Test willingness to pay early and often

Qureshi is advising startup founders to quickly test if potential customers will pay high prices for their solution before pivoting to new problems.

Ask them to pay you a lot of money and then find a new problem. Don't wait three weeks, which is what every founding team typically does because you don't have that kind of time.

It's okay sometimes to lose some deals due to price. Something on the order of 20 to 30% is reasonable so that you can get a sense for where the limit might be.

You can't just solve these problems in spreadsheets. You have to go talk to customers, test the waters, understand where people's appetites are and sussing that out is really hard.

I called up someone I greatly respect who's incredible at pricing and I was like, 'What should I do?' And we talked a bunch and I just ran out of time to incorporate most of that feedback. So, what I did do is ship a Google Form to Discord.

I would've actually tried to monetize and generated revenue sooner... we coulda been cashflow, break even, you know, maybe 2015, 2016, which would've just given us a lot of flexibility in kind of owning your own destiny.