The thing people pay for is not the truck. It is not having to think about the bin.
For the first two years we sold this business on price, and it was hard work. A truck and two people is a truck and two people, and anybody can undercut you by a rufiyaa a day.
What changed was a conversation with a customer on the main road who said she would pay more for a time she could rely on than for a lower figure. Before subscribing she had kept the bin inside until she heard a truck, then run out with it, and some mornings she missed it and the bin stayed in the house another day. Her complaint was not the money. It was the listening.
So we spent a month measuring the route properly, street by street, with somebody writing down the actual time the truck reached each corner over fifteen mornings. The variation turned out to be under twenty minutes on every street except two, both of which were behind a junction that floods.
We published the windows, fixed the two bad streets by reversing part of the route, and started telling every new household their slot when they signed up. Almost nothing about the operation changed. What changed was that the customer could put the bin out after Fajr and go to work.
Subscriptions grew by about a third over the following year without us lowering the price once. The two streets behind the junction still flood and we still tell those households the truth about it, which is that in heavy rain their morning becomes an afternoon.