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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🙋♀️ Paige’s price cuts
Paige is a marketing manager who sells a course for small bakeries on the side.
Nobody is buying it, so she cut the price.
It was $200, then $149, and this week it is $99, and it still is not selling.
Her struggle:
She thinks the price is the problem, so every cut makes the course look cheaper.
Then a friend who owns a gym tells her the true story of a man
who worked with gyms that were also stuck cutting their prices.
He helped them charge more, not less,
and built a business that made about $17 million in profit in its first year.
Charging more when nobody is buying sounds backwards.
💰 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 thinking about joining 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 answering that doubt instead.
Get this — they went the other way and charged more.
Instead of a cheap first month, gyms sold a six-week challenge at several hundred dollars, paid up front.
And they ran those six weeks for the member: a nutrition plan, sessions already in the calendar, somebody checking whether they turned up.
The price went up, and the odds of failing went down.
They found out what buyers really needed, and gave it to them.
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 the question in the customer’s head, from ‘is it cheap?’ to ‘will it work for me?’
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Value Equation
Alex charged more, and made it safer for the buyer to say yes.
Alex’s tactic is called 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?
You want the buyer to get more and trust it more, and to wait less and work less.
Most people only work on the first question, and make the promise bigger, because that costs nothing.
Alex went at the second question instead: how do I know this will work for me.
That’s the one buyers are usually stuck on.
So instead of focusing on price, answer all four questions the buyer is asking.
Answer them well enough and they pay.
Leave the price alone.
Make it safe to say yes, and the same offer starts selling.
🛠️ Paige’s turn
Back to Paige, and the bakery course she has cut to $99 and still can’t sell.
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and gives it her sales page and every price she’s tried.
Her AI sidekick comes back with one clear answer:
Your buyers don’t doubt the price, they doubt it will work for a bakery like theirs.
She puts the price back to $200.
Then she rewrites the top of her sales page,
so it answers the one question bakery owners were really asking: will this work for my bakery?
🌅 Two months later
Paige hasn’t cut the price once since that night.
Bakery owners reply to her emails now,
and they ask about their own bakeries instead of saying “maybe later”.
If nobody is buying, the price is probably not the problem.
Answer the buyer’s doubt, and leave the price alone.
That’s it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours ‘proving to you that most business failures are preventable and success can be engineered’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below takes the thing you sell and finds which of the four questions your buyer is
stuck on — so you stop discounting a problem that was never about money.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you sell, the price, and what the buyer wants to happen afterwards
- e.g. a course on how small bakeries find local customers, cut from $200 to $99, so the owner sees a line on a slow Tuesday morningWhat makes buyers doubt it will work for them, and the reason they give for not buying
- Use their own words if you have them.
- e.g. they think their town is too small for marketing to work, and they say “it’s a bit much for me right now”How long before buyers see anything, and what they have to do to get there
- e.g. six modules, about four hours, and they have to set up a free Google listing for the bakery
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my course outline, my lesson drafts, or my sales page, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume owners of small bakeries three years in, with quiet weekday mornings.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- 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, the price, and what the buyer actually wants to happen afterwards:
{e.g. a course on how small bakeries find local customers, cut from $200 to $99, so the owner sees a line on a slow Tuesday morning}
What makes them doubt it will work for them, and the reason they give for not buying:
{e.g. they think their town is too small for marketing to work, and they say "it's a bit much for me right now"}
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 set up a free Google listing for the bakery}
======================== 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, so the buyer believes it will work for them.
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.