How to answer the question: “How much does this cost?”
Why pricing is a Category Design problem (not a sales problem).
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Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
Few questions make pirates sweat more than:
“So, how much does it cost?”
Say a number too high, and you’re laughed out of the room.
Say a number too low, and they laugh behind your back, knowing they've got a deal.
Pricing is the moment of truth—and most people botch it.
They sell features (“It goes to 11”) or benefits (“It saves time”). Almost nobody sells outcomes (“It changes your life”).
But outcomes are where pricing power lives. That’s how you charge 5x, even 10x more than the next best alternative.
And this isn’t theory for us. It’s lived experience.
(We should note the Prime Minister of Pricing is Pirate Rafi Mohammed. No one has written more about pricing in the Harvard Business Review than Rafi. He’s awesome and the OG and we’ve learned so much from him. his ideas. If you really want to go deeper, go check out his 100+ HBR library on pricing!)
We constantly get questions about the cost of the Category Design Academy.
We’ve had people sign up on the spot.
We’ve had people laugh out loud.
And we’ve had people come back weeks later saying, “I thought it was expensive. Now I realize it’s a steal.”
That’s the power of outcomes.
Inside the Academy, members double or triple their pricing overnight. They add hundreds of thousands in new revenue. One even told us it was more valuable than his Princeton degree (which cost $400,000).
So when people ask, “Why $10,000?” we say it’s because we don’t sell hours, slides, or calls.
We sell transformation.
Most people think pricing happens on the sales call.
Wrong.
Your pricing power is already set long before you ever say a number. It’s baked into your category design:
Problem Framing: Are you naming an expensive, painful problem that only you solve? Or are you competing in the “better, faster, cheaper” swamp?
Evangelize your POV: Does your content condition the market to believe what you believe—so your price feels inevitable by the time they meet you?
Signals of Value: Do you show up in ways that make your price feel small compared to $400K Ivy League degrees, seven-figure consulting contracts, or years of wasted time?
When you lead with a bold POV, you don’t just create demand. You condition buyers to see your offer as the only logical choice.
This is why pricing is a category design problem first, and a sales problem second.
Most people shrink when they have to justify their price. Pirate Eddie does the opposite.
He lays out seven clear reasons why the Academy is $10K—and in doing so, he reframes $10K as obvious, even cheap.
Watch the video, but don’t just listen for the “why the Academy” part.
Listen for the structure.
This is the exact kind of narrative you can build for your own pricing conversation.
When someone asks, “How much does this cost?” Eddie doesn’t flinch.
He uses a simple 3-part framework:
Frame Against the Next-Best Alternative: Anchor them to what they’d buy if you didn’t exist.
Be Different, Not Better: Better caps your price at parity. Outcomes let you multiply it.
Bundle or Unbundle to Signal Value: Time = commodity. Deliverable = predictable. Outcome = priceless.
This is why some people gasp, some laugh, and the right people sign immediately.
If you want to jam on your pricing, you can ask the Pirate Eddie Bot any question:
How should I price my product?
How do I frame my value against the competition?
How do I answer “how much does it cost?” without sounding defensive?
The Pirate Eddie Bot will give you personalized advice you can use in real time.
And that’s the point: The Pirate Eddie Bot is not just “better than ChatGPT.”
It’s tuned to give you clarity, pricing power, and a POV that cuts through the fog.
How to put Pirate Eddie’s 3-part framework into action:
Here are a few prompts to make Pirate Eddie Bot (or any LLM) your pricing strategist and help you frame the conversation when someone asks, “So, how much does this cost?”