45. Revolutions need revenue: LIBERATORY PRICING - with Dr. Joey Liu

You don't have to choose between extractive capitalist pricing and guilt-driven discounts that burn you out.

We offer you a third way: liberatory pricing, which allows your business to thrive as an engine for redistribution.

Listen to hear more about:

• How fear and imposter syndrome masquerade as virtue
• The hidden costs of discount culture and scholarship programs
• The game-changing redefinition of what "accessible" means
• What equity looks like at different business stages: early, intermediate, and mature

Your ancestors dreamed of you being abundantly resourced. May you live into the vision they are holding you in. 

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Take the free course Building Post-Capitalist Wealth: https://play.simonegraceseol.com/pcw

Apply for the 8-week course, Ancestral Wealth: https://play.simonegraceseol.com/ancestral-wealth

Transcript

Welcome back to Liberatory Business. I'm Simone Seol, your host, and today is another conversation with Dr. Joey Liu. In our last episodes, we talked about communing with your ancestors and building post-capitalist wealth, and today we are getting into the nitty gritty. We're getting into pricing 'cause here's what we keep seeing.

Entrepreneurs with beautiful hearts, caring about the world, bleeding themselves dry in the name of accessibility. Running scholarship programs, sliding scale pricing that their businesses can't actually afford, or creating so much complexity that they can barely breathe — all while thinking that that's what makes them anti-capitalist.

But what if exhausting yourself and being underpaid doesn't actually serve liberation? What if the most revolutionary thing you can do is to set prices that allow your business to thrive so that it becomes an engine for redistribution?

Joey and I are talking about liberatory pricing, and it's not about charging as much as the market will bear, nor is it about guilt-driven discounts that burn you out, either. There is a third way and we're excited to tell you about it. Let's get into it.

Simone: What is liberatory pricing?

It requires us to think about what a price is and what it represents, and how much thought and what kind of thoughtfulness is built into it in a way that your price serves you, it serves the people that you are serving, and it serves the world at large.

Joey: I mean, just what you, how you framed it right there. You can't talk about pricing without thinking about relationships, like creating prices is creating entry points or deepening points to relationships.

Simone: Ooh, ooh, ooh. Now that you said that, I feel like, conventionally speaking, it seems as if there are two tracks of thinking about pricing. One is the sort of pure capitalist, you know, "profit at all costs" track, where the only strategic thinking that you put into pricing is what's gonna get me the most sales.

Joey: Right.

Simone: And I feel like people who have problems with the pure capitalism track can easily fall into what seems like the only alternative, which is to create quote unquote accessible pricing, which people often take to mean, to charge less, to give discounts, to create multiple tiers of pricing, to give scholarships — which don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that any of these are inherently a problem, but it kind of traps people into thinking accessible means lower prices.

Joey: I'm curious if we could peel back the layers a little bit and try to understand, is the only motivation for folks walking into that sort of trap, just that they're trying to show that they're divesting from capitalism or are there other underlying factors and patterns at play in your observation?

Simone: Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you were asking a leading question, but I think the biggest thing is definitely people thinking, "oh, well, there's no way there's enough people who are able to pay my full price."

Joey: Ah, the just automatic assumption of scarcity.

Simone: It's a lot of times it's unconscious. I always get people telling me, Simone, there just aren't enough people who can afford my full price in my world. 'Cause what happens is, if you start with the assumption that people in my audience, in my world, the kind of people I wanna serve just don't have enough money... and if a few do, they are a minority, they're the exception. If you start out with that premise, then you are energetically emitting those — as much as I hate this language — those vibrations, and then people respond to that vibration. So when you're putting out, "you can't afford," whoever picks up that vibration is people who are thinking "I can't afford."

Joey: Oh my gosh. Okay. This is so interesting to me. I'm just curious, how many people — when you're following that train of thought that Simone just posited that the people I'm serving can't afford — have ever turned the perspective back around and examined your own buying habits, right?

Because I think a lot of times we are creating solutions for people like us. I think the distance between who we're serving and ourselves is not that far. If we examine our own buying habits, isn't it true that we like make buying choices where we don't always need scholarships and we don't always need accessible prices? And we may not be the wealthiest person, but I can tell you I've invested a shit ton in my education.

Right. As not a high earner, I still found so much value in my education, and I am $150,000 in debt after a PhD. And along the way, I've invested in my health, I've invested in entertainment, I like to go to concerts. You know what I mean?

Simone: So you totally read them to filth right now. And you're absolutely right. I mean, I get people telling me all the time, "but Simone, if I don't do the gross bro marketing thing, people won't buy from me." And I'm like, "well, you bought from me and I don't do that." And they're like, "well, you are different." And I'm like, come on now. Right? And there's other versions of this, but what it all comes down to is I'm not worthy, I'm not deserving. I am somehow a special tragic snowflake that other people won't pay full price for.

