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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Carter writes a newsletter that helps freelancers charge what they're really worth.
He also sells one thing of his own: a $100 online course about pricing.
His message is simple — you charge too little because nobody ever taught you how to price.
And his readers? Skilled freelancers stuck at $40 an hour, afraid to ask for more.
⛳️ Problem:
Carter keeps his own course cheap, at just $100, hoping more people will buy.
But sales are flat, and every time he thinks about it, he wants to lower the price, not raise it.
Deep down, he knows $100 is far too little for everything packed inside. That stings.
His struggle:
He undercharges for his own course, but the price was never the real problem.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Value Equation
In December 2016, Alex Hormozi checked his bank account and saw just $1,036 left.
A run of bad decisions had left him almost broke.
He owned a few gyms, but running them was a hard, daily grind.
So he tried something new. He and his wife Leila flew out to other struggling gyms.
They would stay about two weeks,
run the gym's ads themselves,
and close the sales in person.
In return, they took a cut of the new money they brought in.
Turns out — it worked so well that gym after gym wanted their help.
But there were only two of them, and only so many weeks in a year.
So Hormozi stopped selling his time, and started selling the system instead.
He packaged up the exact ads, scripts, and steps so any owner could do it alone.
He called it Gym Launch, and the offer was so good that owners lined up.
It spread to more than 4,500 gyms across 13 countries.
Before he sold most of the business in 2021, he had pulled over $40 million out of it.
Later, he wrote the big lesson into his book, 100 Million Dollar Offers.
People don't buy something because of its price. They buy it because of its value.
And he found that value is really made of four parts.
Two of them you want to grow, and two you want to shrink.
The dream result — the thing they truly want. Make it bigger and more exciting.
The belief it will work for them — how sure they are they'll get that result too. Make it stronger, with proof.
The time it takes — how long until they get the result. Make it shorter.
The effort it costs — how hard or annoying it feels to do it. Make it easier to do.
Grow the first two, shrink the last two, and something surprising happens.
That very same price suddenly starts to feel like a great deal.
🚗 So Carter tried it his way.
We're back with Carter and his freelance-pricing newsletter.
He was sure his own $100 course was already too expensive.
But he finally saw the truth: the price wasn't the problem — the value just looked too small.
Plot twist: the fix was to raise the price, not drop it.
He stopped staring at his $100 price, and worked on those four parts instead.
First, the dream result.
His old promise was weak: "learn how to price your work."
So he changed it to something bold: "double your rate in 30 days."
Now the reader pictures a clear, exciting win, not a vague lesson.
Next, the belief that it works.
Before, he just asked people to trust him, with nothing to back it up.
So he added a real student who went from $40 to $90 an hour.
Funny thing is — a true story like that makes a big promise easy to believe.
Then, the time and the effort.
His course looked like a long, heavy project that nobody had time for.
So he added one line: "done in a weekend, with simple templates."
Now it felt quick and easy, so saying yes was simple.
So, before he could lose his nerve, he did the scary part.
Only after all that did he raise the price, from $100 up to $400.
And more people bought it, not fewer.
Next to that big, believable result, $400 finally felt like a bargain.
Cha-ching. Higher price, and more sales.
🧸 Don't drop your price. Raise the value, and the same price starts to feel cheap.
The prompt below rebuilds your offer around the value equation.
So you can charge a premium price that still feels fair to the buyer.
🏄♀️ The prompt
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.
Inputs:
What I sell, and what I charge for it now:
{e.g. freelance web design, currently around $800 a project}
The dream result my buyer actually wants:
{e.g. more sales from a site that finally looks trustworthy}
How long it takes and how much effort it asks of them right now:
{e.g. six weeks, and I keep pestering them for content and feedback}
For Outcome: {e.g. a higher price that feels fair, plus how to present it}
Outputs:
1. The bigger outcome — my offer rewritten around the real result, not the task.
2. Proof it'll happen — an example, guarantee, or number that makes it believable.
3. Faster and easier — specific ways to cut the time and effort the buyer feels.
4. The new price — a higher number, and one line to frame it next to the payoff.
Then flag the single thing making my price feel too high right now.
That's it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours 'proving to you that most business failures are preventable and success can be engineered' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️