The date was July 17, 2019. I remember exactly where I was, walking in the old 18th century part of my home town of Zagreb, Croatia, where I was living at the time.
I pulled out my phone and saw that I had a new email from Dan Ferrrari.
In case you don’t know, Dan is an A-list copywriter. I profiled him in Commandment IV of my first 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters, because he has string of winning sales letters that few if any copywriters over the past 10 years can match. As just one example, Dan once wrote a sales letter that tripled sales over the previous control and sold out the entire stock of a longevity supplement.
In July 2019, my connection to Dan was extremely tenuous and unlikely.
I had gotten on his email list years earlier, but he never sent any emails.
Then, in the spring of 2019, while I was on a short trip to visit a friend in Baltimore — my first trip back to the U.S. in over five years — Dan finally sent an email to his list. Is anybody in the Baltimore/Washington area who wants to meet?
I replied yes. I don’t know exactly why or what I was hoping for. I just had a sense I was stuck with copywriting as a career. I had only heard stellar things about Dan. I thought if I met him in person maybe it would lead to something.
Aaaand… it turned out no. Our schedules didn’t fit, and we never ended up meeting in Baltimore.
I went back to Croatia, and Dan went back to his non-emailing.
And then, a few weeks later, Dan wrote me to ask whether I might be interested in his coaching program? I said yes.
To which, Dan replied with nothing. No response, first for a few days, then a week, then a month.
I forgot about Dan, and started fishing around for a different copywriting coach. But crazy as it might seem today, nobody in 2019 was offering coaching for copywriting.
And then, over a month after our last email exchange, Dan did reply. We got on a call to discuss his coaching program. I asked about everything but the price because I didn’t want that to cloud my judgment. The coaching sounded like the exact thing I had been looking for. I told Dan I’m in, and I figured I’d make the price work for me somehow.
The day after the call, Dan sent me an email with a PayPal payment link and the actual per month price for the coaching.
That was the email I got while walking around the old town in Zagreb. The reason I remember exactly where I was is that the price took my breath away.
I expected the coaching to be expensive. But not this expensive. I won’t say exactly how expensive it turned out to be. I’ll just say it was as high as my total income on many months at the time.
Still, I had some savings. I decided that, as long as I had some money in the bank, I was willing to give it a go. I mean, everything seemed to be building up to here — my stagnation with copywriting as a career, the near misses I’d had in meeting with Dan, the constant drum beating of “get a mentor” that was popular at the time.
So I took a deep breath, PayPaled Dan the money, and the coaching started.
I’ve written before about the actual coaching I got from Dan. I won’t repeat that here. Here I just want to focus on the price of the coaching, which, as I said, took my breath away when I first saw it.
Had anybody sat me down a few days prior and asked me whether I would pay, each month, what I ended up paying Dan, I would have just stared at them bug-eyed. “Absolutely not” would be my answer, and I would have meant it 100%.
Here’s the fundamental dilemma of setting prices:
Nobody knows what anything is truly worth. You don’t know what your offer is truly worth to your customers. They don’t know either. You can ask them, but they cannot and will not tell you the truth. The only way to know is to put an offer in front of them and see if they will buy.
I ended up buying Dan’s coaching at a price that would have been inconceivable to me only days earlier. Your customers or clients might end up buying your offers at prices that seem inconceivable to you now.
The only way to know is to put your offer in front of them, and see if they will buy.
That said, you can be a little more strategic about your price than simply throwing darts at a dartboard now and then. And on that note, I’d like to remind you of a mini-course I released yesterday, called Modified Depoorter Pricing.
This mini-course is about a pricing strategy I’ve used in the past to sell both services (back when I was working as a sales copywriter) and, later, my own courses.
This pricing strategy was elegant and worked very well when I used it.
My one regret is, I haven’t been consistent enough or thorough enough about using this pricing strategy. So I’ve created a mini-course outlining this pricing strategy, both for your benefit and for mine.
This is a “mini-course,” because I didn’t fill it with a lot of fluff or infotainment. You can consume it in 10 minutes if you so choose.
As such, I still don’t have a sales page for it. But if you’d like to get it nonetheless, you can do so at the link below.
The reason you might want to act now is that I will soon use the Modified Depoorter Pricing strategy to increase the price of this mini-course from its current modest level. To get it before then: