What if your customers would willingly pay more, but the person stopping them is you?
[The host of The Deep Wealth Podcast and post-exit entrepreneur Jeffrey Feldberg speaks with Etinosa Agbonlahor, a behavioural economist.](https://podcast.deepwealth.com/586 “”)
That question should make every founder uncomfortable.
Not because raising prices is always the answer. It is not.
The uncomfortable part is this: many successful founders have no reliable evidence that the price they charge reflects what customers actually value.
They have assumptions.
They have competitor comparisons.
They have history.
They have a sales team saying, “If we charge more, we’ll lose the deal.”
What they may not have is the one thing that matters most.
Proof.
## Your Pricing Problem May Not Be A Pricing Problem
You know the feeling.
A prospect asks for a discount.
Before the conversation has even developed, someone on the sales team starts shaving dollars off the proposal.
Maybe you have done it yourself.
You tell yourself you are protecting the deal.
You tell yourself something is better than nothing.
You tell yourself the customer will walk if you hold the line.
And sometimes that may be true.
But Etinosa Agbonlahor introduces a far more dangerous possibility.
You may be negotiating against yourself.
She describes what Decision Alpha calls the “tyranny of low prices.”
Charge too little and customers may not celebrate the bargain. They may question the quality.
That is a very different problem.
You thought lower pricing reduced risk.
It may actually create it.
## The Hidden Cost Of Being Too Easy To Buy
One of the most revealing moments in the conversation comes when Etinosa talks about companies that celebrate because nearly every prospect says yes.
Sounds wonderful, right?
Maybe not.
She says, “The fact that every customer said yes is actually not necessarily a good thing.”
That should get your attention.
If almost nobody pushes back, you may not have discovered the perfect price.
You may have discovered how much money you are willing to leave on the table.
And that lost profit rarely stays contained inside the pricing line.
It spreads.
Lower margins mean you need more customers.
More customers often require more people.
More people create more management.
More management creates more complexity.
More complexity creates more founder stress.
Now something that looked like a pricing decision has become a scalability problem.
That is the founder pattern most people miss.
Etinosa explains that people make roughly 10,000 to 30,000 decisions daily. The brain cannot evaluate every one with full rigor, so it relies on heuristics—mental shortcuts. That same mechanism shows up when a founder sets a price or a customer decides whether to buy.
She illustrates the point with a simple umbrella. On a normal day the acceptable price might be low. The moment it starts pouring and the buyer needs to reach an important meeting dry, willingness to pay jumps dramatically—even though the umbrella itself has not changed. Context rewrites the number.
“The architecture, the way you show your price, the context in which you show your price, who people are comparing you to, all of those things will matter to how people choose and how people interact with your price,” she says.
Founders who ignore this reality often undercharge early in their journey because they lack confidence or fear losing the sale. The result is not only thinner margins but also damaged positioning. Customers sometimes treat a suspiciously low price as a signal that quality must be lacking.
## When Revenue Growth Makes The Business Worse
A founder once told me about a business that kept winning work.
At first, everyone celebrated.
Sales were coming in.
The team was busy.
Hiring accelerated.
The top line looked alive.
Then the founder asked a better question.
Why are we winning?
The answer was painful.
They were dramatically underpriced.
When prices finally increased, some customers left.
The team panicked.
Then something unexpected happened.
Profits improved.
Hiring pressure fell.
The business became less hectic.
The company could choose better customers instead of chasing every customer.
Etinosa captures the principle perfectly:
“All activity does not equal profitability.”
That sentence should be written on more founder dashboards.
Because founders can become addicted to visible activity while the economics underneath the business quietly deteriorate.
A future buyer will not be impressed because your team is exhausted servicing low margin customers.
The buyer will ask whether the economics are strong, repeatable, scalable, and defensible.
Activity can hide a skeleton.
Profitability reveals whether the machine actually works.
## Why Customers May Value You More Than You Do
Here is where pricing becomes deeply personal.
Founders often look at their offering from the inside.
I only provide bookkeeping.
I only sell software.
I only provide this service.
I only solve this one problem.
The customer may see something completely different.
Trust.
Speed.
Reduced risk.
Confidence.
Convenience.
Status.
A better outcome.
Less stress.
A problem they no longer need to think about.
Etinosa separates value into layers that go beyond pure function.
That matters because founders often price what they do while customers pay for what changes because they did it.
That gap can be enormous.
As Etinosa explains, “It’s about what is the impact and the outcome that you give to the people who you’re serving.”
There is your reframe.
Stop asking only, “What would I pay for this?”
Start asking, “What is this outcome worth to the right customer?”
Those are two completely different questions.
## The Dangerous Comfort Of Competitor Pricing
Another founder trap is benchmarking.
You call competitors.
You mystery shop.
You look online.
You see what everybody else charges.
Then you build your price around the market.
It feels responsible.
It feels data driven.
But what if the entire category is wrong?
What if your customer values something your competitors do not deliver?
What if the strongest segment of the market is willing to pay materially more?
What if one customer segment barely understands your value while another instantly sees it?
