Price testing is the most quantitative of the four types, and its report opens with a recommendation rather than a finding. This article covers the parts specific to price testing. For the sections every report shares, plus exports, judging how much weight a finding carries, and the thin-run banner, start with Reading a synthesis report.
What Matters Most leads with a recommendation that merges three things: the top-line read, the recommended price tiers, and a recommended go-to-market. It hands you a number before it hands you the evidence, which is why the caveat below it matters.
Treat it as a starting range rather than an answer. The question below on taking a price straight to a pricing page is the one to read before you act on it.
The note under the learnings looks like boilerplate, and most of its wording is fixed, but which sentences appear depends on your run. One sentence shifts with how strong the signal was. A line calling the value gap the real takeaway appears only when most participants didn’t see enough value to consider paying. A Still open line, when there is one, names what the run left unresolved, and it is the only part written for your run. So a run on weaker signal gets a more cautious note than a clean one. Read it. It is the fastest signal of how hard you can lean on the numbers above it.
Two blocks. The findings, one by one is the written read on each price point; where a What’s Next step draws on a finding, that finding’s row ends with a See Step N link to the step. Where willingness to pay lands plots the per-participant spread as a chart, which is the fastest way to see whether your number sits inside or outside the range people named.
Read the spread rather than the midpoint. A tight cluster and a wide scatter with the same average mean very different things: the first is a price the market agrees on, the second is a market that should probably be tiered.
The third section is titled What’s Next here rather than Next Steps. Each step carries the detail, why it matters, a tangible test format so you know how to run it, and, where one step depends on another, a callout saying it is conditional on the earlier step.
These steps are framed as tests to run. Each one links back to the findings it draws on, so you can check the evidence behind a move before you run it. The link runs both ways: a finding a step draws on carries a See Step N link, and clicking it opens What’s Next at the step.
The price-testing appendix is a long one. Go here when you need to explain a number to someone else.
No, and the report's own caveat says so. What synthetic participants can tell you reliably is the shape of the response: where the ceiling is, which anchors people reach for, which segments diverge, and where value stops matching price. What they can't do is hand over a real purchase decision, because nobody actually paid. Use the recommendation to narrow a range and to kill numbers that clearly break, then confirm the final figure against real willingness to pay. A price test is for deciding what to test in market, not for replacing that test.
It's a section in the evidence appendix, and the gap between the two is usually the most useful number in the report. Stated willingness to pay is what a synthetic participant answers when you ask directly, which tends to run high because agreeing is easy. Revealed willingness is what their described behaviour implies: what they compare against, what they currently pay for alternatives, where they said they'd walk away. When the two diverge a long way for a segment, trust the revealed figure and treat the stated one as the ceiling of politeness.
Because most of it is fixed wording, but which sentences appear depends on the run. One sentence changes with how strong the signal was. A line saying the value gap is the real takeaway appears only when most participants didn't see enough value to consider paying. And a Still open line, when there is one, names what that run left unresolved; it is the only part written for your run. Sessions excluded before synthesis show up separately, in the yellow banner above the sections rather than in this note. Read the caveat even though it looks like boilerplate, because it is the fastest signal of how far to push the conclusions.
Start with a free project, or walk through Candor with us first.