Sharpend

I work with startup founders to develop self-awareness, improve emotional intelligence (EQ), learn communication/leadership skills and scale with their business.

Prior to coaching I spent 7 years as founder and head of marketing at Looksharp, and then worked as a marketing executive and advisor to a number of leading San Francisco startups. 

Learn more at https://www.sharpend.co/

Executive Coach

500 Startups

Mentor

Parallel18

Various Companies

Advise, consult, and do marketing work for various venture backed startups.  

Specialties include:
-SEO
-Content Strategy
-Content Development
-Marketing Ops (automation through sale)
-Lead Generation 
-Business Development
-Data and Analytics
-Email Marketing
-PR and Marketing Communications
-Brand Strategy & Creative

Software Expertise includes:
-Google Analytics
-SQL
-Marketo
-Salesforce
-ExactTarget
-Mailchimp
-Optimizely
-SproutSocial
-Trello
-more

Marketer in Residence

Carta

Helped Carta through a critical rebrand, new marketing team hires and growth of demand gen channels that resulted in a 40% lift of net new MQLs.

Demand Generation:
-Managed Carta's inbound marketing efforts including webinars, white papers, and product marketing content. Webinars alone accounted for a 20% increase in monthly marketing generated revenues.
-Collaborated with Carta engineering team to implement site-wide SEO changes that resulted in numerous keywords moving from 50+ rankings into top 3 results and a 70%+ increase in organic traffic.
-Developed and launched Carta's first-ever event marketing series including two large-scale half-day events in New York and San Francisco. Each event was cash-flow positive and resulted in hundreds of net new leads, increased brand exposure and powerful online content.
-Worked closely with Carta's outbound email team to nurture new leads from lead generation through the sales pipeline.

Rebrand:
-Helped develop new brand messaging map, including key messages for press, current customers, internal stakeholders and more.
-Worked with engineering team to develop strategy for domain cutover and technical rebrand implementation.
-Collaborated with marketing, engineering, and design team to help redesign and rewrite content for every webpage on the Carta website and reposition product pages with new brand in mind.

Team:
-Hired and grew marketing team from 1 to 6 people. Led charge in interviewing, hiring and training new marketing hires.
-Used Asana to manage team goals and sync day-to-day work with broader business strategy.
-Developed marketing dashboards and pulled key marketing metrics using SQL, Google Analytics, Looker, and other tools.
-Presented marketing metrics at monthly KPI and leadership team meetings.

Digital Marketing

Looksharp

Founded Looksharp and led the marketing team from idea stage through Series A and beyond. Used an "Iterative Marketing" approach (running rapid fire tests and using data to track and scale campaigns) to drive user and revenue growth.

Overall:
-Grew student audience from 0 to over 10 million uniques annually through SEO, business development, content, press and more.
-Generated over 100,000 inbound B2B leads to support successful sales operation.
-Built reports using SQL and Google Analytics to measure campaigns and drive business strategy.

SEO:
-Worked with engineering and design team to optimize website and gain #1 ranking for over 90% of top keywords in the internship space.
-Developed content strategy and managed team of fifty plus writers to support SEO goals. 
-Used Optimizely to improve conversion rate on SEO landing page by over 50%. 

Content:
-Developed long term content strategy using personas, competitive positioning, and SWAT analysis.
-Managed editorial team of 50+ bloggers to create compelling daily content.
-Invented new recurring B2B content including 'Annual Internship Report' to monthly "College Hiring Webinars" and more that drove thousands of net new leads.

Data​:
-Queried SQL database to develop monthly cohort graphs used to analyze business KPIs.
-Queried Salesforce and Marketo to pull reports and graphs and analyze marketing / sales operation.

Branding and PR
-Developed relationships with top industry journalists and received press mentions in publications including: the WSJ, TechCrunch, WashingtonPost, Mashable and more.
-Managed brand transition from established brand to a parent brand including a number of technically challenging changes.

Founder

Founder -> CMO -> Exec Coach

I coach founders and co-founders from Series B - D. I specialize in co-founder dynamics--helping co-founders build more effective and fulfilling partnerships. 

I believe in a world where leaders have done the work to know themselves, in order to build lasting businesses and a more interesting future.

Nathan Parcells

Schematic

Schematic allows businesses to outsource pricing and packaging with a few lines of code, enabling them to quickly launch new packaging models, take the burden off of engineering, and flexibly adjust their pricing and packaging to individual customer preferences.

