Earlier this week I put 5 uncommon thoughts on pricing in front of you.
In one of those, I claimed “what other people charge is completely irrelevant” – but I hardly explained that. I just posited that if you don’t want to be average/normal, you shouldn’t charge average/normal prices.
So here’s why going to a group of your peers and asking what they charge is a bad idea –
It’s commodity thinking.
“What does that even mean, Adam?”
You may ask yourself…
Well when we pull out my trusty Merriam-Webster dictionary and look up definition 1c of “commodity” we get this:
A mass produced unspecialized product.
Also known as – anything you can buy at Wal-Mart.
Now, on one hand, there’s nothing wrong with being a product that’s sold in Wal-Mart. All power to those companies/products who can do it and succeed – they’re probably making a killing.
But that competition is incredibly stiff. It’s also a race to the bottom – a “high volume, high margin” product is… extremely rare, to say the least.
(For those of you who don’t know what that means – volume is the quantity of sales, margin is how much profit is made on a sale. A high volume, high margin product means you sell a lot of a thing and make a lot of money from each sale – meaning everyone would want to sell your product.)
A much easier, still very successful way to go is the opposite direction of being a commodity.
That means making something, or being unique, specialized, and rare.
In practice that means:
- Having different skills than others
- Thinking, working, and communicating differently than others
- Providing a special, positive end result
- Saying no to opportunities and not always being available
If you do all of those things and charge a “standard rate” (or god forbid, super low prices) – your clients will be really confused.
Why?
If you could buy an SSL mixing console that Dr. Dre recorded albums on, or a Neve mixing console that Nirvana and the Foo Fighters recorded on… what would you expect that to cost?
Too much for you to even consider, right?
What if I said you could buy one of them for $300?
You’d say –
“Does it even work?”
Get it?
Now what if I told you that you could buy one of them for $60,000?
Well… you might think that’s more expensive – but considering you can buy a 16-channel API console on Sweetwater for around that price – it’s still a weird price for a piece of equipment with legendary stories, right?
That’s what it looks like when you’re pricing like everyone else, even at the higher end. It’s clearly a great deal and you may buy it, but you probably still feel a little weird that the price is so low.
But what if I added another zero to the price and made it $600,000?
At that point just by price alone you know that the console is incredibly special. Maybe it’s a ridiculous price to charge, maybe it isn’t. Certainly the number of potential buyers drops drastically at that price point. But the people who would buy it at $600,000 have vastly different thoughts, needs, and desires for that kind of purchase than even the $60,000 buyers do.
And I’m not trying to say you need to go charge insane prices for your work.
I want to ignite the creative part of your brain by pointing out things you probably haven’t considered. I know you don’t view yourself as a Wal-Mart commodity – even if you’re afraid and scared of money.
You might not view yourself as fancy as a $600,000+ legendary recording console.
My point is that price is a number with loaded expectations and if you expect to be perceived as a “legendary” creative – you better damn well be creatively coming up with “legendary” experiences and prices.
Otherwise people will suspect they’re being had.
I’m running into this right now with my upcoming C# Implementation with Wwise and Unity course. Thankfully, a lot of you are interested in this – and even with a price over $100 though, I have people telling me that they’re surprised it’s priced as low as it is.
That means I’m not matched up with expectations. I’ll have to correct that in the future myself – which, oddly, will make me and my customers more happy.
Weird how sometimes people want to pay more – I don’t fully understand it myself.
But, if you’re wanting to charge more by increasing the level of your implementation skills – the course goes on sale Monday.
It’s already unique and specialized – there’s literally no other course online that covers this information. Not one.
Yes, you can dig through lots of documentation and “free” courses and spend a lot of time amassing this information on your own – much like I did. But if you’d rather not spend the time cost, I’ve made this thing for you.
It’s also rare – there are going to be a limited number of copies available. When they’re sold out, it’s going to stay sold out for a little bit. I’ll take feedback, update/upgrade it, and re-release it in the future. I’m only taking a limited number of buyers because I can only handle so much feedback and information at once. Again, I’m a 1 person operation – I don’t have a staff or even an assistant.
So go check it out, think about if you need to commit or not.
I’ll repeat what I said Monday again – if you’re hurting for money or unsure of whether it’s right for you, do not buy it.
But if you’re like me and you learned Wwise only to find out that you couldn’t make your sounds work because “code” – and that makes you exasperated – buy it.
See you then.
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