Are My Prices Too Low, or Am I Just Worried About Charging More?

A man finds a meteorite in a field, heavier than it should be for its size, with a strange, dark, smoothed-over skin unlike anything else lying around it. He has no idea what it is. There's no word in his head for what he's holding, no memory of anything else looking quite like it. He turns it over a few times, weighs it in his hand, and feels the particular discomfort of holding something he can't identify and doesn't know how to judge. Nobody nearby would know either. There's no one to ask, no easy way to test it, and standing there with it, he feels a little out of his depth, like the thing has outpaced his ability to say anything sensible about it.

He takes it to market anyway. Naming a real price for something he can't explain feels presumptuous, so he prices it just above the going rate for gravel, a little more for the strange weight, nothing more. It sells within the hour.

He takes the quick sale as proof he priced it right. It might just as easily prove the opposite: that something unusual moved fast because it was priced like something ordinary, and a fast sale looks exactly the same whether the price was right or quietly, invisibly, too low.

Is the price actually too low, or is the hesitation to charge more just discomfort wearing the costume of caution? It's easy to answer one question while thinking you've answered the other, and they call for different evidence entirely.

⚡ A price should follow the evidence. Discomfort has no vote in the matter.

Uncertainty is not a data point. It doesn't tell you anything about what the thing in your hand is actually worth, only that you don't currently know. The discomfort of naming a bigger number is real, and it's also completely uninformative about whether that number is correct.

The first place to look is whether the thing itself is genuinely undervalued. What does the customer actually walk away with, and how much would the alternative to not having it cost them. Margins are worth a second look too, not just whether they exist, but whether they hold up once the real cost of delivering the work, including the time nobody bills for, is properly counted. And demand is its own quiet signal: work that gets accepted without much resistance, from customers who don't blink at the number, is not proof of a fair price so much as proof that nobody has yet found out where resistance would actually begin.

The second place to look is less comfortable, because it's not about the market at all. It's about the seller. Has a higher number ever actually been said out loud and tested, or has the current price simply never been challenged. A lost sale often gets treated as evidence the price was too high, when it might just as easily have been the wrong customer, a weak pitch, or nothing to do with the number at all. If the fear of a no is doing more work than any actual market feedback, that's not evidence about the price. That's discomfort, mistaken for data.

Worth saying plainly: this cuts both ways. The same not-knowing that prices a meteorite as gravel could just as easily talk someone into pricing an ordinary stone as though it fell from the sky, out of exactly the same uncertainty, just pointed in the opposite direction. Neither instinct, timid or overconfident, is actually evidence. Both are guesses wearing different outfits.

⚡ The fastest way out of uncertainty is a test, not another guess.

The fix for not knowing isn't a bigger feeling in either direction, it's a smaller, real experiment. A slightly higher number offered to a handful of new enquiries, or tested on one particular service, for a defined stretch of time, will tell you more in a few weeks than any amount of internal debate. It replaces a guess with a fact, and it's usually far less risky than it feels before it's been tried.

The man never did find out what he sold. Somebody else worked out what it actually was later, somewhere else, for a price he never heard. He wasn't wrong to feel uncertain standing at that stall. He was wrong to let the uncertainty set the price instead of finding out what he actually had. That's the only real mistake in this story, not charging too little or too much, but letting a feeling decide a number that evidence should have settled instead.

What to do next

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