How to Attract the Right Clients With Your Price | Daily Essay

Show Notes

Cutting the price of Trends Pro changed who signed up. Support rose, engagement thinned, the room shifted. Raising the price back filtered for people who arrived ready. Price selects your market before anyone reaches your inbox.

Featuring: Seth Godin

Watch on YouTube

Read the full post

Brought to you by:

Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities.

HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do.

Multi: Turn any content into a YouTube video.

Where to find Dru:

I write an essay daily. Get them free
Follow me on X
Watch my video essays on YouTube
Follow Dru's Notes on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Creators and Guests

Host

Dru Riley

Founder of Trends.vc

SG

Guest

Seth Godin

Featured in Dru's Notes: How to Attract the Right Clients With Your Price.

What is Dru's Notes?

One mental model each day in a few minutes. Habits, business, building products and thinking clearly. From Dru Riley, founder of Trends.vc.

"But the problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win."
Seth Godin

I cut the price of Trends Pro and watched the whole dynamic shift.

The move felt generous. Lower the barrier. Let more people in. The signup rate stayed about the same. But who signed up changed.

Support tickets went up. Refund requests followed. People joined confused about what they'd bought. Community conversations got shallower. Members who used to show up prepared started drifting because the room felt different.

So I re-raised the price.

Support dropped. Engagement deepened. The community felt like itself again.

The price was doing its job all along. It filtered for people who'd already decided they wanted in. They arrived ready.

Joe Riedel runs Rampart, a local journalism outlet. He priced subscriptions high enough to fund labor-intensive reporting. When subscribers churned, he added podcasts and exclusive columns instead of cutting the rate. Value up, price holds. The people who stay are the ones who came for the substance.

Dropping a price feels like opening the door wider. But you're changing who walks through it. The downstream effects compound:

- More support
- More confusion
- More churn

The "savings" get eaten by the extra work.

This hits hardest in a paid community. People are paying to be in a room with each other. Lower the bar to get in and you change the room they paid to join.

Price selects your market before a single person reaches your inbox.

If you want to reduce churn, add value. The instinct to lower price optimizes for volume. But volume and quality pull in opposite directions when the product depends on who's in the room.

What kind of business are you building each time you set your price?