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Hey there rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Reed writes a weekly newsletter and sells a course on building your own brand.
He started after years of watching skilled solo creators sell their work for far too little.
He's sure a price should match the result, not the effort behind it.
Reed's readers want exactly that — to stop pricing their work like it's worthless.
⛳️ Problem:
Reed priced his course at $49, because it only took him a few weekends to build.
But the students who use it go on to land clients worth thousands.
He priced it by how little work it took him, not the result they walk away with. That stings.
His struggle:
He measures the price by how easy it was to make, so the better he gets, the less he feels it's worth.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Outcome Price
Picture two plumbers at your door.
One takes six hours, one takes one — and both fix the very same leak.
So why should the fast, skilled one earn less? Wild, right?
That's what Chris Do teaches.
He ran a design agency, Blind, that billed over $80 million across its years.
Now he teaches pricing at The Futur, and explains it with a plain t-shirt.
A blank t-shirt sells for five dollars. Add the Nike logo, and the same shirt sells for twenty.
That little logo took seconds to add, so nobody's paying for extra work.
They're paying for what the brand is worth to them — the status and identity they want.
Same with your work: charge for the value the buyer gets, not the hours you put in.
Charge by time, and getting good actually pays you less.
Charge for the result, and your course is worth far more than the weekend or two it took to build.
🚗 So Reed tried it his way.
We're back with Reed and his course on building your own brand.
He'd priced it at $49 because it took him only a few weekends to make.
So he stopped pricing his effort, and priced the outcome instead.
First he asked past students one question: "What did this help you earn or save?"
Several said it landed them a client worth five figures — tens of thousands of dollars.
Turns out the course wasn't "a few weekends." It was the thing that got them paid.
So he relaunched it at $499 — same lessons, priced to the result.
He named the new price plainly on the page, with no nervous discount and no apology.
Spoiler: the first buyer signed up that week and replied that it had already paid for itself.
Same course he almost gave away for $49 — finally priced to what it's worth.
Cha-ching.
🧸 Don't price the hours you spent. Price the result your buyer walks away with.
The prompt below turns an effort-based price into a value-based one.
You just tell it your offer and what it's worth to your 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:
The offer I'm about to price (what it is, and how I'd normally price it):
{e.g. a self-paced course on building your own brand — I'd price it ~$49 because it only took a few weekends to make}
What this outcome is worth to my buyer (the result it drives — ask past buyers if you don't know):
{e.g. past students say it helped them land clients worth five figures}
The questions I'm scared to ask my buyers (the value-finding questions I usually skip):
{e.g. "what did this help you earn or save?" / "what would it cost to not solve this?"}
For Outcome: {e.g. a value-based price for my offer plus the words to present it without flinching}
Outputs:
1. The value-finding questions — 3-4 questions to ask buyers that surface what the outcome is really worth, in their words.
2. The value-based price — a price anchored to the outcome (not my effort), with a one-line rationale I can say out loud.
3. The presentation words — exactly how to state the price plainly, so the value does the work.
4. The hold-the-line responses — 2 calm replies for when a buyer hesitates, that don't cave to discounting.
Then name the ONE effort-based habit I should drop because it's capping what I can earn.
That's it, my fellow doers!
Yours 'helping you skip years of pain and frustration in your life and business' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️