A lot has been said about how to price an online software product. But basically it comes down to a lot of testing and talking. And that is what we did.
Since the start of Warp VR we have experimented with different pricing models. Some of them made it to the website, others didn't. But it appeared that, although our last approach with training seats had some really good intentions, it wasn't always understood.
Let's discuss what went wrong.
When it comes to pricing our product we believe in fair pricing. What we mean by that is that every client should only pay for what they use. Training seats were the very essence of that. One training seat represents one trainee playing one training scenario. And we believed that this trainee should be able to play VR training scenarios over and over again. Repetition makes learning more effective and we didn't want to charge our clients extra for trainees that really liked and benefited from learning with VR. So we decided to give make training seats valid for a full year.
Convinced of the right strategy, clients often came to use telling that they didn't need their training seats to be valid for a full year. They requested to shorten the training seat period in exchange for a discount.
We understood where this question was coming from. Although some client like the fact that their employees can play over and over again, others are in favour of short and simple scenarios that are only being played a couple of times.
Although our intentions of fair pricing were still the same, we knew we had to change something.
Therefore we talked to existing and potential clients and we talked to Warp Experts. We discussed with them where the value of our product lies. And together started designing a matching pricing model.
We tried different models and kept on changing, until we had a model that was understood and felt right for all of them.
Where training seats combined trainees with scenarios, our improved pricing makes a distinction between trainees and scenarios. Let's discuss trainees first.
Trainees in itself doesn't represent any value. Trainees that are playing VR training scenarios do represent value for our clients. Those are employees that are learning. For example, they are learning about the procedures in a company and can therefore apply those procedures. Resulting in real value for the company, but also for the individual.
Active players follow this concept, where only those trainees that are playing VR training scenarios are counted. Since we are only looking at the trainee itself, we don't count how many scenarios they are playing or how often. They can play as much as they like without paying any extra.
An active player is therefore a unique individual that have started one or more VR training scenarios in the last 90 days.
The other part is not so much about the playing, but about the scenarios itself. In discussion with clients we noticed a lot of value is generated with each scenario. Years of knowledge and experience is used when creating scenarios. Often Subject Matter Experts (SME's) are used to extract that practical knowledge in order to pass on to whomever is training.
Since there is real value in these scenarios, we decided to make these a part of our improved pricing model and we count the amount of scenarios that are published and therefore ready to play.
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