Game Changer

Epilogue

Over the weekend before finalizing the manuscript of this book, one of us attended a wedding in New York City. A guest at the reception was the founder and CEO of an AI startup. After learning that we were working on a pricing book, he sighed.

“Pricing, I struggle with this every day,” he said.

After several years of hard work and a few test customers, he was getting a very strong commercial response and scaling up of his business. But after observing differences in customer value across industries and seeing his marginal costs get lower and lower, he was not sure how to set a single appropriate price point. The Cost Game and Uniform Game price mindsets were in play, even though the Choice Game on the opposite end of Hex seemed like a much better fit to his situation.

Another guest was a successful serial entrepreneur in health care services. His latest venture had a revolutionary testing technology for a relatively common type of cancer. The technology not only had significantly better sensitivity and specificity but was also less costly and less invasive than other technologies. Most importantly, it could be used to screen larger portions of the population in routine doctor checkups and detect cancer very early on. His struggle, though, was finding a way to incentivize the medical community to adopt this test. While he was appropriately thinking in terms of the Value Game, he was also taking for granted that his pricing model couldn't deviate from established industry ...