Most SaaS founders with growing SaaS or AI software companies have procrastinated charging more for their software after creating so much more value since the early days.
TJ Joosten calls this the Monetization Gap.
Your eventual private equity or strategic acquirer will profit from your procrastination, but only always.
Tjitte Joosten is the co-founder of RevFixr, a pricing and monetization consultancy that helps SaaS companies improve pricing, packaging, and revenue growth.
Before starting RevFixr, TJ spent a decade building and selling software, helping early-stage companies find customers, refine product-market fit, and navigate important pricing decisions from small startup deals to multi-million-dollar enterprise contracts.
Today, he works with SaaS and AI founders, often through their private equity firms, in companies with revenues ranging from $1M to $20M+.
TJ and his team have worked with more than 150 software companies, helping them identify monetization gaps, redesign packaging, move upmarket, and capture more of the value they create without necessarily building new products.
In our practical conversation on my podcast, TJ shared why most founders systematically underprice their software and why private equity firms often see pricing opportunities that founders miss.
“If you rarely get friction on pricing, it’s rarely a barrier to entry and closing sales, then you have a pricing opportunity. If at least 20% of your deals in the negotiating stage don’t push back on pricing, then you’re probably charging way too little.
“If let’s say 40% keeps giving you pushback, then of course, you might want to go down, but I have never seen that yet. At that stage, they have already invested time, so they’ll always also be honest about whether you’re simply too expensive, and therefore, I’m not buying your solution.
“Or is there a different reason? You can just straight up ask someone, Why didn’t you buy? And if they don’t give the reason of price, then you probably don’t have a pricing problem.”
He also shares savvy advice on usage-based pricing, hybrid pricing models, AI agents, and why founders should continuously test pricing rather than treating it as a fixed decision.
Check out this useful interview with TJ Joosten on the Practical Founders Podcast.
