Ditching Hourly

Hello, and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today, I've got an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Ditching Hourly: 35 Ways to Make More Money Without Working More Hours. If you'd like to add your name to the early access list for the book, please go to jonathanstark.com slash D-H. That URL, again, is jonathanstark.com slash D-H. What is a product ladder? A product ladder is a series of offerings priced in a graduated order of magnitude fashion. For example, $50, and then $500, and then $5,000, and then $50,000. Despite the name, product ladders commonly contain a mix of products and services. Your initial product ladder might not include any products at all. A more accurate name would probably be offering ladder, but that doesn't quite have the same ring to it, now does it? The idea of the product ladder is to make it easy to turn prospects into buyers regardless of the level of trust that you have built with them. In other words, people who have just heard of you will most likely enter near the bottom rung of your ladder. Assuming that they benefit from that purchase, they will have increased trust and be more likely to climb up the ladder to your more expensive offerings. For a product ladder to work, the offerings need to be related such that someone who buys a lower rung would also be a potential buyer for a higher rung at some point in the future. For example, if you're a web developer who helps Shopify stores increase their revenue, you would want all of your rungs to be attractive to people who run Shopify stores. Your bottom rung could be a $50 handbook on Shopify best practices. Your second rung up could be a $500 Shopify homepage teardown. Your third rung up after that could be a $5,000 comprehensive UX audit and roadmap report. And your top rung, the very most expensive one, could be a $50,000 or more custom Shopify theme development project. Shopify store owners who buy your $50 Shopify handbook and are delighted with it will be more likely to climb up your ladder to the $500 Shopify homepage teardown. They might even immediately jump up the ladder to one of your higher tier offerings. In contrast, if you're a web designer and your product ladder is disjointed, it's less likely that buyers will climb up. So here's a bad example of a product ladder for a web designer. $50. Intro to WordPress video course. $500. Shopify theme setup. $5,000. Five-day SaaS design sprint. $50,000. Complete website rebrand. Yes, these are all things a web designer would potentially be qualified to offer, but they are each for different buyers. There's no synergy. It's hard to imagine any single person buying more than one of these offerings, never mind all four. That's it for this time. I'm Jonathan Stark, and I hope you join me again next time for Ditching Hourly. Bye. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com slash call, C-A-L-L. That URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.