Price it
Put a number on it
Gate cleared when
Choose a price and say it out loud without apologising.
The read
About ten minutes. Written for the founder, not the parent.
Pricing feels like maths. It is almost entirely nerve. Nearly every young founder prices too low, and not because they calculated wrong — because saying a bigger number out loud is embarrassing.
Use three anchors, in this order. First: what does the workaround cost them right now? If your neighbour spends forty minutes a week on something, forty minutes has a value, and they already pay it. Second: what do roughly similar things cost? Not identical things — similar ones. Third, and most useful: what number makes you slightly uncomfortable to say?
Take the uncomfortable one. That discomfort is not a signal that the price is wrong. It is a signal that you are finally charging what the work is worth, and it goes away after about the fifth time you say it.
Then compress the price into one flat sentence: “It's twelve dollars.” Full stop. No “I was thinking maybe”, no “but I could do it cheaper”, no explaining the price before anyone has objected to it. When you explain an unchallenged price, you are telling the other person it is negotiable, and they will believe you.
The last part is physical, and it is the reason this module exists. Say your sentence out loud twenty times, standing up. Listen for your voice rising at the end and turning the price into a question. Keep going until it lands flat. Then, when you say it to a real person, stop talking for five full seconds. The silence will feel unbearable. Let them fill it — that is where you find out what they actually think.
Your mission
Now go and do this.
Write your price and your one sentence on paper. Say it twenty times standing up until your voice stops going up at the end. Then say it to one real person and count five silent seconds before you say anything else.
The trap
“Pay whatever you think it's worth”, and free trials with no end date. Both feel generous and both are ways of not asking. You will learn nothing about your price by never naming one.
Definition of done
All four, honestly.
- A number, written down, that made you slightly uncomfortable
- One flat sentence with no apology and no explanation in it
- You said it twenty times out loud
- You said it to a real human and survived the five seconds of silence
Nobody is checking these but you. That is the point — this is the first thing you will ever run where the standards are yours to keep.
Saved in this browser. Tick it when the four lines above are genuinely true.