Did it change? Gaurav: Hovering around ~50 for a long time, with segmentation variance.
Audience Q: Did many switch to annual at the “locks in lower” offer? Gaurav: Low take rate, around 5%. Don’t overthink cannibalization there.
Gaurav: We didn’t A/B test prices. We did significant qual/quant discovery but then shipped. Unless you have Grammarly-scale traffic, it’s hard to get statistical power for pricing tests.
Fynn: Clay appears to have a free tier. Superhuman doesn’t. Why?
Gaurav: Clay’s “free” is effectively a free trial with ~2,000 credits. They face many competitors. If they don’t offer something free, others will, so they need a defensive funnel.
Superhuman competed with free/cheap email clients but didn’t have a direct premium competitor. Giving our premium product away would undercut our positioning. Free tiers make sense when:
Competitive pressure forces it;
You need network effects or data accrual;
Lock-in advantages compound with scale. Otherwise, a free trial or credits can be enough.
Gaurav: Two frequent, related mistakes:
Separate “individual” and “team” SKUs that gate team capability. Make every SKU team-capable so groups can adopt at the lowest friction point and expand naturally.
Discounting per-seat on higher tiers. Higher tiers should command higher per-seat or overall pricing. Don’t hobble expansion economics.
Audience Q: How do you handle timing with annual contracts? Gaurav: Treat timing consistently across monthly and annual. Get comfortable issuing mid-cycle invoices with a clear justification — usage growth, added value, or a plan change. Train customers that expansion can bill intra-term. If you’re scared to invoice mid-term, it’s usually a separate customer health or confidence issue.
Audience Q: Did you include a downgrade path to mitigate churn? How many used it? Gaurav: About ~5% moved down. It was the cheapest engineering path because we removed accrued value rather than inventing new features. If we were in the same product position, we’d do it again. If you’re launching net-new value that eclipses the old product, price it higher and don’t backfill — different context.
Audience Q: How do you sell a paid email client when companies already pay for Gmail/Outlook? Gaurav: Start with individual love and champions. For larger teams, show proof: responsiveness, before/after activity, time saved, pipeline impact. Translate into ROI — time-saved or revenue generated. The buyer needs evidence their team will perform better.
Gaurav: If I could evangelize two points:
Make every plan team-capable and price higher as you move right on the packaging.
Don’t fear mid-cycle billing when it’s justified.