How to price your product | Naomi Ionita (Menlo Ventures)

**Naomi Ionita** (0:00)
Do not set it and forget it. I see companies do this where they labor over designs and features, and they build this perfect product that's delightful to use, and then pricing sort of plucks out of thin air, and then they don't revisit it. This was Evernote, it was many, many years before we went back and overhauled the pricing.
So think about your pricing just like you do your roadmap. So every six to 12 months, there's probably something meaningful that you're launching for users. So treat that as an opportunity to revisit your monetization strategy and making sure you're compensated appropriately.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:32)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing product. Today, my guest is Naomi Ionita. Naomi was one of the first early leaders in product growth and monetization, having built early teams and infrastructure over a decade ago at Evernote. She's also an early contributor to Reforge when it was just getting started and helped create some of their early programs. She's also VP of Growth at Invoice2Go, and currently she's a full-time VC at Menlo Ventures.
In her work as a full-time investor, she gets to see what works and doesn't work across many companies, and one area that she spends a lot of time on is monetization. When it's best to start charging for your product, how to decide what to charge, and how to evolve your pricing. And that's what we spend the bulk of our conversation around. We also touch on a really interesting framework Naomi has been developing that she calls the Modern Growth Stack, which is essentially all the areas that new starter products can help take load off your plate and help your product grow. Naomi is awesome, and I'm excited to share this episode with you. With that, I bring you Naomi Ionita, right after I worked from our wonderful sponsors.
Today's episode is brought to you by Miro. Creating a product, especially one that your users can't live without, is damn hard, but it's made easier by working closely with your colleagues to capture ideas, get feedback, and being able to iterate quickly. That's where Miro comes in.
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**Naomi Ionita** (3:45)
Thank you.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:46)
Did you know that you're one of the very few VC that I've ever had on this podcast?
And so you're basically representing VC kind here. How do you feel about that?

**Naomi Ionita** (3:55)
Well, thank you. I think early growth folks like us have a unique bond and a lens on startups and investing. So my operating background is something I lean on every day and has actually informed a lot of the thesis areas where I spend time now as an investor. So hopefully we'll bring it all together in that capacity.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:15)
Awesome. That's exactly what I was just going to say. So I'm glad that you covered that.