At a glance: Your pricing structure decides which future prices are still available to you
A newsletter consultant built a $40,000-a-year business on a $10-a-month subscription.
Then she found she couldn't raise the price, couldn't cut what she delivered, and couldn't launch anything premium without competing with her own cheap offer.
April Dunford, the positioning consultant, once had a prospect mishear her $15,000 price as $50,000 and chose not to correct him. That one moment sent her price in a different direction.
Two stories, same decision, different moments: whether the way you price something today leaves you a way out tomorrow.
The price you set on day one decides which doors stay open.
The method by which you try to scale your business is the method by which you will commodify your offering.
Blair Enns
The trap that looks like success
Picture the newsletter consultant. A few hundred subscribers at $10 a month each leading to $40,000 a year rolling in reliably. That's a working business, but when the growth stalls, and she goes looking for the next move, there isn't one.
She can't raise the price. The problem is that at $10 a month, subscribers are one price increase away from cancelling, and enough of them will do just that, so the arithmetic isn't going to work.
She can't cut what she delivers. Every subscriber signed up for a specific set of things, and pulling any of them back breaks a promise she made to them in writing.
She can't build something premium. Whatever higher-tier product she designs sits next to the cheap one she already sells, and the cheap one already gives her subscribers live access to her. There's nothing left over to make the expensive version worth the jump.
Three doors, all closed, and none of them closed by the market.
She closed them herself, years earlier, the day she set the price.
The mechanism, named
This is what Blair Enns means when he warns that
the method by which you try to scale your business is the method by which you will commodify your offering. Turn your IP into a self-directed course, it just commodifies it.
Scale usually means selling the same thing to more people for less effort each time, and the moment you build a version of your work that runs without you, you've told the market your work can run without you.
The course, the template, the subscription: each one answers the question "how do I reach more people" by making the offer more reproducible, and reproducible is the one property a premium price can't survive.
The newsletter consultant didn't set out to commoditise herself. She set out to build something affordable and repeatable, which is standard advice, and it worked exactly as designed.
The commoditisation wasn't a failure of execution. It was the offer doing precisely what its price and structure told it to do.
The other side of the same decision
April Dunford tells a different version of this story about herself, and it's worth hearing in her own words. Early in her consulting career she was charging $15,000 for a positioning workshop, without much confidence that the number was right, because there was no comparable service to price it against.
On a call with a prospect, she quoted $15,000. He misheard it as fifty — "is it fifty?" She had a half-second to correct him. She said "yeah, fifty." He booked it on the spot."
"I was under charging for this shit," is how she put it afterwards.
That one moment didn't fix her pricing for good, and she's said in interviews that she still second-guesses whether her current price is right for the range of companies she works with.
But it changed the trajectory. She kept the workshop scarce (three days, with her, in the room), kept raising the number as the waiting list grew, and by most public accounts her workshop now runs somewhere in the tens of thousands, high enough that other consultants use her as the reference point for what a positioning engagement can cost.
The newsletter consultant and April Dunford made the same kind of decision at the start. One built an offer that reproduced her presence at a price too low to protect it. The other built an offer that stayed scarce, and let the price move as the scarcity proved itself. Neither one was smarter. The offers were shaped differently from the first client onward.
Dunford has a name for what the two stories are really about. Price pressure, in her telling, is a positioning problem:
You can't charge a premium for a product that seems exactly like everything else on the market, and weakly positioned products are seen to offer little beyond their competitors.
The newsletter consultant wasn't just priced too low. She was positioned as interchangeable, and the ten-dollar offer was what made her so. Dunford was positioned as different. That is what let the scarcity keep pushing the number up, instead of the cheap offer pulling it down.
The test, before you price anything
Before setting a price on a new offer, or repricing an old one, there's one question worth asking that neither "charge more" nor "start low to get traction" answers: does this offer leave a premium version available later that doesn't compete with what's already selling cheap?
If the honest answer is no, the offer has already decided its ceiling, however it performs in the first year.
- A group program that includes ongoing access to you, priced low to fill seats, has the same shape as the $10 newsletter.
- A diagnostic tool built to run without you, sold cheap to build a funnel, has the same shape.
The test is whether the cheap version uses up the thing a premium version would need to sell.
