Mark Wickersham stopped answering price questions with a number. Instead, he created three tiers on paper: three-star, four-star, five-star. Most customers picked the middle option, which cost three times what he used to charge.
1999.
A three-tier system (three-star, four-star, five-star) on three sheets of paper.
The middle option.
It was three times the price.
I thought to myself, why are they saying that's expensive when it's a really cheap price? And it wasn't until 1999 when I discovered value pricing that I realized that I was making a huge mistake, which is never ever answer the price question with the price. You have to build up the value. You have to communicate the value. So I created back in 1999 my first pricing system. It was essentially three sheets of paper. One was, I called it my three star incorporation service. One was my four star, the other was my five star. I created three different versions of that. I also changed the price of those three choices so that the entry level one was more expensive than what I was charging. The middle one, I made it much higher because I knew I was too cheap. And then I had a premium version. And what I found was after that, most people chose the middle option, which was three times the price.
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