How I discovered our pricing was killing us

We’d raised €11M. We were hiring at full speed. Growth seemed to be holding.

And all the while, our pricing model was bleeding us dry in silence.

It wasn’t a CFO dropping a spreadsheet on my desk one Monday morning. It was reality catching up with us gradually — through increasingly tense board meetings, churn that wouldn’t drop despite commercial efforts, and a realization I took too long to articulate clearly: we were generating massive value for our clients, but only capturing a fraction of it.

What we’d built — and why it wasn’t working

Sortlist pivoted several times on its model before landing on SaaS. We went through an agency directory, then a lead-gen commission model, then a flat-rate subscription for agencies.

The flat-rate subscription looked healthy. Predictable revenue, stable client base, textbook SaaS metrics. The board was happy. Investors validated.

Except we had a structural problem we couldn’t see:

The price we charged had no relationship to the value each client was actually extracting from the platform.

Some agencies paid the same monthly fee and received 3 leads per month. Others, on the same fee negotiated years earlier, received 40. They consumed up to 80% of the marketplace’s value — visibility, qualified leads, introductions to clients with budgets in the tens of thousands — at a fixed price that never moved.

We’d built an all-you-can-eat buffet. Some clients came for a coffee. Others ate for ten.

When the numbers stopped lying

When we started modeling the actual value created in the marketplace — not invoiced revenue, but the real value generated for each side — the gap was staggering.

We were generating roughly one million euros in monthly marketplace value. We were capturing less than half. With a cost structure that wasn’t compressing.

The math was simple and brutal: to be viable, we either had to slash costs massively or fix value capture. Do both simultaneously.

This wasn’t a sudden discovery. It was an obvious truth that imposed itself over several quarters — one I should have seen earlier if I’d been watching the right indicators instead of letting myself be reassured by topline growth.

Why we didn’t act sooner

It’s not that we couldn’t see the problem. It’s that we thought we had time.

That’s the inertia of a growing company. Quarter after quarter, results don’t quite match the plan — but there’s always an explanation. A market slowing down. A hire taking time to ramp up. An initiative that’s about to pay off. And you tell yourself: one more quarter, six more months, and things will unlock.

We’d hired massively after the raise. We’d launched dozens of initiatives in parallel. The implicit logic was: enough projects, enough people, and one of them will eventually compensate for the structural deficit in the model. We were trying to buy time with headcount instead of fixing the equation at the source.

Six months feels long when you’re in the day-to-day. It’s very short in a company’s history. And the spending velocity was such that we hit the wall before we’d had time to work calmly on the model change.

But the deepest mistake wasn’t there.

The biggest mistake was selling investors a business plan built on a broken model. Overselling the Series B on projections we knew were fragile. And not having the courage to say the truth earlier — to say: no, we’re not going to hire first and buy growth. We’re going to fix the equation first. Align value created with value captured. Build a model that’s healthy by design, not in spite of itself.

There was another mistake I recognize today. We listened too much to outside voices — VC funds, particularly in the UK, who sold us the idea that the company was worthless unless it was on pure recurring SaaS, that multiples would be too low otherwise. We let valuation logic dictate business model choices. That’s a dangerous confusion. Valuation is a consequence. The model is a cause. If the model is virtuous — if it creates satisfaction by design, not dissatisfaction — value follows. Not the other way around.

What I’ve always believed, from the start: a marketplace wins when all three parties win. The buyer, the seller, the platform. A model where the platform profits at the expense of either side doesn’t hold over time. That’s why I launched the Innovation Lab during my transition — to unlock that dynamic, to build the model I’d had in my head for years. But the product and tech gap was such that the project died on the vine. Without being able to finish what I’d believed in for a decade.

That’s one of the reasons I’m doing MetSaaS today. Not to give lectures. To help founders avoid walking the same path.

What we built — in 18 months, not 8 weeks

The new model: Sortlist+, consumption-based. CPC for visibility (cost per click on agency profiles), CPL for opportunities (cost per qualified lead introduced). You pay based on what you consume. If the platform generates value for you, you pay. If it doesn’t, you barely pay at all.

The migration happened in tiers, over 18 months:

First, new accounts — minimal risk, validates the model
Then light subscribers — limited impact, predictable churn
Finally, the heavy users — those consuming the most at the lowest price. Some would pay 5 to 10 times more for an equivalent service level

The last cohort switched in 2024. We lost €150k in MRR within days.

A month later, real growth had resumed. Then accelerated. By late 2023, Sortlist was back to over 40% annual growth. By 2024, operational profitability was reached for the first time.

What this teaches about pricing

Pricing isn’t a commercial detail. It’s the architecture of your relationship with your clients.

A flat-rate model tells your clients: “no matter what you consume, you pay the same.” That message rewards those who game the system and penalizes those who are reasonable. Over time, you end up with a client base where the most active users are also the least profitable.

A value-based model says: “you pay in proportion to what you receive.” It’s harder to sell. It’s less predictable short-term. But it’s the only model that durably aligns your interests with your clients’.

Four signals your pricing is broken:

One — Your oldest clients are also your least profitable. If contracts signed 3 years ago are systematically underpriced compared to new ones, you have a structural problem that gets worse every month.

Two — Churn won’t drop despite commercial efforts. If you’re hiring salespeople, improving onboarding, investing in support — and churn stays flat or rises — the problem isn’t operational. It’s in the value proposition, which means it’s in the pricing.

Three — You’re afraid to raise prices. Not because the market won’t bear it, but because you’re scared of losing clients. That fear signals your perceived value isn’t anchored. Which is often a pricing problem, not a product problem.

Four — You’re afraid to look at your cohorts. This is the most telling signal — and the most often ignored.

A healthy cohort appreciates over time. Clients from the same period generate more value as months go by — they consume more, they upgrade, they come back. If your cohorts aren’t expanding in value, if you’re not reaching net positive cohort revenue in euros per cohort, you have a repeat and retention problem that topline growth is temporarily masking.

At Sortlist, the complexity was always this: running two businesses simultaneously. On one side, ensuring repeat on the supply side — the agencies paying us. On the other, wanting to increase repeat on the demand side — the companies looking for service providers — but with a service that was free for them. These two dynamics are structurally in tension in a B2B marketplace. When one stagnates, the other suffers. And cohorts show it before the P&L does.

If I did it again, I’d focus first on the source of value — demand — and build a service so good for buyers that it would naturally push supply to pay for access. Not the reverse. This challenge is classic in B2B marketplaces, but it remains poorly understood because it’s usually approached from the wrong side.

Today with AI, with new SaaS architectures or agentic platforms — what some call SaaP, Services as a Platform — the paradigms are shifting again. But the fundamental questions remain the same. Who is my ideal customer? What’s their real problem? How do I help them succeed? And above all: is the need I’m addressing painful enough that they’ll actually pay me to solve it?

That’s always where everything starts. And it’s often where everything breaks.

What I’d do differently

Start the migration two years earlier, when we still had runway and the serenity to do it properly.

A repricing done in calm looks like a strategic evolution. A repricing under pressure looks like a survival attempt. The message sent to clients, teams, and investors isn’t the same.

If you’re reading this and recognize your situation in any of these signals — don’t wait until you have 8 months of runway to open the conversation.

Thibaut Vanderhofstadt is co-founder of Sortlist — Europe’s leading B2B matchmaking platform, active in over 140 countries. He now works with SaaS founders, marketplace operators, and ambitious non-tech companies through MetSaaS. Book a call →