Joey: Uh, okay. Just a word of compassion to follow that.

Simone: I know. I was like, that was a little mean.

Joey: No, but I think, I mean, it lands because I've certainly experienced imposter syndrome. I can definitely commiserate with those who have had those thoughts and experiences before. And my word of compassion is if that's your experience, that's not your fault. But I also encourage you, like, here's my big sister voice. Like, come on, let's snap out of it. There are better ways of being and living and working, and we're inviting you into the new paradigms.

Simone: When you know why you're here, what your ancestors sacrificed and prayed for so that you could be here to do your work in the world, imposter syndrome — which was by the way, planted by like colonialism, capitalism anyways — has very little oxygen to work with.

Joey: Your ancestors are louder than the imposter thoughts in your head. Testifying. Because Simone and I are testifying here.

Simone: Yeah, yeah. I feel like a great way to start out this conversation, which is that the first layer, a lot of it is just you getting in your own way.

Joey: I want to pause and talk a little bit more beyond pricing. Just people's relationship with money. Mm-hmm. And then how that shows up in pricing.

You and I have talked a little bit about this pattern we've observed of sort of social justice movement and folks who work within those spaces and this sort of like fear cosplaying as virtue. Hmm. Or this sort of like ego cosplaying as virtue that like my work is more pure if I do it for free, or if I prove how many scholarships I'm giving, or if I show how accessible I'm being, that there is this value and this virtue. And yet those models are not always creating less problems for the communities that they say they're serving.

Right? 'Cause they don't have enough resources flowing in to solve actual material problems for their people.

Simone: Perfect. So here's what happens, right? When you are like, "oh, I'm giving all these scholarships, I'm doing sliding scale. I'm discounting my thing." Here's what happens. When something does not get paid its full price, the cost of the discount doesn't go away. Someone has to bear the cost, right? Mm-hmm. Like let's say in order to, like, for your business to be sustainable, totally made up number, but you need to be paid a hundred bucks an hour, right?

Let's say. And you say, oh, this person needs help, so I'm gonna give it to them for $70, right? So there is a missing gap of $30, right? That is a cost. Who's gonna bear that cost? And the answer is, you as the business owner, bear that cost.

You are not eliminating the cost. You are shifting where that cost goes. In the long run, you are depleted. You are resentful, you are overworked, and nothing about the system has changed whatsoever.

Joey: Mm-hmm.

Simone: Right? So you are shifting the cost onto you while doing nothing about the systemic causes of why certain people don't have as much access.

These armchair morality critics on the internet who say, oh, you are not giving enough scholarships, therefore you are not accessible. Your stuff is too expensive. If anyone accuses you of that or you see other people pointing fingers, just notice how many of these accusers, these armchair morality critics have their own thriving, sustainable businesses.

Joey: Oof. Yeah.

Simone: The answer is none. None. It's very easy to critique if you have no idea just what goes into running a sustainable business, what it takes to keep the lights on, how much labor, how much investment, how much risk it takes, right?

Especially in these social justice-y sort of circles, a lot of people have very strong opinions about things that they actually have no qualification to speak on.

Just notice like, does this person who's criticizing me have what I wanna build? If not, then their opinion just is not worth a lot.

Joey: You know, the thing that comes up for me right now is the conversations I've been in with people who have actually sustained payroll for other human beings and their whole families, right? When they carry the burden with their business of an entire, not just their families, but multiple families' livelihood and wellbeing.

The nature of the conversation is vastly different. Anybody else who has never done the courageous thing of building a business that creates jobs and sustains people's livelihoods can even begin to fathom what that burden feels like. A lot of conversations are just not for you to chip into.

Simone: Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of times payroll is often the biggest expense, but there are so many other fucking expenses that just go into keeping just the lights on.

Another thing that really comes into play when it comes to other people's opinions, is that for the most part, people have a very wounded, distorted relationship with money because we all live in capitalism.

If they weren't brought up in Western culture, they were brought up in cultures that have been very influenced by Protestant Calvinist, puritanical ideology that underpins American-style capitalism, which says, money is dirty, money is bad, but also you need it.

So if you're gonna get some, you better make sure you're very worthy and you have to prove your worthiness. So this very wounded relationship with money. And so when you start to experience abundance, right, when you have enough, when you're enjoying your life, other people might see that as, oh, they've lost touch with their morals.

They're greedy now. They're only in it for the money. Sometimes it's conscious, but sometimes it's unconscious: we fear other people's judgments. What will so and so think if my price is this number? What will so and so think if I'm successful at this level?

