44. Why I raised my course price from $460 to $3000

In the planning stage my new course, Ancestral Wealth, I told my mom that we'd be selling it for $460. 

Her next words to me were — no joke — "That's an embarrassment." 

Um. Excuse me. What?

What followed was a conversation that cracked my brain open  —  about accessibility, investment, transformation, and the uncomfortable truths I'd been avoiding. 

Listen.

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Ancestral Wealth starts December 9th. 

Applications are open now.

https://play.simonegraceseol.com/ancestral-wealth

Transcript

Welcome to Liberatory Business. I'm your host, Simone Seol, and I want to tell you a story today.

Spiritual work is our family's business. As a Seol, I'm a third-generation spiritual worker that I know of. There might be even more generations further up that I don't know about.

So naturally, sometimes I run my business decisions by my parents. In preparing for my new course, I happened to tell my mom that the price my co-conspirator for the course, Dr. Joey Liu, and I had set was $460. This was all in the planning process, and she looked at me like I had lost my mind. Her exact words were: "That's an embarrassment."

And then came the haranguing — loving but fierce haranguing, that sort of tsk, tsk, tsk energy that only a mother who's been watching you play small can deliver.

"What happened to you?" she barked at me. "I've been watching you. I've been noticing the prices of your courses these past few years. A hundred dollars, $250. What are you doing? I don't understand."

I started to push back. "You know, Mom, a lot of people are struggling nowadays. The economy isn't what it used to be. There's inflation and this and that."

And then she looked at me, paused, and said: "Do you know who you are? Do your people know who you are?"

I was stunned into silence.

She started to ask me more questions about the details of the course — the enormous scale of preparation that she'd already seen me pour unprecedented levels of devotion into, the way my co-creator Joey had been doing the same. The richness of the teaching curriculum that we were building, not to mention the pre-course teaching that we'd be distributing for free. The structure of the live calls, the hands-on asynchronous coaching that we'd be providing throughout.

With each thing I listed, her disbelief grew. She told me, "If you sell it at that price, you'd be making a huge mistake."

Look, the price that we'd settled on — $460 — my team and I had already put many hours of discussion into it, about how to best balance affordability with reflecting an accurate sense of the program's depth and quality and rigor. We'd had conversation after conversation. We arrived at that price, not easily.

And so I have to admit, I had no intention of actually changing the price, even while she was yelling at me. But just out of curiosity, something in me compelled me to ask her: "Okay, Mom, what price would you rather it be? Knowing what you know about the program, what feels right to you? Like, instinctively?"

She said, "$3,800."

My jaw dropped. I started laughing. "Mom, that's insane. Nobody can afford that right now."

She gave me a look — the kind of look that said, Your face right now? That's exactly the problem.

Then she told me about her years in business.

In the beginning, she said, she had trouble falling asleep at night every time someone came to her and asked for help. She would lie awake thinking about how many people needed what they were offering, how hard their lives were, the moral weight of what would happen if she were to turn a blind eye to their struggles. Her heart broke into a thousand pieces worrying about these people.

And so she gave scholarships and discounts freely. She wanted to help. Her heartbreak demanded it.

All these people came to her with stories about how hard they had it — the unfortunate circumstances that they just couldn't foresee, which happened through no fault of their own — and how access to this program was the answer and the solution that would for them be like an answer to a desperate prayer. Pleading for her generosity, asking for discounts, scholarships, special exceptions.

But over years — decades — of this practice, she noticed something that compounded her heartbreak: very few of the people that she granted those exceptions to turned out to be engaged students. Even fewer of them came back with gratitude.

Never mind gratitude. The worst of all is that not an insignificant portion of these people would come back with complaints, or she'd find them talking behind her back about this problem or that problem... this thing they didn't like, that thing they didn't like.

She could count on one hand the number of people who genuinely took the gift of a discount or scholarship to heart and did something with the education that made her deeply glad that she'd made it accessible for them.

And the majority of these folks would also promise up and down while asking for the special exception that they would repay her for the difference. And my mom never asked for it. She never said, "Well, you know, as long as you repay me." That was never a condition. But they said they would anyway. "Oh, believe me," you know?

And out of the literal hundreds of people who made such promises to my mom over the years, exactly one actually delivered.

Meanwhile, she told me about people who had saved up for years to afford her programs. The people who sacrificed other things, sometimes for a long time, to make the investment because it deeply mattered to them. And the difference in their output was undeniable. These people applied themselves completely, and their success reflected their investment.

And she said something that honestly feels really taboo to say out loud in most places, which is: "The people who feel entitled to discounts and free access are the very people who are least likely to succeed. People who have a habit of negotiating prices down or wanting things to be free repel their own luck. I've seen this pattern play out a thousand times."

And then she also shared: The extent to which people ask for discounts does not even correspond to how much money they actually have. Some of the most financially struggling people were too proud to ask for discounts. They would save up for years and they would come when they were ready. Some of the people who are the most comfortable asking for discounts are actually financially quite comfortable.

And I know my mom's heart as her daughter. She's the one from whom I inherited a fierce love of fairness and justice. She's the one whose super sensitive, tender uber-empath genes are encoded in my DNA also. She comes from a line of obnoxiously obstinate people who have what I call "moral OCD" — people who have routinely turned down opportunities and money, often to their detriment, when it came with corruption.

My mom also spent the first part of her life in poverty, working backbreaking hours in minimum wage jobs — including while she was pregnant with me — just to make ends meet. She went through periods of relying on generous tips from her cleaning clients to be able to eat two meals a day.

My mom is a woman who understands both struggle and what it takes to create something bigger than where you started from.

So her words weren't coming from greed or elitism or indifference to suffering, but from someone who spent decades trying to help, who had given freely and generously, and learned something painful in the process.