With Schematic, teams can ship faster, delight customers, and get out of billing projects forever.

Co-Founder & CEO

First Round Fast Track

Techstars

Techstars Mentor

Automox

VP Business Operations

Chief Of Staff

Director of Growth

Springbot

VP Corporate & Business Development

Matcha

Matcha is the first all-in-one blogging tool and the largest marketplace of licensable professional articles for growing ecommerce brands. The company was acquired by Springbot in 2020.

* Identified market opportunity & commercialized vision
* Brought product to market with enterprise & SMB customers
* Assembled a group of incredibly talented and intrinsically motivated people. Recruited & hired ~80 people across the company's lifespan. 
* Built internal operating procedures & managed P&L
* Executed both inside sales & product-led go-to-market motions
* Raised angel & venture capital
* Acquired in late 2020

Founder & CEO

RootsRated Media

RootsRated.com was developed to help people to discover the best outdoor experiences in the world, according to local experts. The site grew into one of the leading outdoor discovery sites in the world (500k unique visitors/mo) and served native advertising & sponsored content campaigns to brands like Marmot, Arc'teryx, Toad&Co, ExOfficio, Timberland, Smartwool, New Balance, and more.

Pointer Management Company

Intern Hedge Fund Analyst

InternMatch

Chattanooga Outreach Director

Creathere

Stand Campaign Field Organizer

I'm a co-founder & CEO of Schematic, where we help businesses solve the last mile of pricing and packaging. With just a few lines of code, Schematic allows companies to quickly launch new packaging models, free up engineering resources, and tailor pricing to individual customer preferences. In short, we help teams ship faster, delight customers, and eliminate billing headaches for good.

As a kid, I wanted to play professional soccer, and I pursued that into my early 20’s, playing collegiately & then semi-professionally. My professional journey off the field began with a community visioning campaign to help continue Chattanooga TN’s revitalization, then a short, but formative stint with an edtech startup, which got me interested in startups, and then a year at a fund of hedge funds, before founding my first company in 2012, RootsRated.

Founding RootsRated kicked off a decade-long journey into building software companies. RootsRated began as a go-to site for outdoor recreation and adventure travel. We later pivoted to SaaS, launched Matcha, a content marketing platform, and eventually, were acquired by Springbot, an email marketing service. After Matcha, I joined Automox, a leading ITOps platform, where I wore multiple hats—Director of Growth, Chief of Staff, and VP of Ops. 

I love the challenges of entrepreneurship—identifying market opportunities, designing & commercializing products, and building teams to bring ideas to life. 

I was raised in Chattanooga, spent the last 6 years in Atlanta which is one of the great cities, and recently moved to Colorado with my wife, two kids, and two dogs. I went to the University of Richmond, where I captained the men’s soccer team and studied International Relations & French (though my French has since atrophied). 

Outside of work, I enjoy trail running and cycling, and occasionally share my thoughts on history and technology on Substack.

Monetizing SaaS:
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@schematichq
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5yjegk5duBz3LtvjwOo8ai
- Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/monetizing-saas/id1757006729

Fynn Glover

Wrote a book. It's everything I've learned about what it takes to create leverage from pricing & packaging. 

Wrote it for people who are building b2b businesses and want to excel at monetizing their products. 

From how they package and price. To how they go to market. To how they negotiate. To how they architect their systems. To how they ensure pricing is a function, just as sales, engineering, and marketing are functions. 

Wrote it with a great deal of support from hundreds of conversations I've had with founders, growth practitioners, pricing experts, and operators over the years. 

Releasing soon.

Co-founder & CEO of Schematic | helping SaaS & AI startups monetize smarter and faster

Super fun dinner last night at Indigo (very good) in SF with a great (and hilarious) group of founders & operators. 

Topics of discussion:

What you've done that no one else at the table has. 

The biggest friction in your pricing & packaging. 

Notably: 

"Billing system isn't flexible enough. Code changes required to evolve pricing & packaging."

"How to do multi-meter pricing for a complex, multi-product offering & how to communicate that complexity clearly via a pricing page."

"Willingness to pay differences across different customer segments."

"How to marry usage and pricing data to more deeply understand customer behavior."

"How to go unbundle a platform suite into a multi-product offering."

"How to approach deal customization, exception management, and unique demands from customers."

