A lightweight conjoint survey for pricing a brand-new product

Van Westendorp is the fastest way to get a defensible price range for a new product, but it can't tell you how price trades off against specific features — which matters when you're deciding, say, whether to bundle a feature in or sell it as an add-on. That's where conjoint analysis earns its keep: it asks respondents to choose between full product packages that vary on several attributes at once, including price, and infers how much each attribute is actually worth to buyers.

A full commercial conjoint study can run into the tens of thousands of dollars and take weeks. A scaled-down version is workable for most teams: pick no more than 4-5 attributes that matter most (including price as one of them), define 3-4 realistic levels for each, and generate a set of 8-12 package comparisons using a simple fractional-factorial design — free tools and open-source R packages (such as the `conjoint` or `support.CEs` packages) can generate a balanced design without a market-research background.

Field the survey to at least 100-150 respondents from your actual target segment if you can get them; fewer than that and attribute-level estimates get noisy. For each comparison, ask respondents to pick which full package they'd choose, not to rate features individually — the forced trade-off between price and features is the entire point, and it produces far more realistic answers than asking people to rate importance on a 1-5 scale.

Analyze results with a simple choice model (multinomial logit is standard and doesn't require a data scientist to run in R or Python) to get relative importance weights for each attribute and a willingness-to-pay estimate for each feature level. Treat the output as a planning input for pricing and packaging decisions, not a guaranteed revenue forecast — conjoint measures stated preference in a survey, not actual purchase behavior, and tends to overstate willingness to pay for feature-rich, high-price bundles relative to what people do with real money.