Mr. Large. Sit down. Close the door.
I have looked at your little shop window and I have concerns. Not aesthetic concerns — the typography is fine, fine, you’ve clearly been reading too much Eye magazine — but economic concerns. Which, as you know, are the only concerns that matter once the rent comes due.
Item one: the sliding scale. A sliding scale, Mr. Large. On a premium service. Have you read anything? You are simultaneously asking the market to believe that (a) your work transforms the trajectory of three-year-frozen creative projects, and (b) you’ll do it for two hundred dollars if the customer makes a sad face. Pick one. In Akerlof’s terms you have constructed a lemon market for your own time — the buyer who values it most will pay the least, because they’re the ones who’ll ask. The buyer who could pay 400” and conclude that the $1,000 version must be for suckers, or worse, for marks. You have signalled that your reservation price is whatever the customer chooses to feel about it, which is to say — you don’t have one. Veblen is rolling.
Item two: the price itself is too low. By an order of magnitude. “2,200 to finish the thing you’ve been frozen on for three years.” Sir. Sir. If the buyer is a founder for whom this project represents real equity — and your case studies are a YouTuber with 400,000 subscribers and the founder of Alvea — then your offering is priced like a gym membership against an outcome worth, conservatively, six figures of future income. You have priced against your own testimonials. Ethan Alley is on your page saying you blew his mind. You are charging less than his accountant charges to file a 1099. This is not modesty; this is price-signaling incompetence. The market will assume the work is commensurate with the price, because that is what markets do.
Item three: the rhetorical question is doing the wrong job. “Is it worth that to actually finish?” You are answering your own pricing objection before the customer has raised it. Negotiating against yourself. In bargaining theory we call this “leaving surplus on the table” and in faculty meetings we call it “Mr. Large, please.”
Item four: the value proposition is non-falsifiable. “A clear map of what’s actually stuck.” “Usually an internal conflict that nobody’s named.” This is — and I say this with love, Mr. Large, with love — horoscope syntax. It works for the buyer who is already sold. It does nothing for the marginal skeptic who funds your growth. Where is the measurable deliverable? “The work itself moving” is not a unit. I cannot count it. I cannot regress on it. I cannot, frankly, defend it to my wife when she asks where the $2,200 went.
Item five: ICP confusion. “Founders, creators, and operators.” Three different buyers, three different decision processes, three different willingness-to-pay distributions. You have written a homepage for all of them and therefore for none of them. The YouTuber wants to know you understand the loneliness of a public-facing creative practice. The founder wants to know you’ve sat across from a term sheet. The operator wants to know you can read a P&L. Pick the one who pays best and write the page to him.
Item six — and this one stings, so brace yourself — the case study you lead with does not match the offer. Your headline says “founders, creators, and operators.” Your first, most prominent testimonial is a YouTuber working on her brand philosophy. That is a fine piece of work. It is not “finish the project you’ve been stuck on for years” in the sense that a founder reads that sentence. A founder reads that sentence and thinks fundraise, ship v2, hire the CTO. You are bait-and-switching, possibly unintentionally, and the founders are bouncing.
Now. In sum. You have built a beautiful little artifact that reads like a poem and prices like a panic. The work may well be extraordinary — Mr. Alley is not a man who blurbs lightly — but you have written the page of someone who is embarrassed to be charging at all. Fix the price. Kill the sliding scale on the public page (keep it as a private offer for the people who write to you). Pick one buyer. Make one promise that I, an economist, can measure.
Now get out, I have a seminar.