Thanks to Gaurav Vohra, Hiten Shah, Matt Bradley, Vijay Nagappan, Matt Curl, Benjamin Papillon, Jack Jundanian, Christian Pickett, Bera Sogut, Alistair McLeay, Andrew Johnston, Shreyans Kothari, and Nate Stewart for the great evening!

Stripe bought Metronome. Congrats to everyone who made it happen. 

This is a good move for both parties in my opinion. 

But this acquisition solves only one part of the deeper monetization problem.

What it doesn't solve is the fulfillment & entitlements problem.

Billing, whether its seat-based, or usage-based or hybrid, determines how you invoice. 

Fulfillment determines how you monetize your product(s) and how customers receive value across the entire lifecycle.

Fulfillment answers questions like:

What does this customer get?
What are their limits? What happens when they cross them?
How do trials work?
How do add-ons activate?
How do exceptions behave?
How do products interact inside a suite?

All of this fulfillment logic is governed by how a company implements entitlements. 

Most companies hard-code entitlements and tie them to plan IDs in their billing system. Some use JWT tokens from their auth system. Some use feature flags and then build glue code between flags and billing that takes the form of an admin panel.

The result is predictable. 

We accept bad application design, where our applications are expected to know the billing state of our customers (e.g. hard-coded). 

Product catalogs are duplicated across billing, ERP, CRM, CPQ, and databases.

Exceptions pile up. Experiments stall. Engineering becomes the gatekeeper.  Pricing and packaging become untouchable. Billing disputes increase. Expansion remains unoptimized. 

No one can identify whitespace. No one knows how product usage behavior should influence pricing and packaging, or how pricing and packaging should influence product usage. 

Growth teams stop pushing for changes. Finance models ideas they can't execute. Product can't align the product roadmap w/ the pricing roadmap. 

Companies leave real money on the table. And worse, they accept a slowdown in their ability to lever pricing to grow faster. 

I saw this again yesterday with a $30M ARR Stripe Billing customer. 

Their VP Engineering and VP Finance described the same pattern. They want to evolve pricing. They want to experiment. They want to match price to value. But they can't. Engineering has to say no because the product cannot fulfill the ideas the business needs.

And the Metronome acquisition won't solve this customer's problems. 

This is the deep, deep gap in modern monetization. It's an architecture problem that stems back to fulfillment. 

My view is that the only billing platform that gets to multi-billion ARR is the one that makes entitlements & fulfillment a first-class pillar. 

Hybrid pricing, hybrid selling, and great developer experience all depend on it. 

This is one of the reasons I've been writing a book how to truly leverage pricing & packaging in b2b SaaS/AI.

Chapter 6 explains how to design the architecture that fixes this exact problem and delivers true flexibility. If you want early access, DM me.

The future of b2b monetization is hybrid. 

In 2026 unlock pricing & packaging leverage. Leave less money on the table. 

Build a great pricing practice internally. Don't neglect the systems. Don't write billing code. Don't hard code pricing. 

Make product monetization a 1st class citizen.

Make monetization 1st class

Serious B2B SaaS/AI companies are all trying to support hybrid billing models, hybrid selling motions, and multi-product offerings. 

Their ability support this type of monetization complexity hinges on their entitlements system.  

But many people still don't really know what entitlements are. 

Here's a way to think about it. 

Every customer moves through your product with rules: what they can do, what limits do they have, and what changes when they upgrade or run out.

Most teams treat these rules as a few fields in Stripe or as conditionals in code.

But in practice, they behave like a customer state machine, or in other words, a system that changes based on events.

Examples:

Sign up → new customer state

Trial expires → new customer state

Upgrade → new customer state

Add seats → new customer state

Hit a usage limit → new customer state

Sales grants an exception → new customer state

Each event changes what the customer is entitled to right now.

If the system misses an event, processes it twice, or receives it out of order, the customer ends up in the wrong state and revenue and UX suffer.

This is why entitlements become one of the hardest systems to maintain.

The rules themselves can get complicated, but it's the transitions between rules where a lot of the technical challenge lives, because they’re distributed across billing, product, frontend, backend, and GTM tools.

Put differently:

A customer is always in one state, but many systems are trying to update it at once. That’s where things break.

Viewing entitlements as a state machine makes three things clear:

1. You need a single source of truth for “what the customer gets right now.”

2. You need reliable transitions when events happen.

3. Every surface in the product needs to reflect the same state.

Get those right and pricing becomes flexible, product becomes reliable, and GTM becomes fast.

