If you 10X’d your price tomorrow morning, how many of your customers would cancel?
And how many would send you a panicked email, begging to stay?
That question has almost nothing to do with your pricing strategy.
And everything to do with the truth of your value.
It is the single clearest measure of whether you have built a convenience, or a cornerstone.
A convenience is a ‘nice-to-have.’ It’s a vitamin. Your customers like it. They might even say they love it. But their praise is soft. They are sensitive to price. They churn easily because the switching cost is just a minor headache. Their feature requests are for small comforts—a different color button, a slightly faster report. They are asking you to make their path a little smoother.
A cornerstone is a ‘can’t-live-without.’ It’s a painkiller for a migraine. It’s not just part of your customer's workflow; it is the workflow. They build their own processes, their own spreadsheets, even their own teams around your product. Removing it wouldn't just be an inconvenience; it would be an amputation. It would break their business. Their feature requests aren't for comforts; they're for more power. They are asking you to help them build a bigger kingdom.
I learned this lesson the hard way. It is so tempting to build conveniences. They are easier to imagine, easier to build, and easier to sell. Solving a small, obvious problem gets you quick, positive feedback.
But it's a trap. It leads you to a place where you are always defending your turf, always one new competitor away from becoming irrelevant.
So stop asking your customers what features they want. They will only tell you how to build a better convenience.
Instead, go watch your best customer work for an entire day. Don't say a word. Just watch. Find the ugly workaround—the duct-taped spreadsheet, the convoluted process they've invented to bridge a gap.
That gap is where the migraine lives.
That is where you must build.
Build the thing that makes the workaround obsolete. Build the thing they can't imagine living without.
Build the cornerstone.