Key lessons from the book “How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No”

A few weeks ago, I finished a book called “$100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No” written by Alex Hormozi.

The book became very popular, and currently, it has more than 3,000 5-star reviews on Amazon.

As it was full of great insights on business and marketing, I decided to share the best lessons and bring some tips on how to create & sell a product at a premium price.

The advice from this book can be helpful to anyone who wants to start selling digital products/services and beat the competition in the overcrowded digital market.

How to find the right market & product

Niche down to earn more

In general, we either want to improve our health, wealth, or relationships. Thus, focusing on these niches means targeting the biggest audience of potential customers.

However, to get paid big bucks for what you offer, you have to niche down. As they say, riches are in the niches — for a simple reason.

If you approach a general audience within niche relationships, you can give only broad advice, not a tailor-made solution — and you can’t charge a lot.

It applies to any other area within the three main niches. If you, for example, choose wealth, go further and pick a microniche make money online. From there, make money writing online. From there, you can niche down even more.

A simple example here would be “Writing course” and “Personal Essay Writing Course for Business Thought Leadership on LinkedIn”.

While for the first one, you can charge anywhere from $10 to $100, for the latter one, it can move between $100 to $1000.

(I started using the “niching-down” method even when creating proposals for my potential writing clients. It worked amazingly well, and now I can charge 3–4 times more than before. You can learn about this technique in this article.)

Sell to the right people

Another thing you should keep in your mind is selling to the right people. The prospects you’re trying to reach need to have purchasing power.

For instance, trying to sell a $1,000 course on “How to find the dream job” to an audience made of unemployed people isn’t going to work. These people are most likely short on money and have more important things to pay for.

Also, check the numbers before diving into a particular market — it should be a growing market with huge potential.

Think twice before you start

Before you start executing the product (or service) idea for real, make sure it’s something unique and hard to find.

If you manage to cover these two conditions, great, you can move further. If not, think again.

What you offer doesn’t have to be something special nobody heard of before. It can be another self-help book or writing course.

However, it needs to come with a tiny twist. Something that sets it apart from the majority of the products within the niche.

You can do it in the following ways:

• the value of your offer exceeds its price

• the product comes with premium goods or support

• people can hardly get what you offer somewhere else, so they purchase based on value, not price

People selling you something want to earn as much as possible for as little work as possible. It’s a typical example on the market, and that’s the spot where you can differ.

So the first step you can take toward a successful product is to give more than you get.

Example

There are thousands of, e.g., essay writing courses, but you can still make money if you offer something different than your competitors.

You can add various cheatsheets, free e-books, little-known resources, detailed analysis of your best-performing stories, etc., anything that makes your product distinguishable.

Lessons

• Niche down to get paid more — the more specific offer, the higher price you can put on it.

• Your audience needs to have purchasing power — don’t lose time targeting people who can’t afford your products.

• Aim for a premium product that stands out — it needs to have some unique aspects.

Why you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for more money

Putting a higher price tag on your product or service will help you improve the overall perception of its usefulness.

Simply said, the price you’re asking for indicates the quality of your offer.

When you charge $5 for a course, people assume it won’t be something special or super useful.

On the other hand, charging $500 for a course makes people assume you’ll share with them secrets and special formulas, something they can’t easily find somewhere else. (Of course, you should deliver on this expectation.)

Also, by asking more for your products, you’ll attract people genuinely interested in solving their problems.

For example, if you want to learn how to write better but you’re not willing to pay $500 for a course from a professional journalist, it simply means you

aren’t ready for this yet. If you want to learn how to write well, you’ll find a way to pay for the course.

While not attracting everyone might seem like a loss, the opposite is true.

When you attract people less invested in your offer, they won’t do their best when applying your solution to their problems. They won’t most likely reach the results you promised, and they end up disappointed, leaving critical reviews.

Thus, you always want to reach only people who aren’t just willing to pay you, but they are also willing to follow the steps you show them.

Having a higher price on your product will guarantee this.

Only the most invested people will jump on the board with you, and they’ll do their best to achieve the dream outcome.

Lastly, the more you earn, the more you can invest in your business and make it even better. It’s a win for both sides as you’ll get more money, and your customers can enjoy a better user experience.

Lessons

Putting a higher price on your offer will lead to:

• Attracting people who are genuinely invested in the issue — their pain is big enough as they decided to spend the money on the solution, and they’ll most likely achieve their goal.

• Having more money for further investment — the more you earn, the more you can invest into improving your brand, product, or customer service, which leads to even higher sales.

• Perceiving the offer as a high-value — just make sure you deliver on this promise.

Find the right balance

To earn the most while giving the best to your customers, you have to consider the following variables:

The dream outcomes should be as big as possible altogether with the likelihood of people achieving them. Contrastingly, the effort and sacrifice needed for success have to be as low as possible.

You can understand it better by looking at the value equation:

For example, a course with the promise “Grow your website traffic by 50% within the next year with only a 4hours/week commitment.”

versus a course promising

“Grow your website traffic by 50% within the next 2 months with only a 3hours/week commitment.”

In the first case, you can charge X for the course, but in the second case, the price can be 4X or even higher simply because it guarantees results faster with less effort.

How to increase chances of selling your offer

The pain of your customer needs to be immense

If your potential customers have a problem that isn’t urgent, they won’t buy from you.

Therefore, you should aim to target problems critically decreasing the quality of people’s lives, where the solution can’t wait any longer.

The bigger the problem and pain, the more you can charge for solving it.

Don’t try to create demand

Don’t waste your time trying to create a new market and offering something unique. Choose the markets where the demand is already high so you know for sure your offer can succeed.

Deliver on promise

You need to prove that people can achieve their dream outcomes.

Using testimonials is a usual practice for a good reason. If prospects see other customers have changed their lives using your product, they’ll be happy to pay you.

If you don’t have any testimonials yet, you can give away your offer for a lower price to a handful of people in exchange for detailed reviews.

Make payments easy

Asking for a higher price comes with some limitations. To decrease them as much as possible, you need to implement various payment options.

Some people prefer credit cards, others PayPal, Google or Apple Pay, or even Stripe. Make sure you cover the most preferred choices.

Also, if you’re charging for your offer three or four-figure payments, give people always a chance to pay in installments.

Write headlines that sell

Your headline doesn’t have to be unique or fancy, it has to be clear. If you describe within the headline what exactly people can expect, you win.

You can include in the title:

• the problem and its potential solution

• for who is the advice meant

• time estimate for achieving dream results.

Words like challenge, shortcut, mastermind, or program can increase the chances of higher sales.

Example:

• 30 days challenge for busy people who want to go from skinny to shredded with just 20-minute daily exercise

• Shortcut to high website traffic: How to double your traffic in less than 60 days with minimum time & money investment

Conclusion

Even in the overcrowded digital space, there’s still a chance to sell high-priced products.

You just need to create a unique offer, find the right market, and put it in front of the right people. And of course, you always have to deliver on the promises you gave in the first place.

Once you manage to create a product based on these fundamentals, people will happily pay a high price to have their pains and problems solved.