Etinosa shares a client example where pricing research uncovered something bigger than price.
The company believed it had three logical customer segments.
Research showed only one truly understood the value of the offer.
That segment also had greater willingness to pay.
Think about what that means.
Pricing research changed market strategy.
It changed where the company should focus sales effort.
It changed where revenue could arrive faster.
It changed which customers deserved attention.
This is where pricing stops being a finance exercise and becomes a growth strategy.
## The Only In Deep Wealth Reframe
Here is the Deep Wealth question I would put in front of every founder:
If your current pricing forces you to win more customers, hire more people, absorb more complexity, and carry more stress to produce the same profit, what exactly are you scaling?
That is not just a pricing question.
It is an enterprise value question.
A lower price can create a company that looks bigger while becoming harder to operate.
A better price, attached to the right customer and the right value proposition, can create the opposite.
Higher margins.
Fewer wrong fit customers.
More resources for the right team.
Less pressure.
Better service.
Greater strategic choice.
And potentially a stronger story for a future buyer.
The Rembrandt may not be a new product.
It may be value you already create but have never learned how to measure, communicate, and capture.
Research shows that a single option causes roughly 90 percent of people to seek external comparison. Two well-constructed options cut that deferral rate dramatically because the brain can now compare within the offer instead of outside it. Nine options, by contrast, create paralysis. Etinosa’s team helps clients map the right choices to the right customer archetypes rather than dumping every package in front of every prospect.
The foundation is willingness-to-pay research. Decision Alpha’s four-step process begins with market monetization zones (including cost audits and segment definition), moves into quantitative and qualitative willingness-to-pay work, then addresses framing and packaging, and finishes with test-and-iterate. One client completed the full cycle in six weeks and discovered that only one of three target segments truly understood and valued the solution. Selling to the right segment first produced faster revenue and higher prices.
“You should have a small percentage of people who you put your price in front of going, ‘Oh, I’m not sure.’ … But if everybody’s saying yes, potentially a sign that maybe you’re leaving some money on the table,” she says.
## Stop Guessing At The Most Important Number
Perhaps the most surprising admission Etinosa hears from successful businesses is simple:
“We set our price by guessing.”
Think about that.
Companies will spend months planning hiring.
They will build annual budgets.
They will debate software purchases.
They will analyze marketing campaigns.
Yet the number that determines how much value the company captures can still come down to instinct.
Etinosa offers a better path.
Understand your costs.
Research willingness to pay.
Identify alternatives.
Understand customer segments.
Test how the price is framed.
Then put the price into the market and keep learning.
She puts it another way:
“Pricing should be a feature, not a reaction.”
That distinction matters.
Reactive pricing waits for pressure.
Strategic pricing prepares before the pressure arrives.
## Before You Discount The Next Deal
The next time a prospect asks for a discount, resist the reflex to answer immediately.
The question may not mean what you think it means.
Etinosa admits she regularly asks sellers for discounts simply because she considers it good business practice.
She may still buy when the answer is no.
That means the customer asking for a discount is not necessarily rejecting your price.
They may simply be asking.
Instead of cutting price, perhaps you change terms.
Add value.
Change scope.
Offer something with low delivery cost but meaningful customer value.
The larger lesson is not “never discount.”
The lesson is to stop surrendering economics before you understand what the customer actually needs.
## Listen Before Your Pricing Gets More Expensive
If your company is busy, growing, and winning business, do not assume your pricing is working.
Ask harder questions.
Are customers buying because your price is right, or because it is too easy to say yes?
Are you pricing the service you provide, or the outcome the customer receives?
Are you discounting because the economics demand it, or because fear does?
Are you targeting the segment that values you most?
And if you raised prices, could you build a more profitable business with fewer customers, less hiring pressure, and greater control?
Etinosa Agbonlahor goes much deeper into those questions in this conversation.
Because the expensive founder mistakes are rarely announced in advance.
They hide inside normal decisions.
A discount here.
A guessed price there.
Another customer won.
Another employee hired.
Then one day you realize the business grew, but the profit, freedom, and enterprise value did not grow with it.
The Deep Wealth Podcast exists to surface those patterns before they become expensive.
And for founders who want to go beyond recognizing the pattern and systematically build a company that is more profitable now and stronger for a future buyer, that is exactly the kind of work Deep Wealth Mastery is designed to help you do.
[Listen to the full episode to hear the exact research steps, the discounting conversation scripts, and the customer-segment insights that turn undercharging into deliberate, evidence-based pricing. Subscribe to The Deep Wealth Podcast so you never miss the next conversation that can change how you capture the value your business already creates.](https://iapdw.com/podcast “”)
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Today, Feldberg's passion is helping you extract your deep wealth. The 90-day Deep Wealth Mastery program helps create a solid foundation for three areas: increasing profits to enterprise value and optimizing post-exit life. Deep Wealth Mastery offers strategies and insights drawn from Feldberg's rich experience. The strategies from the trenches get results. Jeffrey's vision is to increase the social fabric of society one entrepreneur at a time.
Learn more through https://iapdw.com/prosper
