When faced with choice; keep it simple

I've been involved with several product planning and pricing sessions lately.  In those sessions, our company has tried to give advice regarding features, editions, and pricing from a sales perspective.  All to often, in these sessions, the other stakeholders are really focused on copying existing competitors, their price points, and how they productize their features.  Although I think it is important to look at competitors and map out the players, that exercise shouldn't be the critical decision criteria.  Because we are a new player in the space with a v1 product, at this point, I believe we would make a mistake by creating specialized editions and mirroring our competitor's pricing and feature differentiation.

Here are some of my reasons why:

1. Creating different editions adds time and confusion to both the buying and evaluation process.  Our goal is to get more evaluators and more customers.  Many different editions create additional objections.  Additionally, they sometimes cause paralysis with evaluators and customers, as not only do customers need to justify the purchase, but now also need to justify the type of edition or product.  Isn't it best to first build a loyal group of customers and users and reward those users with great features?

2.  Support and marketing.  Creating editions prematurely adds to your support and initial marketing costs.

3.  With stratifying the product, valuable web site space is devoted to detailing the differences between editions and products vs. selling the value of the product.  Isn't that space and energy better suited getting testimonials, case studies, or tutorials built?

Sometimes productizing development tools into editions or different products make sense, but in my opinion it makes much more sense after a product matures and has enough user momentum and feedback to justify the effort.