Design a pricing strategy for a hypothetical Google teleportation service

Imagine Google has invented teleportation. You are the product manager responsible for taking it to market, and the interviewer asks how you would price it. The details of the technology are left to you, so state your assumptions about what it can do and show how your pricing depends on them. ```hint Bound the price before picking one Work out what sets the lowest price Google could accept and what sets the highest price a given customer would pay, then notice how far apart those bounds are for different customers. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Does it move people, goods or both, and how far can it reach: within one city, within a country, or anywhere on Earth? - What does one trip cost Google to run, and how many trips can the system handle at launch? - Has it been proven safe and approved by regulators for people, or would the first launch be limited to cargo or a pilot? - Is Google's priority profit, the widest possible adoption, or building a platform that other businesses use? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A pricing objective tied to Google's goal and the launch stage, stated before any number - A cost floor and a value ceiling for each customer type, based on the alternatives teleportation replaces and the time it saves - A price structure and segmentation, with fences that keep customers in the right tier - How capacity limits, safety, regulation and fairness shape launch pricing and how prices change as capacity grows - Metrics and experiments for adjusting the price after launch, and the risks to existing industries and to public trust ### Follow-up Questions - Demand at your launch price is ten times the available capacity. Do you raise the price, run a waitlist or auction slots, and why? - How would your pricing change if a competitor launched its own teleportation service two years later? - Should an emergency medical trip cost the same as a holiday trip? How would you decide?