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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Maya’s course that earns less as it gets better
Maya is a project manager at a hospital, and she writes a newsletter for new team leads on the side.
This week, she is setting the price for the online course she sells to her readers.
So she counts what is in it, eight hours of video, twelve worksheets, a workbook,
and she sets the price by how much stuff there is.
🧩 Her struggle:
She counts what’s in the course instead of what it does for a new team lead, so a better course earns her less.
On her drive to work, she’s listening to a podcast that tells the real story of a designer
who also used to price his work by the hour,
and whose design agency, he says, billed more than $80 million.
His fix wasn’t to raise his hourly rate.
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🎨 The designer who stopped counting hours
Chris Do, a designer, worked out that getting better at his job was costing him money.
He ran a design agency called Blind, which he says billed more than $80 million over its life.
Early on he priced the way everybody in his industry did, which is by the hour.
The problem with that shows up the moment you get good.
If he drew a logo in two hours, using twenty years of practice, he could only charge for two hours.
A slow beginner who took forty hours on the same logo could charge for forty.
So the better he got, the less the same work paid.
So he changed what he charged for.
He now talks about pricing the same logo work at $500 versus $100,000, depending on what it needs to do for the buyer’s business.
Instead of pricing the time, he prices the outcome the work produces.
A brand identity is the logo and look a company uses everywhere.
The company puts it on every product, van and business card for the next decade.
It is worth the same to the company, whether the file took two weeks or an afternoon.
He now teaches the same thing through The Futur, the design-business school he runs.
The fix he insists on isn’t a higher hourly rate.
It’s to stop charging by the hour at all.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Outcome Price
Chris stopped charging for the hours a logo took and started charging for what it did for the buyer’s business,
and his agency, he says, billed more than $80 million.
This tactic is called The Outcome Price.
He didn’t raise his hourly rate.
He changed what the price was for.
Price by size — hours, length, number of lessons — and the buyer compares you with whoever offers more of it for less.
Price by what changes for them, and there’s nothing left to compare you against.
So getting faster and better at your craft stops cutting your own pay.
You get paid for what changes for the buyer, not for how long you sat there.
With AI, the same work takes a fraction of the hours, so charging by the hour now punishes you for using it.
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🛠️ Maya’s turn
So what about Maya, who prices her course for new team leads by counting its hours of video?
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what changes for a new team lead after the course.
Her AI sidekick comes back with one clear answer:
Price your course by what it saves a new team lead, not by how many hours of video are in it.
She takes the line about eight hours of video off her sales page.
In its place, she writes what changes for a new team lead in their first month.
Then she cuts two hours of video that nobody needed.
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🌅 Two months later
Maya’s course is six hours long now, instead of eight, and it’s clearer.
Her sales page talks about a new team lead’s first month, not about hours of video.
Nobody has asked her why the course got shorter.
The better you get at your work, the less time it takes.
Your price doesn’t have to shrink along with it.
Price your work by what it does for the buyer, not by the hours it took.
That’s it, my fellow anti-status-quo-ers!
Yours ‘helping you skip years of pain and frustration in your life and business’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below re-prices what you sell around the result instead of its size.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you sell, how you price it now, and how you picked that price
- e.g. a course for new team leads, at $200, because it is eight hours of video and that felt about rightWhat changes for the buyer afterward, and what that change is worth to them
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. they stop losing good people in their first year, and one person quitting costs three weeks of hiring and a coach at $300 an hourWhat they’d do instead if your course didn’t exist
- e.g. hire that coach, or guess
🚀 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 people who have just been promoted to lead a team for the first time.
- 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.
- Never price by hours, length, module count or word count. If a recommendation depends on the size of the thing, it is wrong.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I sell, how I price it now, and how I picked that:
{e.g. a course for new team leads, at $200, because it is eight hours of video and that felt about right}
What actually changes for the buyer afterward, and what that change is worth to them:
{e.g. they stop losing good people in their first year, and one person quitting costs three weeks of hiring and a coach at $300 an hour}
What they would otherwise do instead:
{e.g. hire that coach, or guess}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. What they are actually buying — the result in their words, not the format in mine.
2. The value of it — a plain estimate of what that outcome is worth to them, with the arithmetic shown.
3. The new price — a specific number anchored to the outcome, plus why it is defensible.
4. How to say it — the sentence that puts the result in front of the price, so the size never comes up.
5. What to stop advertising — the size details on my page that invite a comparison I lose.
Then tell me the one number in my current pricing that is doing the most damage.