🍐#102: Pricing and billing teardowns from, and how to book demos with ICPs through LinkedIn

Hey,

You pear🍐 has been reading. Life stuff, not work. Three books that I recommend a ton lately: “Die with Zero”, “Four Thousand Weeks” and “The Squirrels Who Squabbled” (ok, slightly different focus). Not sure what comes out of it for me but sure as hell they got me thinking.

This week on the agenda:

• Pricing and billing teardowns from Schematic

• How to book demos with ICPs through LinkedIn

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

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Developer marketing insights

1. Pricing and billing teardowns from Schematic

A few weeks back I came across pricing/billing teardowns in the community. This comes from co-founders of Schematic, a pricing/billing product. Four folks going at it from different angles: design/CPO, growth/product manager, engineer/CTO, business/CEO.

I actually spend a few hours going through teardowns of Linear, Supabase, Vercel, Mintlify, Posthog. Whatever they published there ;). I enjoyed it a ton.

If you are going through some sort of a pricing/packaging exercise, I recommend giving it a look. Even if you don’t, you might get inspired.

By the way, I really like this style of marketing, especially in this new content era of hyper-relevant content (persona, theme, first-hand experience), where you want to go for depth and uniqueness.

Here are my takeaways:

Complexity communicates enterprise readiness (Supabase, Vercel)
Displaying detailed feature breakdowns, extensive add-ons, customizations (all linked to docs) conveys enterprise readiness. This signals scalability and readiness for larger users while reassuring smaller folks, self-served or hobbyists, that if the time comes they are good.

“Pricing as product” (Vercel, Supabase)
Playing on the known idea in dev tools, “docs as product” the idea of "pricing as product" to facilitate growth made me think. In many ways obvious, just made me think when they said it. Effective pricing strategies, including free-to-self-serve-to-enterprise transitions, create paths to guide users toward higher-value plans (and growth).

When to gate pricing calculators (Vercel)
Pricing calculators enhance transparency, but if it just shows you would be expensive, you may want to gate them. Cost is only one part of the story, the value they get when replacing/expanding devs/existing processes is the other. Consider gating when you think this should be told during a sales convo.

FAQs improve conversion (Linear, Supabase)
Clear, well-structured FAQs address customer concerns. Duh. But some folks will not have their questions answered. And you cannot include all (long-tail) obstacle handlers in the copy elsewhere. FAQs solve that. Supabase and Linear both utilize FAQs effectively to manage complexity.

Pricing as an extension of your brand (PostHog, Linear)
The pricing page reflects your brand. PostHog effectively uses personality and humor, while Linear emphasizes simplicity and minimalism, each reinforcing their unique product philosophy. Pricing is one of the most visited pages after all.

Predictability and transparency as a differentiator (Supabase)
If predictable pricing sets you apart, highlight it explicitly. Supabase emphasizes this consistently (pricing page, billing, modals in-app), reducing anxiety around unexpected costs. If this is one of the big things to handle → handle it.

Add-ons as expansion levers (Mintlify, Vercel)
Strategically placed add-ons (both pricing and in-app/billing) create opportunities for revenue expansion. Vercel emphasizes this clearly, while Mintlify is still working towards automated visibility.

See more dev tool pricing examples ->

2. How to book demos with ICPs through LinkedIn

A few weeks back, I shared the LinkedIn CEO playbook based on what I had learned (mostly) from listening to Finn’s Founder-Led Marketing Show.

And this week I saw this awesome post that went viral where Finn breaks down his playbook with an example of running this for a VP of Engineering ICP audience.

Super actionable, super clear. Very “how sausage is made” type of post from someone who actually implements this for companies. Read, implement, enjoy.

Big takeaways here:

• Connect with your ICPs. LinkedIn algo shows to first connections first, then if the post gets enough traction, to second, third etc. So make sure to have ICPs in your first connections. And 50% of ppl will connect

• Match the “thought leader” with ICP. If you are marketing to devs → have devrels or founder/CTO, if you are going at CTOs or VP eng, go founder or CTO.

Big takeaways here:

• First find organic content that works → then add thought leader ads. And find this content by building a muscle, interviewing/writing/posting weekly

Big takeaways here:

• Use the new account / signal based / AI tooling. Look for triggers (engaging with content, following you, looking at your page) to know when to reach out, give people a nudge.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

If you want my help, I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

See how to work with me ->

2. Bonus links to check out

• 🎧️ Enablement Beats Collateral & Credit Card Gates | Code to Market Podcast

• 🟥 How I grew a bootstrapped API product | Reddit Thread and AMA

• 🛠️ Scrunch AI | Tool that monitors how you show up in AI chat engines

3. Join our Slack community

2000+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Check out marketingto.dev ->