# Pricing From Value

#concept #pricing

## Summary

Price against the value of the outcome to the buyer, never against your cost or your competitors' rates. Both sources agree that rate competition is terminal; each contributes a distinct tool — a backwards-math model for setting price, and an objection test for defending it.

## Current Understanding

**Backwards math sets the number** ([[2026-07-17-design-the-perfect-offer]]): pick the monthly revenue target → divide by price → that's the client count. $10,000 ÷ $1,000/mo = 10 clients. If the count feels unrealistic, raise the price rather than chase volume. Restated at larger scale in [[2026-07-23-make-my-first-100k-in-month]] as the **money map**: five price×count routes to $100K/mo, of which only **~100 × ~$1K/mo** is judged sane — 1×$100K is concentration risk, 10×$10K "heavy per-deal," 1,000×$100 too many closes, 10,000×$10 unreachable. Same floor ($1K/mo minimum), plus a stated ceiling for a starting operator (**below $10K/mo** — "every conversation should be worth having") and a language rule (the price is an *investment*, never a *cost*).

**The $1,000/mo floor**, with two justifications:

1. *Buyer-side:* for AI/business services, one new client is worth ~$1K to the buyer — worst case they recoup the fee with a single win.
2. *Seller-side:* below ~$100/mo there's no margin to fund the work that would make the service good. **Pricing constrains quality**, so a low price is self-fulfilling.

The seller-side argument is the more portable one; the buyer-side "one client ≈ $1K" figure is domain-bound and plausibly fails where buyer LTV is far below or above $1K.

**"Expensive" doesn't exist — "I don't see what for" exists** — origin: [[2026-06-15-rodenko-selling-development-expensively]] (condensed in the distillation). The diagnostic:

> *"If we guaranteed the result — is price still the problem?"*
> - **Yes** → they have no money. (Wrong buyer — see [[niche-selection]].)
> - **No** → they never trusted the value. (Your problem, and fixable.)

This is the most operationally useful item in the vault: it converts a vague objection into a binary about which of two different problems you have.

**The Zendesk story makes value pricing concrete** ([[2026-06-15-rodenko-selling-development-expensively]]): a client paying $30k/mo for Zendesk was sold a $2k/mo custom solution; the $100k project paid back in ~4 months. The price wasn't argued down — it was anchored to a cost line the buyer already felt. The outreach reduces to "how much do you spend on X?" → "and if it were 10× less?" (see [[pain-discovery]]). Value pricing works when the value is a number the buyer already pays.

**Price as a competitive weapon = bankruptcy** ([[2026-06-15-selling-development-services-in-the-ai-era]]). With a ~$200/mo AI substitute at the bottom of the market, undercutting has no floor to stand on. The escape is not a better rate but a different category — see [[productized-service]] (commodity test) and [[niche-selection]].

**Pricing power is the PMF test** ([[2026-07-26-how-to-build-a-billion-dollar-company-2027]], [[oskar-hartmann]], added 2026-07-26): if you **raise prices and the customer flow doesn't fall**, you have Product-Market Fit; "whoever sells too cheap has no PMF." And if you cannot set your price at all — a marketplace sets it, discounts aren't yours to give — "you're not an entrepreneur, you're in a simulation of entrepreneurship." This gives the sell-dear school something it lacked: a *test* with a direction of causation. The vault's prior tools diagnose a price objection after the fact (guarantee test); this one uses price as the *probe* — raise it and watch. His companion diagnosis — **most entrepreneurs sell below the real, full cost** (forgotten lines: distribution, repeat acquisition, amortization, write-offs — see [[unit-economics]]) — reaches "sell dear" from the cost side rather than the value side. Notably, this is the first voice from *outside* the coaching/dev-sales schools (a VC/product investor) to join the position, which is worth more to the page's confidence than a fifth in-school restatement.

**Anchoring.** Design the core tier first, then bracket it — see [[offer-ladder]]. A second anchor sits *upstream* of the offer: [[2026-07-18-information-is-free-implementation-is-paid]] argues that 50 free expert videos make a $997 offer feel *cheap* by the time the buyer reaches it — the giveaway pre-sets the reference price before any pitch. See [[information-vs-implementation]].

## Evidence

- Backwards math table (price floor / why $1K / client math) — [[2026-07-17-design-the-perfect-offer]]
- The money map (five routes to $100K/mo; $1K floor, sub-$10K ceiling; "investment" language) — [[2026-07-23-make-my-first-100k-in-month]] ([[dan-martell]])
- "Under $100/mo there's no margin to fund the work that would make the service any good" — [[2026-07-17-design-the-perfect-offer]]
- **Primary:** the guarantee test, "expensive doesn't exist," the Zendesk $30k→$2k story, and "price as a weapon = bankruptcy" — [[2026-06-15-rodenko-selling-development-expensively]] (condensed in [[2026-06-15-selling-development-services-in-the-ai-era]])
- Convergent: "price as incentive devalues you permanently… fastest path to bankruptcy" — [[2026-06-15-more-clients-dev-agency]] (Tony)
- Solution margin 30–50% vs. staff-aug price race — [[solution-vs-staff-augmentation]]
- Pricing power as PMF test; "sells too cheap = no PMF"; the full-cost diagnosis; "simulation of entrepreneurship" — [[2026-07-26-how-to-build-a-billion-dollar-company-2027]] ([[oskar-hartmann]], independent tradition)

## Related Pages

- [[outcome-based-selling]] — the value that price is measured against
- [[offer-ladder]] — how the price points get arranged
- [[productized-service]] — what makes value pricing structurally possible
- [[niche-selection]] — the "no money" branch of the objection test is an audience problem
- [[solution-vs-staff-augmentation]] — the margin consequence of the model choice
- [[information-vs-implementation]] — free content as the upstream anchor that makes the offer feel cheap
- [[unit-economics]] — the cost side of the same price: what the "sell dear" spread must actually cover
- [[overview]]

## Contradictions / Uncertainty

- **The $1K floor is asserted, not derived — and its "second" assertion may be the same speaker.** It originates in one domain (AI services for small business), and its 2026-07-23 restatement is [[dan-martell]], who is plausibly also the unnamed 07-17 speaker (see [[dan-martell]]) — if so, the floor has been stated twice by one person, not confirmed. `Status: tentative` outside that context.
- **Currency and market are unstated.** The video reasons in USD for a US-ish SMB market; the Russian distillation names a ~$200/mo AI substitute without a market. Whether the $1K floor transfers across markets is untested.
- No source disagrees on pricing — four converge from the "sell dear" school (Rodenko, Tony, the video, the distillation), and since 2026-07-26 a fifth from **outside** it ([[oskar-hartmann]], VC/product tradition — pricing power test, full-cost floor). The out-of-school voice upgrades this from one coherent viewpoint to a genuine cross-tradition convergence — but all five are still advocacy; the vault has no adversarial view of value pricing (no documented case where raising prices *did* collapse the flow of a viable business).

## Next Questions

- What is the actual floor in the user's own market and currency?
- How do you price when buyer LTV is *far above* $1K — does the "one client recoups it" logic then argue for a much higher floor?
- What does the guarantee test do with a buyer who says "yes, still too expensive" but demonstrably *has* money? (Neither branch fits.)
