Pricing Is Your Fastest 10%: A Conversation with Krzysztof Szyszkiewicz

Krzysztof Szyszkiewicz is known as the pricing guy in the SaaS, e-commerce, and B2B worlds. He is the co-founder and partner at Valueships, a pricing consultancy built by former top strategists that has run 150-plus projects across 22 countries and helped generate over $300M in additional ARR. Before Valueships he spent nearly four years at McKinsey specializing in pricing, dynamic pricing, and monetization. He is known for helping companies uncover at least a 10 percent revenue lift through pricing alone.

What makes Krzysztof worth listening to is that he treats pricing as both art and science, and he is unusually specific about where the money actually hides. This conversation is a working masterclass on the three pricing levers, why discounting quietly destroys your business, how to choose a model, and how to break a sales team's discount addiction.

The 10% is conservative

When I called "every company has 10 percent untapped in pricing" a bold statement, Krzysztof corrected me: it is conservative. His analogy is the gym, where muscles grow fastest at the very beginning, and most companies are at the zero level of pricing proficiency. They set cost-plus pricing, ran one problem-solving session, or copied a competitor. On a language-proficiency scale, a company doing 20 or 30 million is usually at a B2 or C1 in sales, marketing, and product, but sits at A1 or A2 in pricing, so there is enormous room precisely because you are starting from the beginning. The data backs it: studies show a 1 percent pricing improvement can drive 10 to 15 percent of profitability.

The 10 percent comes from three levers. First, discount leakage, because most companies have no discount-management body and end up living in two worlds, discounting freely while never raising prices on existing customers. He cites a 15M ARR SaaS leaking 221K in monthly recurring revenue, 2.4M a year, simply by not aligning existing customers to current pricing. Second, repricing, because A1-level pricing is usually underpriced, since founders do not want price to be a wall between them and users. He points to Brand24, whose cheapest plan went from 39 to around 99 or 119 over a few years. Third, packaging, because what people want and what they will pay for are not the same, and gut-feel packaging pushes everyone to the cheapest tier.

Discounting creates churn, not loyalty

The most counterintuitive insight, and the one most worth internalizing, is that discounting produces churn rather than loyalty. The intuitive founder logic is reciprocity: be nice, give a discount, and the customer will be loyal and forgiving. The data says the opposite. Customers who bought on a discount or got more value at the same price churn more often than those who paid list price. It makes sense on reflection: discount-seekers are the most cost-sensitive, so they leave for the next better deal; some only bought because of the promotion and did not really need it; and people who pay full price tend to invest their time to match their monetary investment, the "hire slow, fire slow" of software.

He also demolishes the "but it's still revenue" defense with math. If your margin is 40 percent and you discount 15 percent, you need to sell 1,666 units to make the same margin as 1,000 at full price, a 66 percent volume increase. For a bootstrapped company that is punishing; for a VC-backed one it hurts retention and a-RR quality, which is what actually matters for a sale. Discounting is lose-lose-lose: lower margin, lower ARPU, lower LTV. And he confesses that early in his career he thought dynamic pricing would become the way of pricing everything. It works for marketplaces and e-commerce, but for SaaS it does not, and changing prices constantly even breaks e-commerce because Google Shopping has to realign and your performance costs climb.

Choosing a pricing model

Krzysztof's framework for choosing a model rests on three inputs. First, internal data: your P&L to see margin leakage and potential, plus usage data to see which features people actually use and how often. Second, competitive data, because unless you are a genuine innovator, the competition sets your boundaries, so a 99-dollar barrier of entry across 95 percent of the market makes launching at 199 a hard sell. Third, and most overlooked, primary research with prospective users, not just current ones. Current users are already stuck with your pricing, so their input is biased and suboptimal, while prospects tell you how much they will pay, what they want to be charged for, what genuinely differentiates you in their minds, and how they measure your success.

Put those three together, and you can build two or three candidate models aligned with strategy, then run advanced analytics to forecast the revenue impact of each, attributing likely churn and lower conversion from the price change. That forecasting is not just analytical hygiene; it is what keeps you from hitting "control-Z" in the stressful first days after a change, when you have received negative feedback but the revenue upside has not landed yet. If you have seen the model and seen how others did it, you hold, and pricing works over more than seven days.