And a lot of the times, the friction, the tension that you create by subverting that narrative might become the generative energy that someone needs to examine their own wounded money consciousness and to be triggered to heal it, you know, to evolve that 'cause that's not serving them either.

Joey: Yes. So what's coming up for me right now is just hearing that your capacity to hold money as one form of currency is very much parallel to your capacity to hold other forms of responsibility. And what you just named right now is even the responsibility of being a teacher in somebody else's life, even if it's not in such an ego-feeding way.

Right. Even if you are a teacher by way of being sort of a thorny reflection for that person to work through their own wounds.

Simone: Oh, so good.

Joey: You know, it's a really thankless form of teaching and also what I wanna acknowledge as I'm hearing this wisdom coming from you is, is very complex work that we're doing right now.

And it's a very complex conversation to have because we are in this liminal space where we are trying to maintain our moral compass that is anti-capitalist while also having to acknowledge we are not freed from capitalism yet, and we still have to master some of these techniques of working with money so that we can resource the freer, flourishing, reciprocal world that we are dreaming of.

Right. And if we don't acknowledge the ways that we've been conditioned by capitalism to remain in poverty, we are never going to build critical mass in order to build new structures.

Simone: 100%.

And I want to speak to a nuance that personally took me a while to kind of sift through. And that is a lot of people that I have observed who on the surface are saying similar-ish things to what we're saying aren't actually interested at all in collective liberation.

And they use this kind of like, this shift the paradigm, you know, abundance mindset kind of language ultimately for individual accumulation and hoarding. A lot of these people will also give you the advice to just charge a lot, right?

Right. Charge your worth. Know your worth. And basically the advice boils down to charge as much as you can get away with, as much as the market will bear. And they also, these people also often tell you to sell to rich people, sell to people who already have money because they're the most likely to buy.

Which, if you peel back the surface is just telling you to extract from wealthy people. And so it took me a while to figure out, wait, hold on a second. Like on the surface what they're saying, like, I agree, but why does this feel not right?

Why does this feel icky? And I realized that's why. When we say charge a healthy price, so much of that gets unconsciously linked with a lot of noise that's out there, which yes, personal abundance, but also where are we rooting in, right? And what we are rooting in ultimately is the interdependence. Into our ancestrally appointed role in how we serve the liberation of all living beings and how that can coexist with your abundance because your abundance has a responsibility to feed into collective liberation.

And so I feel like if that lens is missing, all this kind of abundance wealth mindset stuff is, it's just capitalism. It's more capitalism.

Joey: Okay. You know what else is also missing from that abundance wealth mindset stuff.

Tangible skills like math.

We always have to figure out the cost of what is our return on investment. This pricing model that truly sustains your business so that your business is set up as a channel of power and redistribution of resources to do the revolutionary work that you say you're here to do. What is the math that we get there and what are the pitfalls?

What are the pitfalls to watch out for as we are starting to learn to do some of that math? Okay.

Simone: So first, and actually I haven't run this by you, Joey, yet, so I'm curious to see what you'll think about this. Okay. I wanna flip the definition of the phrase "accessible pricing." Okay.

Joey: Let's do it.

Simone: Accessible pricing doesn't mean anyone who wants it can afford it. Mm-hmm. That is not what accessible means. What it also doesn't mean is like everyone with a good heart, who's aligned, who's allied with the causes that you believe in should be entitled to your work.

That is not what accessible means either.

Joey: Okay. Say more.

Simone: Accessible pricing means your price is accessible to those who are meant to partner with your business to serve the needs of the business, which are also tied into your personal needs and also the needs of your business as an engine in the world to create value, to create more that can flow back into the community.

Joey: Right.

Simone: Accessible pricing is whoever is able to joyfully access the price that allows you to do that.

Joey: What I'm hearing is your work was never meant for everyone. I'm also hearing it's not meant for everyone who wants it right now.

Simone: Right now. Yes, yes. I feel like the things that you sell for money is just one part of how your business serves the world. And accessible pricing is people who can access the price that needs to be in order for you and your business to flow more back out into the world. Because here's what I want to share with everybody, is that I have had offers everywhere from like 25 bucks and up until like $20,000 offers and through all of it, I have had people tell me, Simone, your classes are amazing.

They're the best. I've learned so much. But also what really changed my life is just like watching you exist in the world. Hmm. Just watching you be yourself on social media or just watching you like make mistakes and learn from them in public or the way that you're so human. Like that's what really gave me value.

Even though your class was really great, you know.

Joey: And that was for free, what they're saying is what really changed your life was the free part.

Simone: Exactly. And so I don't wanna put this in like a tier system where the things that I exchange for money are more important or higher value than things that I just like exude into the world by being like a thinking and creative person in public, right?

