What's up, it's Zayd.

I was talking to this founder who spent three months obsessing over his outbound sequence, his ICP, his LinkedIn profile photo. Real details-guy energy. Then I asked him how he landed on his pricing and he said, and I quote: "I just looked at what the guy above us was charging and went a little lower."

Which is…fair.

I did it too, initially, but your price is doing more selling than you think, and most founders have no idea what it's actually communicating.

A discount you offer in the first conversation, a "starter tier" designed to be impossible to say no to, a number you picked because it felt safe, are all signals.

All of it is telling your prospect what your product is worth before you've said a single word about what the product does.

This week I'm getting into why your pricing strategy might be attracting exactly the wrong customers, and what to do about it.

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My favorite finds of the week

When a prospect sees your price for the first time, they form an opinion about what kind of company you are and who you built this for.

Low pricing reads one of two ways: either this product isn't serious, or this company is nervous. Neither is a great foot to start on, especially when you're already asking someone to bet on a company they've never heard of with a product that doesn't have ten years of case studies behind it.

The prospect who pushes hardest on price in the first conversation is almost never the one who becomes a great customer. Your best customers are looking for something that works. They've had the experience of buying cheap and regretting it. The ones who want to negotiate before they've even seen a demo are telling you exactly how this relationship is going to go. They are going to be high maintenance, low margin, first to churn, and definitely not referring anyone.

You've built a filter with your pricing. The question is whether you've set it to catch the right people.

Lead qualification happens way before discovery. It happens when a prospect decides whether to engage with you at all, based on what your product appears to be worth.

Price above what feels comfortable and something interesting happens. The prospects who don't flinch are signaling that they take the problem seriously enough to pay to solve it. The ones who immediately try to get you down are signaling the opposite. You haven't even gotten on a call yet and you're already learning something useful about who you're talking to.

Founders who reflexively offer discounts in the first conversation, who have a "just to get you started" tier that's designed to remove all friction, are optimizing for a closed deal when they should be optimizing for the right closed deal. In the moment, we all forget that there is always a cost to customers who were never a good fit from the start. There are support hours, there’s product roadmap noise, churn, and the particular demoralizing experience of working really hard for someone who still leaves. That cost doesn't show up anywhere obvious, which is why it keeps happening.

Examples of the best performing LinkedIn outreach messages:

Find your best current customer that’s getting the most out of the product, who's never complained, who has probably already told someone else about you. Figure out what you're actually worth to them. Time saved, pipeline generated, headcount they didn't have to hire, revenue they can attribute to using you. Whatever the unit is for your product.

Then look at what you're charging them.

In most cases there's a significant gap, and that gap is information. It means your pricing might not be reflecting what your product actually does for people who use it well and that's worth recognising.

The best pricing conversations with prospects feel like making the value so clear that the number is an afterthought. Getting there is a product positioning problem as much as a pricing problem, but it starts with having enough conviction in what you built to charge accordingly.