Breaking the discount habit

Sales teams get addicted to discounting 20 to 30 percent to close, and Krzysztof breaks the habit in three moves. First, information: salespeople often do not know the margin of the product or how much their discount harms profitability, and once you show them that a 15 percent discount requires selling 66 percent more, they negotiate harder, because well-informed people make roughly 50 percent better decisions. Second, enablement: before imposing any rules, equip salespeople with value-communication tools, pricing calculators, value equations, and case studies, so they can defend price with value rather than caving. This is a marketing-and-pricing job, building the soft and hard toolkit, not just product information.

Third, a control mechanism, the escalation ladder: discount more than 10 percent needs a manager, more than 20 percent a director, more than 50 percent the CEO. And crucially, that control should come with support, a deal desk where a salesperson pricing a huge, rare contract can pick the brains of product and account leaders rather than pricing it alone. On whether AI will automate pricing away, he is measured: the calculations and impact modeling absolutely can be, and were being reduced even before AI. But the two hard parts, the psychology of people afraid to touch pricing and the fact that pricing is a continuous process requiring human-to-human relationships, are what keep the work relevant.

Key takeaways

A few things worth keeping.

The 10% is conservative. Most companies are at A1 pricing proficiency, so the fastest gains are here. A 1 percent price improvement can drive 10 to 15 percent of profit.

Three levers. Discount leakage, underpricing (repricing), and packaging. Most of the untapped 10 percent lives in these three.

Discounting creates churn. Discount-seekers are cost-sensitive and leave for the next deal. The math is lose-lose-lose: lower margin, ARPU, and LTV.

Choose a model from three inputs. Internal data and usage, competitive boundaries, and primary research with prospective (not current) users.

Break the discount habit with information, enablement, and an escalation ladder. Show reps the margin math, arm them with value tools, and add controls with a supporting deal desk.

Frameworks worth stealing

The three pricing levers

To find your untapped 10 percent, audit three things: discount leakage (are you discounting freely while never raising existing-customer prices?), repricing (are you underpriced because you feared price as a wall?), and packaging (are you charging for what people want or what they will pay for?). Most of the money hides in these.

The three-input model choice

Build pricing from internal data (P&L and usage), competitive data (which sets your boundaries), and primary research with prospective users, since current users are biased by the pricing they are already stuck with. Then forecast the revenue impact of two or three candidate models before you launch.

Forecast so you hold

Before changing prices, model the revenue impact and study how others did it, because the first days bring negative feedback before the upside lands. Having seen the forecast is what stops you from reverting a good change too early. Pricing works over months, not seven days.

Inform, enable, escalate

Break a discount habit in three steps: show salespeople the margin impact of their discounts, equip them with value-communication tools and case studies to defend price, and add an escalation ladder tied to a deal desk so big or deep discounts get more eyes and real support rather than a lone rep's guess.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

It's not a bold statement, it's a very conservative statement.

Discounting creates churn rather than a loyal user. It's lose, lose, lose.

A 15 percent discount means you need to sell 66 percent more to make the same margin.

And the reframe on what price is for.

Price should be a bridge that connects you with your users. Frequently people build a wall.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. No prep, no warning. Here is how Krzysztof handled it.

Best advice you've ever received? From a construction site in the US: if you don't have anything to do, find something, make yourself busy. He extended it into always finding the next avenue that makes you better.

Advice you ignored or wish you had listened to? He followed the money early instead of passion and impact. The money came eventually anyway, and it was never really about the money.

What would you tell your younger self? Keep pushing, and push even harder.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Still choosing to cover things himself rather than building team capabilities around them. He knows it, and is battling it, mostly successfully.

Favorite spot? In Wrocław, a sushi place called Akita; and he deeply respects Młoda Polska for its down-to-earth quality and atmosphere. He is a foodie who cooks a lot.

Tool you can't live without? LinkedIn plus his website. He is, in his words, on his way to becoming an influencer.

---

Krzysztof Szyszkiewicz is the co-founder and partner at Valueships, a pricing and monetization consultancy that has run 150-plus projects across 22 countries, after nearly four years at McKinsey. He mentors startups with the MIT Enterprise Forum and Techstars. Find him on LinkedIn or at valueships.com.