What Your Price Says About You: Read It Cold.
What your price says about you reaches strangers before they meet you or try anything. It is the only business decision visible that early. So reading your own number the way a stranger would is a skill worth building tonight.
The first thing a stranger sees.
Every other part of your business is about the work itself. However, price is the number attached to that work. It speaks for you before you open your mouth. Because strangers see it first, it works as a price as a signal of quality. Yet most people never read their own price coldly.
Reading what your price says about you.
So imagine a stranger who sees only your price, with no other information. Then ask what they would conclude about your work. Raise the price, deliver more, and you buy yourself room to work. In short, the number and the delivery have to rise together.
The wall pricing cannot fix.
Keep raising your price and you eventually meet one wall. You are still selling hours from a life with a fixed, unknown number of them. That is the trading time for money ceiling, and no price on earth solves it. But that wall has a door in it.
Check what your price says about you.
Show your price alone to someone who has never seen your work.
Then write down the first conclusion they reach about its quality.
From the book.
Every other chapter here is about the work itself. This one is about the number you attach to that work, and about what your number says on your behalf before you have opened your mouth, and I do not think you have ever once read your own price the way a stranger reads it.
I Want to Start a Business but I Don't Have Money, chapter 7: Why you will price too low
Questions about what your price says about you.
Why does what your price says about you matter so much?
It is the only decision a stranger sees before meeting you. So it shapes their view before your work does.
What happens when I raise my price and deliver more?
You buy yourself room to work. However, both the price and the delivery must rise together.
Is there a limit to raising prices?
Yes, because you are still selling hours from a limited life. No price solves that, but the wall has a door.
Read the whole chapter.
This lesson covers one section of chapter 7, “Why you will price too low”. The book goes further, with the full evidence, the stories and every exercise.
Lessons in this chapter.
- 01 Why Freelancers Undercharge: The Number Comes From You.
- 02 Anchoring Effect Experiment: Your Cost Is the Wheel.
- 03 Price Placebo Effect: What the Evidence Really Shows.
- 04 Penetration Pricing Risks: Why Cheap Can Sink You.
- 05 Water Diamond Paradox: Cost Is Not the Buyer's Value.
- 06 When to Raise Your Prices: The Cost of Waiting.
- 07 Gabor Granger Method: Test a Higher Price Tonight.
- 08 What Your Price Says About You: Read It Cold.