The other day I was having a debate with my cofounder over product segmentation.

We have 1 pilot customer, and he was debating with me on which feature(s) we should charge them (more) for.

My response was "We don’t even know what they find valuable today."  He didn’t really understand where I was going, so I expounded:

We should give them every single feature we can think of and implement and get their thoughts on it.  We should ‘kitchen sink’ them.

He did not think that was a good idea, because in that way, we are leaving money on the table and giving away too much for free, so I clarified.

We should kitchen sink them because they are our pilot customer and it’s from them we can learn what’s valuable, what’s not valuable, and what we can charge (more) for.  As a pilot customer they are basically debugging and market testing for us… and we get paid for it, so our best option is to learn as much from this customer as possible, even if it means leaving money on the table.  When the next customer comes along, we will have a much better idea of what to charge, and we will understand the value and ROI of those additional charges to our customers.  Right now, we don’t know what we don’t know, so any product decisions we make are conjecture.

He thought about it for awhile… then he agreed.  Score one for the product team.

The moral of this story is that it is very tempting to come up with additional features and try to drive additional value for those features, but as a startup, it’s safer to put those features in front of a customer and get their feedback before making any major decisions on free vs paid vs premium in terms of features.  Customer development and piloting is great, and its wonderful if you can get a customer to PAY for a pilot.  We have to learn as much as possible while we are still under the radar.