If you're building billing/monetization from the ground up, you're signing up for an infinite roadmap. Here's what I mean:

Unless you’re incredibly intentional (and wildly skilled) about how you architect your pricing logic, you’re signing yourself up for what I call "the infinite roadmap" (and your engineers are going to hate you almost as much as your GTM & RevOps teams will).

Every time you change pricing, every time you want to grant an exception, if you want to roll out usage-based pricing, whatever... you're pulling engineers off core product to implement hard-coded pricing changes.

Most founders (especially in SaaS or AI) assume billing and pricing are more or less the same. You plug in your prices, generate invoices... boom, monetization.

Except that’s not what’s 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 happening.

You can put a $49 price tag in a price field, sure. You can send an invoice.

But pricing — 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 pricing — is an architecture that starts in your product itself:

• In how you grant or restrict access
• In how you gate, bundle, and unbundle features
• In the rules you create around limits (e.g. hard limits & soft limits)
• In the UI that shows a customer what they've used 
• In how you grant exceptions

I ran growth at a company as we scaled from $10MM ARR to $40MM ARR… and we left 𝘮𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 on the table.

My team wanted to unbundle a high-value add-on out of our “good, better, best” pricing. It would have not only driven new revenue, but would have materially impacted our ability to cross sell, up sell, the works.

We tried to make it happen for six months. Engineering couldn’t make it work, too many devs spent too much time away from the core product, the business lost patience, and the initiative was scrapped. 

𝗛𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗿𝗲𝗱𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘁𝘀 𝘄𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗱, 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗮𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘂𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗳𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲.

That’s the infinite roadmap at work.

𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗶𝘁. 𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝗼𝗳 𝗶𝘁. 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝗼𝗳 𝗶𝘁. 𝗙𝗼𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿.

I didn’t have this term in my vocab yet, but the infinite roadmap is why we started Schematic. Not because billing is broken… Stripe Billing is great & getting better by the day. But rather because the tooling we have to control product monetization is homegrown and brittle.

Pricing done right isn’t a number. It’s a living system. Modular. Composable. Decoupled from code. Able to power PLG and enterprise and hybrid models… without begging for sprint time.

If founders internalized one idea from this entire journey, I hope it’s this:

Pricing agility is revenue agility. And if your pricing is static or hard-coded, your revenue is too.

So yes — build it yourself if you want. That’s a valid choice. Just make sure you understand what you’re signing up for.

No alternative text description for this image

Pricing is a discipline every bit as important as finance, operations, marketing or R&D… yet most founders learn the skillset on the fly (and usually through costly mistakes).

𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝘁 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗮𝘆, 𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘁𝗼𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗱 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗮 𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲.

I wish I could say I always understood how important pricing & packaging was… but I was one of those founders who learned the hard way.

I ran growth at a scaling startup on the journey from $10MM ARR to $40MM ARR… and we left many millions on the table.

We wanted to decouple our highest-value feature set for a specific subset of our user base into an add-on. Fairly standard pricing stuff.

Six months of engineering frustration later, and we canceled the add on. The engineers couldn’t get it to work, and the business was frustrated with how much time they were spending away from core product.

We projected a 20% lift in net dollar retention… and it just sat there. Languishing. Never to be captured. All because our pricing architecture was a mess of hard-coded “IF/THEN” statements.

Price is a number. Pricing is an architecture.

You have to invest in the systems that not only preserve pricing agility but unlock revenue agility.

Run A/B tests constantly. Make changes to pricing in config, not code. Let GTM tinker, test and refine without having to pull engineers off core product.

That’s what we built with Schematic. I didn’t want any other founders to suffer through what I had to the hard way.

SaaS companies could learn a LOT from airlines.

Love them or hate them, airlines know how to optimize pricing. Much like telecoms figured out how to charge based on usage, airlines kinda cornered the market on dynamic pricing.

They have all the data of who's searching for flights, to where, for when, and can test (in realtime) how much you're likely to pay for said ticket.

Now I'm not saying SaaS companies should charge every client a different amount... but that level of pricing agility equates directly to revenue growth for airlines. And for years, SaaS did the exact opposite: per-seat pricing, revisited every couple of years, thanks for playing.

When AI means you can scale MUCH faster, but that scaling brings with it compressed margins and hard inference costs, you can't rely on per-seat pricing any more. It just doesn't cut it.

Some thoughts:

5 primitives every modern SaaS/AI company needs to maximize monetization.

