How to price your first offer without guessing

Most first offers get priced by feel: a competitor's page, a round number, a figure that feels brave at midnight and embarrassing by Friday.

Price is not a personality test. It is a hypothesis about what an outcome is worth to one specific buyer, and like any hypothesis it can be tested cheaply.

Price the outcome, not the hours

An hourly rate caps you at your calendar and makes the buyer care about your cost base. A price on the outcome makes them care about the result. If an offer saves a company €40,000 of wasted spend, €4,000 is not expensive. It is a rounding error with a decision attached.

Write the outcome in the buyer's language before you write down a number. "One audit" is a service. "A clean answer on where your acquisition spend is leaking" is a purchase.

Start with the smallest paid unit

Your first price is not your forever price. It is the entry point that proves somebody will pay at all. Strip the offer to the smallest version that still produces a visible result: one audit, one sprint, one month of access.

Ten buyers at €400 teach you more than one buyer at €40,000 — and they teach you in weeks, not quarters. The point is not the revenue. The point is the sample.

Test three tiers, not one

Buyers never answer "is this worth it" in a vacuum. They answer "compared to what". Put three versions in front of them:

• Entry — the smallest paid unit, priced to be an easy yes.
• Core — the version you actually want to sell, roughly three to four times entry.
• Full — the version with your calendar in it, priced so that yes is a real decision.

If nine of ten buyers take the core without asking a question, it is underpriced. If nobody takes the core, either the entry sits too close to it or the middle carries nothing the buyer cannot get alone.

The number nobody computes

Take your last three projects. Divide the fee by every hour you actually spent — the calls, the revisions, the invoices, the afternoon you spent resenting the scope.

Most founders discover their effective rate is half what they assumed, and that one client is quietly subsidising the rest at 30% of the margin. That number, not the price on the page, is what you are choosing to keep.

What to do this week

1. Write the outcome of your offer in one sentence a buyer would repeat to their partner.
2. Define the smallest paid unit and price it so a yes costs the buyer nothing politically.
3. Put three tiers in front of five people and watch which one they argue about.

Argue with the market, not with yourself. The market answers in days.