stevenwu

We have a class that we want to migrate away from Kaggle's academic platform for various reasons.

Through a chance connection in our network, a startup was happy to let us use their datasets for the class in exchange for all of the reports that resulted from it.

We can't use any dataset easily found online because a significant portion of the marking will be based on the prediction results from the given training data evaluated on held test data. (We can obfuscate/simulate/transform the data but I thought I might find more such companies with unique datasets with prediction tasks that can't be reverse engineered)

If there's any interest, please shoot me an e-mail in my profile and I'll get back to you promptly. Thanks.

I'm a longtime lurker - consistent advice seems to be that one should 1) identify a need 2) build an MVP 3) reach out for feedback from users 4) iterate from there

I'm done step 1 & 2, and fine with step 4. I thought I would be okay with step 3 but I find myself with alot of questions related to pricing. Background information: my app is targeted for a specific market of users. It started off as a sideproject to build my portfolio but now I want to monetize it if possible.

My questions boil down to: how do you ask your potential customers how much they will spend for your software? I don’t have a problem negotiating once I’m in the middle of it but I don’t know how to start it; after they try it out and like it, do you just ask them how much their budget is and negotiate an agreeable price from there? Or is it better to have a pricing plan set up ahead of time? The problem with the latter is that I can come up with tiers but wouldn’t know what’s a realistic price for each; I don’t want to lowball myself with something too low and I don’t want to insult them either with something too high. I realize the best answer would be to just straight up ask before even embarking on coding...

Any answers or anecdotes of first time sales that address these questions would be really helpful. (I've tried to keep my questions as general as possible so that any other newbies in a similar situation can benefit). Thank you.