AI is pushing everyone toward hybrid pricing, hybrid selling, faster iteration, and finer-grained control of who gets what.

If you don’t have the right billing primitives in place, you leave a ton of revenue on the table. 

1. Product Catalog
 
Your source of truth for everything you sell: platforms, tiers, add-ons, legacy plans. Think of it as the policy file that defines entitlements across the whole stack. If this isn’t clean, nothing else will be.

2. Company Profile

One record per customer: traits, subscriptions, usage, history. Enforce uniqueness, preserve change logs, keep it updated whether the account is free, paid, churning, or dormant. This is the backbone of GTM, support, and billing.

3. Metering

Track usage with idempotent events keyed by company, feature, and timestamp. This powers usage-based pricing, limits, trials, and the insights your GTM team needs. Real-time or batched. Just be consistent.

4. Subscriptions

A subscription is the link between a product in the catalog and a specific company. It defines price, start/end dates, allocations, limits. Never delete them. Together they form your change-order ledger and answer “what does this customer actually get?”

5. Entitlement Flags

The real gatekeeper. Feature-level checks, not plan-level. Entitlements let you shift packaging without rewriting code and handle conflicts by granting the most permissive rule. This is how you run trials, custom enterprise plans, and multi-product bundles without a ton of commercial debt. 

If you get these five primitives right, everything else in monetization becomes dramatically easier — pricing experiments, customer telemetry, expansions, migrations, trials, unbundling, bundling, revenue enforcement, etc.

Get them wrong, and you’ll feel it across the business and leave a ton of money on the table.

Your product catalog is a poison pill hiding in plain sight.

Had a great conversation with Kayvan Dastgheib-Beheshti on our Monetizing AI Podcast a few weeks ago.

The big takeaway for me? "Treat your product catalog AS a product."

It has immense downstream implications when ownership of the product catalog is messy, distributed, or worse, unknown. It touches GTM, Revenue, Finance, your taxes... almost everything. So treat it like it's as important as your core product... because it is one of your core products.

Check out the clip from the episode, full cut in the comments 👇

If you’re building SaaS or AI, you already have entitlements.

They determine what each customer can do, what limits they have, and what changes when they upgrade or run out.

Here’s the part most teams underestimate:

Entitlements change every single day.

New signups, expiring trials, usage resets, feature launches, overages, exceptions, seat changes.

Most teams don’t notice this… until pricing & packaging starts to evolve as your product expands. 

Here's an example. 

A seed-stage CRM starts with a simple seat model.

They manage entitlements with feature flags and an admin panel.

It works… for a while.

Then they ship more product.

They add AI features.

They want to introduce credits.

They want better trials, but they also need to support custom deals & exceptions. 

They want usage-based guardrails.

This is when the cracks appear.

Leadership proposes new pricing.

A PM and analyst spin up models.

Engineering isn’t looped in until late.

Engineering says: “We can’t enforce this for launch.”

So the company launches the new AI features without the pricing model they wanted.

Upside is lost immediately.

No one feels it, but the revenue is gone.

Six months later, the cycle repeats.

Behind the scenes they now have multiple billable metrics: record limits, automation credits, email sends, API volume, seats, AI usage

But no source of truth ties usage → access → billing → revenue.

So they pull three teams into a pricing project.

They join tables for weeks.

They argue about limits.

They debate whether they’re leaving money on the table.

Then engineering spends a month re-configuring thresholds, paywalls, and migrations.

Two months go by.

Revenue hasn’t changed.

The limits still might not be right.

And the cycle will repeat again.

This is the cost of poor entitlements: lost revenue, slow pricing iterations, engineering drag, misaligned GTM, fragile launches

Now imagine the alternative.

- Billing + usage in one place

- Every entitlement change is configuration, not code

- Pricing experiments deploy in hours, not months

- Limits adjust automatically without engineering

- Feature access, product UI, and Stripe Billing all stay in sync

- GTM teams act on real usage, not guesses

A real entitlement system gives you speed, clarity, and protection against revenue leakage.

Most companies learn this the hard way.

something that i really love to do is help founders pick up the vocabulary of pricing, packaging, and willingness to pay. 

for founders who are just wondering if they're onto something, it's force multiplying for their confidence. 

and for more established companies, it's also fore multiplying, because it allows them to really tap into their potential.

Add ons aren't necessary to most of your customers... but they're mission critical to some portion of them.

