add conversion-first benchmarks and day-0 pricing discipline

README.md

@@ -114,6 +114,14 @@ Numbers pulled from enterprise deals and growth engagements advised between 2024
 
 Scope-control discipline that saves deals: keep the SOR (raw customer asks) separate from the SOW (acceptance criteria), sign the SOW together with the contract, and route every change through a CCB. When the customer gets excited on a call — only paperwork counts.
 
+### What's New (July 2026): Conversion-First Benchmarks from Founder Interviews
+
+Three additions distilled from 2024–2026 founder podcast interviews (recalled figures marked accordingly):
+
+- **Conversion-first benchmarks** — Scale only after signup-to-paid clears the bar: >=1.5% for ToC AI (good products: 6-8%; best seen ~40%), >10-15% for ToB. Of 200+ teams that heard this SOP, fewer than 10 executed it; those reached 4-8%+ conversion and raised more smoothly. Includes the documented case of ~$5,000 MRR on ~10,000 registered users after roughly six quiet months of conversion grinding.
+- **Day-0 pricing discipline** — Charge from Day 0, even $1. Ship a deliberately vague pricing page + contact form before the paid tier exists: in one documented case, dozens of price inquiries arrived within two weeks, splitting ~70% community-free / 20% personal / 10% team — and the user question shifted from "is this free?" to "how much?". Users genuinely pay for at most ~3 points in any product: instrument usage, find them, gate there.
+- **PLG-to-SLG watershed + lean-team benchmarks** — ~$1M ARR is where pure PLG stops scaling; above it (and for most ToB) you need SLG / local key-account channels. Lean-team bar (podcast-recalled): ClickUp ~24 people at $1M ARR, Notion ~4-8 people at million-user scale; over 25 people without $1M revenue = an org problem, not a market problem.
+
 ### What's Inside
 
 - **PMF Validation Framework** — How to know you actually have product-market fit (not just polite users)