Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🥾 The ninety pairs that came back
Ninety of the first hundred pairs fell apart.
Leon Bean was a storekeeper in Maine.
In 1912 he'd made himself a hunting boot, because he kept coming home from the woods with wet feet.
He stitched a leather top onto a rubber bottom and sold a hundred pairs by mail.
Then the stitching tore straight through the rubber, and the leather came away from the sole.
He'd promised anyone who wasn't happy a full refund.
So he paid it, ninety times over.
Ninety out of a hundred.
Ouch.
It very nearly finished the business, and he had to borrow from his family to fix the design.
Leon didn't build a cheaper boot.
He didn't knock a few dollars off the price to cover the risk of buying from a man whose boots had just come apart.
He fixed the stitching, and then he made the promise louder.
Anything he sold could come back if it disappointed you, and he printed that promise on everything.
A stranger ordering boots by mail from a man he'd never met was making a bet.
Leon took the bet away.
That boot is still on sale today, more than a century later.
⛳️ The problem
Leon refunded ninety pairs and made the guarantee louder, not the price lower.
But right now, nobody is buying, so we do the only thing we can think of and cut the price.
And so we keep cutting, because it's the only lever we know.
💰 The man with $1,036 left
In December 2016, Alex Hormozi looked at his bank account and found $1,036 in it.
He'd owned a few gyms.
A run of bad decisions had taken almost everything else.
So Alex and his wife Leila started flying out to other people's gyms, the struggling ones, and staying about two weeks.
They ran the gym's advertising themselves, sold the memberships in person, and took a cut of the new money they brought in.
Those gyms had been discounting for years.
Cheap trials, cheap first months, cheap everything.
Turns out it had never worked, because the person walking past the window wasn't thinking about the price.
They were thinking: this will not work for me either.
So the Hormozis stopped competing on the price and started attacking that thought instead.
Get this — they went the other way and charged more, and they made it much harder for a member to fail.
They turned the system into a business called Gym Launch.
In its first year it made about $17 million in profit.
In 2021 they sold 66% of it, together with their supplement company, for $46.2 million.
He did not find cheaper customers.
He changed what the customer was deciding.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Value Equation
Leon refunded ninety of his first hundred pairs, then made the promise louder instead of the price lower.
Alex charged more and made the offer much harder to fail at.
Alex's own name for what they both did is the Value Equation, and he says a buyer is quietly asking four questions.
Price is not one of them.
What will I get?
How do I know it will work for me?
How long will it take?
How much work is it for me?
The first two you want to raise.
The last two you want to bring as close to zero as you can.
Beginners only do the first two, because making a bigger promise is the easy half.
The money's in whichever of the four they're actually stuck on.
So you stop discounting a problem that was never about money.
Leave the price alone.
Make it safe to say yes, and the same offer starts selling.
That's it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours 'proving to you that most business failures are preventable and success can be engineered' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below takes the thing you sell and finds which of the four your buyer is
stuck on — so you stop discounting a problem that was never about money.
Save this prompt as a Skill or add to Project in your favorite AI tool — build once, use often.
Update your input values in the prompt, or just run it as is. Your AI sidekick will use the example values and give you an output.
CONTEXT:
- (use what's available, fall back to the inline values)
- If my Voice Profile exists, write in that voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If my ICP / Audience doc exists, target that reader. Otherwise, use the audience below.
- If you can see my sales page or past buyer messages directly, read them. Otherwise, use what I paste below.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I sell, and the price:
{e.g. a $100 course on how to price freelance work}
What the buyer wants to actually happen afterwards:
{e.g. stop quoting $40 an hour and be able to say $2,000 for the project without flinching}
What makes them doubt it will work for THEM specifically:
{e.g. they think their clients are cheaper than everybody else's clients}
How long before they see anything, and what they have to do to get there:
{e.g. six modules, about four hours, and they have to redo their rate card}
The reason I have been given for not buying, in their words:
{e.g. "it's a bit much for me right now"}
For Audience: {e.g. freelance designers three years in, stuck around $40 an hour}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The four questions — rate my offer out of ten on each one, and say which of the four is weakest.
2. The real objection — what "it's a bit much right now" is actually saying, given those four ratings.
3. Certainty moves — three concrete ways to make buying safe, the way Bean's refund promise made it safe.
4. Speed and effort moves — two ways to get them a first result sooner, and two things I can do for them instead of asking them to do it.
5. The version at double the price — what would have to be true of the offer for that to be the obvious buy.
Then tell me the ONE change that would let me leave the price exactly where it is.