As an entrepreneur who has struggled with setting prices since launching my first business venture in the 7th grade, I was thrilled to recently discover a survey tool that makes setting a fair price rather simple. It’s called the Van Westerdorp technique.

You ask your survey respondents 4 specific questions and the results of those questions are plotted on a graph. The graph below is an ideal example.

Where the “too cheap” and “too expensive” lines cross is called the “Optimal Price Point”.

This first chart includes all our survey respondents (to date), whether they expressed interest in using the service or not.

Based on the above results, the pricing of our Author Followers service should be set at about $11.20 a month. However, we realized that this graph included survey respondents who said they were not interested in being contacted about using the service, once the ideal pricing was identified.

So, we removed their data and the chart below represents the answers of those who did express interest in using the service. It makes sense to set the pricing based on this chart instead.

So, what this tells us is that the optimal price for this service to acquire interested followers for authors is $10 a month, and that’s where we’ll set the price for this service.

We’ve set up a page for those wishing to sign up for the Interested Followers service for Tweeting Authors.

The results of the 2nd survey strongly verified this as 82.5% of the respondents chose “Help attracting followers interested in your particular genre of books” as the service they would appreciate most.

Lucky for them, that happens to be something we’re really good at!

The next step is to determine a fair price for that service. So, this next survey has four questions which make it straightforward to calculate exactly what the best price is for this service.

Here’s the next survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YHFHT37

As founders of TheAuthorsAlly.com, Kevin and I wanted to find ways to help self-publishing authors, with whom we both relate.

We wanted to determine if there is interest among authors who tweet for some kind of service to help them get more exposure through Twitter. We had a Twitter-related service here that we thought would be of interest, but the response was low. So, we sought to discover if there was truly a need that is not being met in the marketplace. (We all have to make a living somehow, right?)

Beginning in early November 2012, we constructed a survey along these lines. It took us about a month to get a good sampling of tweeting authors.

Survey Results

The most common concern/need was in finding and befriending followers interested in the genres of the tweeting authors. 33% of the respondents expressed this issue in one form or another.

The time it takes to manage a Twitter account came in a distant second — for some strange reason authors would prefer using that time to write!

Other common services mentioned (or alluded to) included:
1. Connecting you with other authors (either inside or outside your genre or geographic area).
2. Expert Twitter how-to advice (whether in the form of coaching, teleconferences, ebooks, etc.)
3. An assistant who would handle certain Twitter-related tasks, and
4. Ongoing assistance coming up with meaningful content to tweet.

Next!

The second survey seeks to determine where the greatest demand is among the above mentioned services so we’ll know where to start. Feel free to take the second survey even if you didn’t take the first one.

This is a common mistake among entrepreneurs – assuming the market wants what you want to offer. (This is one of those lessons they don’t teach you in business school and can only learn out in the rough-and-tumble free market).

SO, we’ve decided to ask authors. We’ve created a survey specifically targeting authors who tweet on Twitter. We’re seeking to determine IF there is a need in that marketplace and if so, how might it be filled.

Here’s the URL:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/29G6P6F

If you’re a tweeting author, please help us help you by taking the survey. We’ll post the results once we get a good sampling (around 100).

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