If you can identify a specific feature that's driving immense value to a specific subset of your user base, it might make a lot of sense to unbundle that from the core pricing tier and offer as an add-on.

I identified one such opportunity when leading Growth at a startup as it went from $10MM ARR → $40MM. We projected we could lift net dollar retention 20% by unbundling a specific feature.

Six months later, we had spent hundreds of thousands in hard costs to build that... and the business scrapped it.

Engineering couldn't make it work with our pricing architecture, the C-suite lost patience, and the company couldn't afford that many engineers yanked off core product for any longer.

It cost us millions in incremental revenue that year and every year thereafter.

It was the "aha" moment that led us to founding Schematic. It blew my mind that it took 6 months to unbundle a feature into an add on (and we couldn't even do it!).

So we built the application layer that removes pricing and billing from your codebase, and turns it all into config. That way, GTM, Growth, Sales, whoever can tinker, test, tweak and roll out new pricing without engineering having to touch a single line of code.

I'd love to show you how.

Yesterday, I had a call with a pricing leader at a great software company. 

We unpacked the opportunity the company has to transform pricing into a growth lever. 

As we explored the situation, we articulated something that I have felt for a while, but haven't put into words. 

I've usually thought about pricing & packaging from two angles: 1) how it's operationalized as a practice; and 2) the systems architecture that governs how it evolves in concert with a maturing product and market.

But yesterday, another angle surfaced. 

What is a company's culture around pricing? Suer this gets into how pricing is operationalized. 

But it's also discrete and separate. 

You can have a great pricing leader. You can have what looks like a well constructed pricing committee that is ambitious and ready to go drive iteration. 

You can have agile, composable architecture. 

But what if your executives don't really want to lean in together to make pricing a consistent driver? What if every idea is met with skepticism? 

That's a cultural problem. 

If you're a CEO reading this, ask yourself  a couple of questions: 
1. are we too precious with our pricing?
2. do we have a mindset of "yes, and..." or do we gravitate toward, "no, that would never work."

Pricing in a great company is many things... 

It's how you operationalize change as your product evolves with your market. 

It's how you architect the interaction of key business systems (entitlements, product catalog, metering, etc).

It's literally half your revenue equation (price x quantity = revenue). 

And it's also how you create the cultural conditions to take risks and learn from them.

We all talk about pricing and packaging as a crucial growth lever that companies too often under-utilize. 

But what those statements usually don’t highlight is the underlying systems problems that destroy pricing & packaging agility. 

If you're a product or engineering leader thinking about your approach to managing pricing and packaging... 

If you're a CEO who wishes you could move faster on pricing & packaging and leave a lot less money on the table... 

Then you need to understand the architecture of monetization in B2B SaaS and AI. 

There are 5 components that support a more flexible pricing & packaging system. 

Companies who operate pricing & packaging well will understand each of these systems in detail and architect their monetization accordingly.

pricing architecture 

Instead of hardcoding billing & pricing logic into your application, you can use a centralized hook — useSchematicEntitlement() — that replaces hundreds of lines of billing code.

It works like a feature flag, but for monetization. Developers can query:

- how much usage is allowed,
- how much has been used,
- and whether the feature should be enabled.

And when a customer takes an action — like clicking “generate report” — we track that event, route it to Stripe for billing, and enforce limits & access in your product.

All pricing & billing logic is abstracted out of the codebase, allowing product and GTM teams to evolve pricing, launch AI features, run pricing tests — all without code changes.

“𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐮𝐬𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐲. 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭. 𝐖𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨𝐨𝐥𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐥𝐞𝐟𝐭 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐜 𝐨𝐧 𝐮𝐬. 𝐎𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐒𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐰𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐚𝐛𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐭 𝐮𝐬𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐜.”
— @Nejc Drobnič, Founding Engineer, Flashnet


Flashnet’s SDK and protocol empower builders to deploy native Bitcoin trading applications in minutes. But supporting multiple plans, usage tiers, and access controls across those apps doesn’t happen by accident.

Schematic gave Flashnet a single source of truth for usage, entitlements, and plan logic — meaning builders get the infrastructure they need, and Flashnet engineers can focus on latency, throughput, and protocol innovations.

taplio

The Battle

Nathan Parcells

Fynn Glover

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreFynn Glover's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Nathan Parcells

Fynn Glover

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Fynn Glover's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreFynn Glover's LinkedIn Performance