How Much Should You Charge? You're Probably Asking the Wrong Question.
Pricing is a message problem before it's a number. Here's how to stop competing on price.
It’s one of the most common things founders go looking for: how much should I charge. How do I price this. How do I charge more without losing people.
It’s a fair question. It’s also, usually, the wrong one.
Price isn’t really a number problem. It’s a message problem, and underneath that, an identity problem. You can’t hold a price for value you can’t clearly name. And if you can’t say what you actually do, beyond the deliverable, the client prices it as a commodity. They’re not wrong to. That’s what you handed them.
Here’s the shift. People aren’t buying the widget. They’ve got a frustration on one side and something they want on the other, and they’re looking for someone to carry them across the gap. Your job isn’t to provide the deliverable. It’s to be the bridge. Sell the deliverable and you compete on price, because there’s always someone cheaper. Sell the bridge instead. The outcome, the experience, the change. Then you’re the one who sets the price.
A founder I worked with did genuinely beautiful work but kept getting beaten down on cost. He described himself as doing maintenance: cutting grass, tidying borders. So that’s what people bought from him, and grass-cutting has a going rate. We pulled the word “maintenance” out of his vocabulary entirely. He wasn’t selling maintenance. He was creating a garden that’s beautiful in every season, year-round, an experience, not a chore on a rota. Same hands, same skill. But once he was selling the experience instead of the widget, price stopped being the argument. The people who only wanted the cheapest mow took themselves elsewhere, and that was fine. They were never his people.
A builder I coached had the same shape of problem from a different angle: drowning in leads, all of them haggling. He didn’t filter the leads. He reframed what he was, and the right ones followed. The move is the same in both: you narrow by what people actually want, not by what you’re willing to discount to.
So before “how much should I charge,” the better question is: what am I actually selling, and to whom? Get that right and the price question gets a great deal simpler, and a great deal less negotiable.