This doesn't rule out packaging, or a repeatable process, or bringing more people into what you do. It rules out only the specific move of solving a growth problem by giving away, at scale, the access that was supposed to be scarce.
What this means for how you price your own work
If part of what you sell is a repeatable diagnostic, a workshop format, or anything that could be turned into a wider-reach, lower-touch version, the Enns/Dunford test is worth running before you build it, not after it's already selling.
Consider what the cheap version includes, and whether anything left over could still justify a premium price once the cheap version exists. If the answer is nothing, you're not building a funnel. You're building the ceiling.
The door that stays open
The newsletter consultant built a business her own pricing couldn't grow past. April Dunford let a client's wrong guess set a new floor, then kept raising it. Neither outcome was decided by talent or effort. Both were decided by structure – by whether the offer left room above it or used it all up on the first sale.
The question to ask is not whether your current price is right, but whether your current price still leaves you somewhere to go. If the answer is no, the number is not the problem. The shape of the offer is.
That does not mean never building anything repeatable. It means building the premium version first, or at least reserving the thing a premium version would need.
What I mean by the thing you reserve is the thinking only you can do: the diagnosis, made live in the room with the client before anything gets built or delivered.
Everything repeatable – the course, the template, the programme – is meant to flow out of that room, not replace it.
The doors you close at the start stay closed. The ones you leave open stay open.
Value pricing
Setting price from what the outcome is worth to this client, rather than from your time or costs
Commodity Pricing
The point at which buyers treat different providers as interchangeable and price becomes the only thing that separates them
Scarcity
An offer's supply staying limited relative to demand, which is what lets a price keep rising as reputation grows
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if my current pricing has already boxed me in?
Ask the three questions the newsletter consultant couldn't answer:
- could you raise this price without losing most of your buyers,
- could you remove something from what you deliver without breaking a promise, and
- could you design something more expensive that wouldn't compete with what you already sell cheap.
If all three come back no, the structure is the problem, not the number.
Is April Dunford's $15,000-to-premium story typical, or a lucky break?
It's one case, and she's been open that the moment with the mishearing client was luck, not strategy.
What wasn't luck was what she did afterwards: she kept the offer scarce and let the price track the waiting list, rather than opening it up to reach more people at the old price.
The luck created an opportunity; the structure is what let her keep it.
What if I'm already locked into a low-priced offer like the newsletter consultant's?
Enns's own advice, from the same material, is not to fight the trap directly but to draw a line: reprice every new client under a different structure, and leave the old arrangement in place for people who already bought it.
You don't have to unwind the existing offer to stop building more of it.
References
David C. Baker, The Business of Expertise. The source for the two-room idea the article closes on: clients should reach the
execution only through the diagnosis, and the diagnosis is what a premium offer must reserve.
Liam Curley, "Pattern 10: Resist Commoditisation" (newsletter). The source that first connected Enns's pricing argument to Dunford's story as a before/after pair; the $80,000 figure and the framing of Dunford's price trajectory come from Curley's account, corroborated independently by a third-party source citing her workshop fees in the $50,000–$100,000+ range.
April Dunford, interviewed by Allan Dib, Lean Marketing podcast, June 2026. The source for the $15,000 pricing story and the misheard-price anecdote, in Dunford's own words.
April Dunford, Obviously Awesome (2019). The source for the framing that price pressure is a symptom of weak positioning, and that an offer positioned as interchangeable cannot command a premium.
Blair Enns, Pricing Creativity: A Guide to Profit Beyond the Billable Hour (workbook edition). The source for the central claim that scaling and commoditising an offer are frequently the same act, and for the practical advice on repricing new clients under a different structure while leaving existing arrangements alone.
Where this goes next
If you're pricing anything repeatable right now, whether that's a diagnostic, a workshop format, or a version of your work built to reach more people, run the test above before you set the number: does a premium version still make sense once the cheap one exists?
If you want a structured way to work through your own pricing and offer design, Business Clarity in Five Lines walks through where your revenue is concentrated and what that concentration is protecting or costing you.
For the commoditisation argument this article draws on, see how experienced professionals avoid the AI commoditisation trap.
For a profit-first reframe of the same problem, read when the capacity problem is really a profit problem.
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When you want a second pair of eyes on your own practice, the Positioning and Practice Audit is how I work with people: wisepreneurs.com.au/marketing-partnership