Brendan Gahan shows how to make $100k from a small email list by selling high-ticket services like $5,000–$20,000 coaching engagements instead of cheap products. He raised a $100 email course to $200 through repeated price bumps, generating $42,000 in revenue. Start at a price people will buy, then raise it as demand grows.
The people that make the most off of small lists would be service providers and coaches. So I've seen someone, especially if they're doing consulting, you're going to make like sell a $10,000 consulting gig or a $20,000 consulting gig off of a small list because you get the right people on your list. The other thing that makes a big difference is any product that you can charge a lot for. So if you're selling a product for $5 or $10, you need thousands of tens of thousands of people on your list. But if you're selling a product for $500, let's say a coaching session, or $10,000, like a design engagement, then you don't need that big of a list in order to make a full-time living from it. Do you think most people undercharge? Yes, I think most people undercharge, but I'm not in the blatant, like, charge more, always raise your pricing category, because there's just so much more to it. There's so many skills that you have to learn in order to demand a price point. And so, like, it doesn't matter if you're learning as you go and you sell something for $50 and it could have been worth $100 or $500. Like, there's always someone else that you can sell to. Choose a price that people are going to buy at. Don't be the person pricing something at $500 that no one buys and then having to lower from there. I'd much rather start with a price and raise from there as I've demonstrated value and, you know, real demand in the market. And honestly, as I've made the product better, because really a lot of things like the first version of the course, the first version of the software product, it's probably not very good. So if you start out charging $50 for it and people are like, wow, This is insane value that I'm getting from this. Then it's like, great. That's way better. You know, for a lot of people to say that, and then you can be like, hey, we're going to raise the price next week to $100. We're going to raise the price next week to $500. Starting, you know, low, low, but fair and going up from there is much better than starting too high and realizing you have to come back to the market with a lower price later. Just for fun on the side, I made an email course that's for creators who have already earned like $100,000, $200,000 as a creator. And I put that behind a paywall 'cause I only wanted people who were actually really into it to buy it. I didn't want feedback from people who were just like, you know, you're showing off or whatever. And this was a paid email course that I charged $100 for. And I'd get these replies and people were like, this is incredible value. Like $100 was totally worth it in the first email. And I want that. You want people to have that experience. And I add to it over time. I raised the price to $150. And that gave me an opportunity to go to my audience and say, hey, if you bought this already, that's awesome. If you haven't bought it yet, next week the price is going up to $150. And it gives you this opportunity for scarcity. And then as I make the product more valuable, eventually it'll go to $200 and then it'll go up from there. And at every point I get to do another push for scarcity, right? I get to have another reason for people to buy today instead of someday. And so the product gets more valuable and I get these nice sales bumps. And now that email course, which is just a hobby, uh, product that I made, has made, I think, $42,000.
