Hey y’all — in the early days of Uber Eats one of our biggest bottlenecks was changing pricing and how it was presented to users.

I led analytics for our marketplace org, and could prove we were leaving money on the table, but even clear analyses or experiment results took a long time to ship.

As founders we obsess over speed, but pricing is almost always deeply embedded in application logic. And as that grows in complexity, changing it becomes increasingly risky that engineers don’t want to bother with.

So even as your product matures and competitors enter the market, your pricing structure stays stuck in the past.

I met Fynn Glover in SF a few weeks ago, and he helped me realize this is actually a very common and limiting problem for startups. His hundreds of interviews with founders about the topic taught him that founders undervalue the impact of optimized pricing — they think of growth in terms of quantity of users rather than an equation of quantity * pricing optimization.

He’s solving this with his own startup, Schematic — which gives founders and GTM team members direct control over pricing, packaging, and entitlements to launch updates to pricing in days rather than months without risking any issues with the codebase by leveraging feature flags.

It seemed like a no brainer to me, so I had him come by our studio to share his story and talk more about:

He also is giving FJ readers free copies of the literal book he wrote on pricing, where he compiled his learnings from the hundreds of interviews he did.

Here’s his founding journey and how he raised $4.8M for Schematic:

When I first met Fynn and he told me he was building tools to help teams manage their pricing my first thought was… don’t I do that with Stripe already?

Stripe is so pervasive in Silicon Valley, and has been for so long, that there’s an implicit assumption it does everything a startup needs regarding pricing.

But Stripe handles billing. Schematic handles what customers can actually do and get access to in your product (in fact, Fynn’s team built the product as a runtime entitlement layer directly on top of Stripe).

Without Schematic teams hard-code entitlements, stitch together usage tracking, and manage pricing logic in your app (which is why pricing changes take quarters rather than hours).

As your codebase gets more complex you get a tough choice: force engineering to deprioritize feature work or live with outdated pricing forever.

The reason most founders think about pricing in a limited way is this it’s not really a day one problem — it’s one that emerges slowly over time.

In the early stages most startups run on simple, seat-based pricing or basic tiers, and a few hardcoded checks or homegrown admin panels do the job just fine.

But as your product matures and addds features, introduces usage-based elements, supports enterprise exceptions, or shifts toward hybrid models (seats + credits + consumption), that simplicity turns into fragility.

Suddenly your pricing no longer reflects the true value you're delivering.

Every new capability becomes a potential revenue lever, but without the right architecture, launching it means begging engineering for time, risking bugs in customer access, or leaving money on the table because changes feel too scary or slow.

We can learn from Fynn. His big insight with Schematic is that pricing shouldn't be a static artifact buried in code. It should be treated like product itself and be iterative, hypothesis-driven, and owned by the people closest to the market.

Initially that’s the founders but eventually becomes product managers and GTM leaders.

This mindset shift turns pricing from a bottleneck into a growth engine.

As Fynn puts it, the revenue equation is simple: price × quantity. Most founders obsess over quantity (acquisition, conversion, retention), when the other half is just as high-leverage, if not moreso in some cases.

Once you’ve accepted pricing should evolve like product, the lift is surprisingly light.

With Schematic: generate an API key, drop it in your code, wrap key access points with real-time entitlement checks.

From there, product or GTM folks control everything via a no-code dashboard. Everything happens in minutes, hours, or days at worst — not months.

I always learn something when I talk with founders who actually lived the problem they’re solving, first.

After growing his first startup to $2M ARR and selling it, Fynn built the growth team and scale the business at a cybersecurity company.

Their business was growing rapidly, hit PMF, but hadn’t touched pricing in 2 years.

Fynn realized, sure, he could fine-tune growth levers to bring in more customers but he could actually have more impact by just updating their pricing to reflect all the new functionality they’d built in that time.

They were leaving literally millions of dollars in incremental ARR on the table.

He did everything right — he ran willingness to pay studies and sensitivity analyses to understand elasticity, but even though he had buy-in from other execs, actually getting the work on their teams’ roadmaps took over 6 months of begging.

Even at a company oriented around growth, changing pricing felt like too big of a lift with no true owner.

After pushing the changes through, eventually, Fynn left to do discovery and realized how common this problem was.

And it led him to the belief that powers Schematic: that a small set of commercial-focused owners (founders, product leaders, and GTM operators) drive disproportionate revenue when they can directly control pricing and packaging.

Here’s Fynn himself sharing more:

Highly recommend booking time with Fynn to chat about your pricing and packaging, not to mention picking up his book!

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