In an email last year, I talked about how it’s generally easier (and a lot less stressful) to build a lifestyle business around selling high-ticket offers instead of trying to play the volume game and sell thousands of things for $10 each – unless you already have a massive and super engaged audience.
And last week, I talked about how to overcome the fear of selling itself.
So today, I wanted to marry these two concepts and talk about why I teach all my students in the Lifestyle Business Academy to price their first offer at $2,000 minimum.
Now I know what you’re probably thinking because it’s one of the main pushbacks I get from students – “but Ali, I can’t charge $2,000 for my course” or “I’m not worth $2,000!!!”
And you’re definitely not alone. I had these exact same limiting beliefs back when I first started selling my own stuff on the internet.
When I created the Part-Time YouTuber Academy (PTYA) about 5 years ago now, I was originally planning to sell it for about $200, which seemed logical to me. I was going to teach everything I knew about YouTube and package it into a self-paced course.
But then I had a conversation with Tiago Forte and David Perell, who were running these expensive, live, cohort-based courses at the time (like Building a Second Brain and Write of Passage), and they basically challenged me to run a thought experiment.
They asked me something like: “hypothetically, if you were charging $2,000 for this course, what would change about how you show up for your students?”
And that question completely transformed the way I thought about this whole pricing thing.
If people were paying two grand, I wouldn’t just be creating a course they’d buy access to, never watch, and never implement. Instead I’d be actively invested in their success – we’d give them feedback on their videos, hire people to help them with whatever they were struggling with, and build in accountability systems to make sure they actually got results.
I’m so glad I followed that advice because we’ve had multiple million-dollar launches and Black Friday offer periods.
But it’s not just about making more money. Charging more fundamentally changed the quality of what we delivered and the results students got, which is why I’m now so bullish on this idea of charging more premium prices.
On top of this, I think this is becoming even more important in a world where AI is making information increasingly commoditised and more and more stuff is becoming free.
Nowadays, anyone can learn anything by asking ChatGPT or Claude, and the value of a pre-recorded, self-paced online course that’s just a series of videos is falling pretty quickly.
Whereas what has value now are things like accountability, personalised feedback, community, and support systems that help people actually do the thing, not just learn about it.
So instead of asking “am I worth £2,000?” I want you to start asking “can I deliver a result for someone where that result is worth way more than £2,000 to them?”
And there are 2 key variables I want you to think about when it comes to charging more money for your offer.
1️⃣ The Person – if your target person has more money, then the same problem is worth much more to solve.
This is why it’s generally easier to sell to businesses than to individuals. And this is why Esther Perel for example, the relationships therapist who only works with billionaires, charges high prices because for a billionaire, saving their marriage is worth exponentially more in terms of their overall life quality and financial situation (even though she’s not doing something fundamentally different from other therapists).
2️⃣ The Problem – it’s generally easier to charge premium prices for problems that directly help someone make money or save money. And the more tangible and measurable the outcome, the easier the pricing conversation.
For example, we have students in the Lifestyle Business Academy who say “I help 7-figure course creators increase their sales call close rates by 25%.” That’s an incredibly easy offer to sell for £10-20k because the ROI is so obvious.
But then we have other students who say “I help working professionals overcome imposter syndrome” which is much harder to sell at a premium price point because… what’s the tangible outcome?
So if you’ve ever struggled with coming up with an idea for an offer or pricing something you’ve created, hopefully today’s email was helpful.
And if you have any specific questions, hit reply and let me know – I’d love to know more about where people are getting stuck.
Have a great rest of your week!
Ali xx