The tale of the piano player in the strip bar

Yorick Bloemen introduces himself as an amateur pianist in a strip bar. Telling friends and family he is an accountant and CFO would be too boring. That says enough: he is the least typical CFO I know. Every other CFO wants to talk cash flow and loan contracts. Yorick, co-founder and CFO of Timeseer.AI and CFO of Hyperfox, two software companies at six and three years old and both close to product-market fit, opens with “pricing is rarely a financial problem. It’s a commercial problem.”

One price list, for the rest of your life

Founders think they need to create “one price list out of the blue” and then work with it for the whole of their existence, as if it were the truth. Meanwhile the product goes through version one, two, three, and the price list stays where it was on day one.

His alternative is the title of his episode: “develop your price like you develop your product.” Start from what the customer gains, not from your product specifications. Test what customers would pay from the first minimum viable product onwards. Look at the ROI calculators on SaaS sites: built from the product perspective, and in his words lacking connectivity with how the customer thinks.

His example, invented on the spot: Word and the spelling checker. Would the customer pay extra for it, or simply expect it to be there? For the founder the spelling checker was extra work, so it lands in tier two and the customer pays, “where the customer doesn’t feel it like that.” Then “the two roads start to separate”, and going to market with your price list gets harder every version.

Before the mayonnaise sets

Yorick thinks in phases. No product-market fit and no acceleration yet? Then pricing stays as experimental as your product. “Give it for free, but ask what people would want to pay for it.” Too expensive, too cheap, what would a relevant bronze, silver, gold look like for you? “Not thinking that you know this, but ask it to the customer.”

Discounting in that phase does not bother him. A discount that gets you a reference customer? “Please discount.” It does you more good than the extra thousand euro of ARR, or even MRR. Managing the price becomes the priority only when you have market share and things accelerate, when the mayonnaise “pakt”, as he says in Dutch. And no, you do not see that moment in a P&L. It is rare, he says, that a P&L tells you a problem goes away if you change the price. “If only it was this easy.”

Where we disagreed

Here I pushed back. Yorick says give it for free in the search phase. I do not agree. Free does not express value. A customer who pays nothing does not invest either, so you learn nothing about what they really buy.

His answer was better than his first statement. Not free as in walking up to a prospect and saying let’s just try this. His way: “I think you have a problem, and I want to investigate if you have this problem, and I think I have a solution.” You name the price, 25,000 euro for six months. Because you want them as your reference customer, you discount a hundred percent, or seventy-five, or fifty. And you ask commitments back. “It’s not for free: you discount it because you want this to work, and you ask something back for the reference customer.”

We still do not fully agree. But there is a world of difference between free and a hundred percent discount on a named price, and that difference is what your customer remembers when the pilot ends.

When the CFO does have to be at the table

If pricing is a commercial problem, what is the CFO doing there at all? Yorick draws the line. In the early phase his job is to help the founder manage the funds, typically from investors, not to optimise the price. Pricing belongs to sales and product marketing. The CFO should have a say, not the say.

That changes when you stop selling small things and start signing master agreements that shape future revenue. Then he wants in, mostly on the legal side: the contract must state that today’s price and setup are temporary, with an opening to raise prices, change scope, change tiers. Same for pilots and PoCs, and there he is blunt: “I don’t care about price. I just make sure that it doesn’t auto-renew, and that it’s preferably three to six months, tops a year.” Paid, or not.

The simulation tool that changes the conversation

Then the part that matters most, because it is what Yorick actually does every week. Ask him what a CFO in a startup or scale-up should really do. Not pricing. Not cash flow. Not reporting. A simulation tool.

“A budget is not a static thing. A budget is a dynamic model where almost every line relates to the next line.” More leads means more marketing, more marketing means a marketeer or an agency, a marketeer means a bigger office, a bigger office means higher heating, water and insurance. Inside that model sits your revenue build-up with all its assumptions: the price, monthly or quarterly or annual invoicing, upfront or afterwards, license including consumption or separated. All of it goes into one dynamic Excel with monthly numbers for at least three years ahead.

With his CEOs at Timeseer and Hyperfox he sits at that Excel every week. If not, one of them is abroad. They play. Not thirty new customers this quarter but thirty-five, what does it do to EBITDA. EBITDA is nice for the annual report, but what everyone really wants to know is the runway of your cash. Five customers less, one month of runway gone. Raise the price by five percent, what happens to the runway. Get invoices paid after sixty days instead of thirty, what happens then. “Your model should be able to simulate all this.”

The point is not the spreadsheet. The point is a CEO who turns the buttons and sees the financial dynamics of the company. That is when real growth decisions become possible. The more mature the company, the more assumptions get replaced by real data, until you can simulate hiring someone now versus in three months and the effect falls straight into your numbers.

Yorick wants this from before day one, because the financial plan you bring to a bank or an investor should already be a model, not a static document. “Whatever investor you will encounter, they will ask you three questions and immediately understand whether you understand the dynamics of your company or not. The only way to understand it, is to simulate it.”

This is where pricing and the tool meet. Before you go to a customer, check in the model what a five percent higher price brings you. One month of runway? Not worth the bother, stick with it for now. Pricing is one of the zillion elements of running a company, and, as he says, “if it was easy, and it was only three parameters that you had to manage, we would have more successful companies.”

Check it, test it, change it

I asked Yorick what is obvious to him as a CFO and lost on most founders. He resisted, pricing is not a CFO matter, and then summarised the whole conversation: “check price models, test it, and do it from a customer perspective, not from your own perspective.” Being the founder does not mean you know how the customer perceives it. “Test it, check it, change it: version one, version two, version three.” Your price model needs to be validated before you expand. It is simply part of product-market fit. Send salespeople or a partner channel on the street with a price list they still have to experiment with, and your partner model will not succeed and your salesperson will fail.

The full conversation with Yorick Bloemen is on YouTube, in the Tentacles of Pricing series. It ends with his last line, which I leave as it was: “it’s almost time for Duvel.”