From her wisdom, she was pointing to something important and yet pretty uncomfortable for many of us to hear: something about the complex relationship between entitlement, investment, and transformation. Something about how feeling entitled to discounts and actually being in a place to truly benefit from them aren't the same thing. Something about the energetic pattern of people who habitually negotiate down versus people who invest fully, even when that demands commitment and sacrifices from them.

The energetic exchange matters. Investment — real investment that requires people to put skin in the game — changes how people show up.

There came a point where I knew she was right, even though intellectually I was still squirming. But sometimes my body knows things before my brain can catch up, and I couldn't unknow what she had shown me.

Continuing with the $460 price tag that we'd been planning on would be a violation of my own integrity now that she'd cracked my head open.

So we decided to investigate a new, coherent price — with the blessing and encouragement of my co-conspirator Joey, who it turned out had been feeling what my mom had been feeling the entire time.

And what's important about what happened next is that logic was applied to exactly 0% in this process. My mom didn't know what the "going rates" were for courses like mine in markets outside of Korea. She didn't care. We weren't going to look for news articles about the economy, or benchmark against industry trends, or calculate conversion rates. None of that happened.

And what followed was a process that I still really don't have easy language for. My parents and I used a combination of energy work and divination rooted in our lineage to discern the energetically correct price.

And I'm not going to detail those practices here because, well, both because they're sacred and also because explaining them would not actually help you to find your own answer. But what I will say is that it wasn't arbitrary. It wasn't just "pick a number that feels good." It was rigorous, it was methodical. It required me to sit with discomfort and to listen to wisdom that exists outside of my individual analytical assessment of what felt fair or right.

And as a result, we arrived at a number that was lower than what my mom's gut instinct said — $3,800 — but higher than what we originally were planning on. We arrived at $3,000.

But the price wasn't really the point. What my parents made me confront was something far more uncomfortable than a number.

They made me take a look at my own excellence.

My  intelligence and sharpness of insight. The brilliance of my associative mind. My enormous creative capacity. My integrity as a teacher. What I have, they insisted, is rare.

And I am so uncomfortable right now saying these words out loud. There is a squirm happening in my body when I claim this.

And that discomfort — that reflexive modesty, that instinct to make myself smaller than I actually know I am in my bones — that's exactly what kept me charging low prices.

But there's more than that, because this process revealed things that I had misunderstood entirely.

I had misunderstood who I was serving and who was being, quote-unquote, "priced out." When I was doing high-ticket work before — and I had done plenty of high-ticket work before — in reflecting about some of those experiences, I had told myself I was serving people who are already the most privileged. That's the story that I had picked up at some point, and that's why I stopped doing high-ticket.

But that wasn't actually true. I was serving people actively building and generating resources. Immigrants and children of immigrants building businesses. People of color making significant investments in their own growth. Entrepreneurs, healers, teachers stretching to bet on themselves. Middle-class folks who prioritized their own transformation and made room for it in their budgets.

These weren't people who were already the most privileged. These were people who were actively becoming resourced through their own work and through their devotion to their vision.

And unwittingly in the process, I had distorted what accessibility actually means. I was operating from a premise that went like this: Most people in the world can't afford thousands of dollars, therefore I should make all of my work cheaper.

But that logic only works if this work is meant for everyone. And it's not.

This specific work that Joey and I are doing right now addresses a particular transformation at a particular stage. Not because other stages don't matter or because other people aren't worthy, but because this is what this container is designed to hold.

And yes, the price does create barriers for some people who might genuinely be able to benefit, and that is a tension that I hold. That's not something I think I can solve or make peace with entirely. However, I'm no longer pretending that this tension means that I should make everything as cheap as possible.

I had unconsciously limited my own range, and I see that now. The lower-priced courses weren't wrong. I'm enormously proud of every single one of them. They were extremely high quality. My students' results show it. And I'd put any of them up against much more expensive courses anywhere.

But somewhere in my commitment to accessibility, I'd also opted out of depth, out of a certain level of rigor. I had self-selected out of the kind of work that requires more from me — work that asked me to show up at full capacity, at the deepest edge of my bigness.

This is not about abandoning financial accessibility.

I'll continue to create lower-priced programs and I'll absolutely continue creating lots of excellent free resources. And I am not interested in becoming someone who only does high-ticket work.

However, this particular course that we're offering right now, Ancestral Wealth, requires this level of investment because of what it is, because of what I'm bringing to it and what Dr. Joey Liu is bringing to it. Because of the container that it needs in order to do the work that it needs to do.

And I am being intentional about it in a way that I wasn't before. I am actively centering and designing for people of the global majority — not as an afterthought or "it would be nice if..." sort of preference, but as a core piece of the architecture.

$3,000 is not about charging what I'm worth.

That phrase never sat right with me, and I've talked about this a lot in my past teachings. This is not about my worth. My worth is infinite. So is yours, by the way. If I were to charge what I'm worth, everyone would have to pay me infinity dollars for anything that I have to offer. If you were to charge what you are worth, I'd have to pay you infinity dollars. 

It doesn't work like that. It's not about worth. It's about claiming the full depth and scope of what I can hold for a particular transformation. This is about honoring work that my ancestors can recognize as worthy of their lineage.

If something in this story landed — if you felt that recognition of, "Oh, I think my ancestors and elders are calling me into something bigger too" — I'd love to have you. The course is Ancestral Wealth, a graduate-level intensive and practicum for people of the global majority ready to steward serious wealth the way their ancestors intended them to.

It starts December 9th and runs through February 3rd of next year. Applications are open right now, and I'll leave the link in the show notes.

But more than that, I'd love for you to ask yourself: What is the work that you've been afraid to claim? What's the price you've been afraid to name?

Your ancestors are watching you. They know who you are.

Do you?