# Pricing is hard

> I am no salesman.

> As we record the Johnny.Decimal Workshop, I'm thinking about how to price it. I wanted to record my thoughts somewhere that I could link to them later.Pricing things is hard.

I'm not a salesman. It's the part of my new job that I enjoy the least.

When we released the [Workbook](/jdu/workbook) I had no idea what it was worth. How could I? What baseline could I possibly have? It's a PDF that we'd written.

It's simultaneously worth nothing (it's a digital good with [zero marginal cost](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-78237-5_6)) and everything (it's how we pay our rent).

So it's an equation. Basic maths. Price × sales. Higher price, fewer sales, and vice versa. Where's the sweet spot?

## Doing it wrong

I treasure my audience. Lucy and I call you 'the Johnny.Decimal family'. We really do.

So when I price a thing high, my best supporters buy it immediately, and then if I lower the price ... that feels bad.

This happened, obviously. There's nothing I can do about it now, other than learn the lesson.

**#1: Turn it up, not down.**

## Unfortunately, discounts work

I _hate_ the bullshit where someone says that some thing is 'worth' some amount and if you get this one thing and this other thing then really the 'value' is $499 but _unbelievably_ you get it for $4.99!

I refuse to play that particular game, but people do love a deal. It's just human nature.

**#2: Price it higher, but always have a deal.**

This feels a bit sleazy, but I need to get over it. Make the base price higher, but [nobody actually pays it](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/74828/why-are-hotel-rack-rates-so-exorbitantly-high): there's always an offer.

And it aligns with **#1:** you can easily **turn it up** by adjusting the coupon discount.

## Lower price × higher volume = lower stress

When the Workbook was $37, some days I'd wake up to zero sales. (~80% of my sales occur while I'm asleep here in Australia.)

That's terrifying.

So when I dropped it to $19, the overall earnings didn't necessarily go up, but the chance of any given day being disastrous certainly went down.

**#3: I prefer volume over price.**

This sits nicely with me. I'd prefer to be more affordable, and this means I get to help more people.

(The alternative is to go high-end. The price of entry for some of my competitors _starts_ at multiple-hundreds of dollars. Good on them, but that's not for me.)

## Sales are spiky

What are you people _doing_ out there?

If my best day last week was 100%, my worst was 19%. The sales graph is super spiky and as far as I can tell there's no pattern.

<div class="special-pre-follows"></div>

```

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S│▓         ▓
a│▓         ▓
l│▓   ▓     ▓
e│▓   ▓     ▓
s│▓ ▓ ▓ ▓   ▓
 │▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓
 │▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓
 └────────────
  ThFrSaSuMoTu
```

_(Indulge me my passion for pointless ASCII graphs.)_

So you'll have a great week – the first week of January was a record-breaker – and you'll think, mad!, we've cracked it.

And then the next week will be crap.

It's been long enough now that I've learned to ignore it.

**#4: View sales month-by-month not day-by-day.**

**#5: Don't respond to yesterday. It was random.**

---

# An experiment

This header was going to read 'this isn't science' and then I realised, no – it's the very _definition_ of science: I don't know the answer, and I'm testing hypotheses with experiments.

And so if you see prices change, or you wonder _why he did that,_ the answer is ... experiment. It's just some guy with no expertise trying to figure it out.

It's not nefarious, and it's certainly not personal.

> Discuss this [on the forum](https://forum.johnnydecimal.com/t/22-00-0027-pricing-is-hard/1210).