Joey: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Simone: And so the things you sell for money serve a particular function is that whoever is willing to pay real cash money for the offers that you decide to sell, they're funding the rest of your operation.

Joey: Absolutely.

Simone: That's the function. It's almost like you're like a patron.

Joey: What kind of got removed with capitalism is this model where in our ancient villages and in our ancestors' time, if you were a seer, healer, somebody who existed to just channel services to the community, your livelihood was taken care of in that way. And we've talked about what do modern forms of patronage look like?

And very much paying for your paid offers is a form of patronage. I think that's easy to understand.

Simone: And not everyone has to do that.

Joey: Some can just access your free body of work that you are going to put out into the world no matter what, because that is the leader that you are. That's the mission that you're on. That's your, what we're calling your ancestral assignment, that you are here on earth to carry out. Yeah. And that is going to flow out regardless, but in order for you to continue flowing that out at the highest level, you have to be materially taken care of. Yeah. And then your connected systems, your living systems, your families, your communities that you also care for have to also be taken care of.

And your business can function as a catchall, like as a rain catcher.

Simone: My business exists to serve the world.

Joey: Yeah.

Simone: And my job is to serve my business. When you pay for my courses or my whatever, you are funding my business to be able to do its work in the world.

And you are funding me 'cause I'm the human who does the thing with the business. Right. And so really important thing here is that because we're in capitalism, which reduces everything into a commodity... capitalism says everything has a price and the value of something is determined by the price.

We lose sight of the fact that all of this is a fucking made up illusion.

Joey: Yeah.

Simone: Right. The whole system of currency is made up. Yeah. None of it has any inherent meaning. Right. So when I put a price on something, I always understand that the true value of whatever it is, has nothing to do with the number that I put on it, which is arbitrary.

Mm-hmm. The number that I put on it is meaningful to the extent that it allows certain people to patronize me and to kind of put some coins back into the hat so that I can continue to do the work. But the true value of my $25 class is fucking infinite. The true value of our $3,000 class is fucking infinite.

And guess what, what we're talking about right now, which you're getting for free on my podcast, the value of this conversation, fucking infinite, right?

Yes. And so it's capitalism that tells you the things that cost more are more valuable. And the things that cost less are less valuable. So therefore, if you have three free things to give to people who can't pay anything, and then you only reserve the real value for the people who pay — that is how capitalism teaches you to do it, to kind of gatekeep the real value and only feed crumbs that are meant to be like bait to people who can't pay anything.

We have to flip this whole thing. I love that one of your favorite words is excellence, Joey, because that is such an Asian value and we need to make excellence great again. And the things that you put out there that have no dollar price on it need to be excellent and of infinite value.

And things that you put out there for $10 have to be excellent, infinite value and the things that you put out for thousands of dollars... and so there is infinite abundant value accessible at every level, and one is not better than the other. And if you ever think one is better than the other, that's capitalism talking.

Joey: Oh, oh my gosh. Mic drop. I wanna come back to talking about excellence and free bodies of work in a second. But I also wanna bring back to the excellence that you embody as a person. This vote, this choice that is made when someone comes to purchase from you — I recognize, and this might be totally subconscious for people, but I'm trying to bring this into the consciousness — but imagine that when you are bringing your dollars and you are giving it to somebody who has created a paid offer, it's like you're saying, I recognize the excellence in you, in your personhood, and in how you have allowed yourself to undergo the work to become this tributary, this flow of resources.

You are better set up than I in this moment to take these dollars and redistribute it to our interconnected ecosystems for good. I am putting my trust — I talk a lot about choosing your teachers as a sacred act. And if you are a teacher who also happens to exist within a business that you have founded, you're also choosing your money redistributors, and that's also a sacred act.

You are trusting that this person has matured and developed themselves, which is not easy work. And it's decades of life lived and apprenticeship to our elders, to our ancestors, to better paradigms of knowing and being and saying, you have developed yourself into this flow and I would like to put my dollars — capitalistically earned — back into your hands so that it can do something real for collective liberation.

Simone: And how capitalism has desecrated those ideas is that it has reduced everything into a transaction, right? Mm-hmm. Even when they think they're choosing teachers, a lot of people who've been, you know, conditioned into capitalism, they're not really choosing teachers.

They're choosing: whom can I extract value from so I can have more of what I want, right? And so when that's the worldview that you're operating in, then thinking about pricing becomes very constricted, because then you are thinking, okay, for this amount of money, if I charge this price, then what are people gonna extract from me for this price?

Is that good enough? And it gets into, it just gets very energetically wonky, very fast when you have desecrated the teacher-student relationship. And it's not even just teacher, student, even if it's like service provider. Like even if you're making a dress for me, right?

That there is sacredness in that reciprocity of exchange. You as a person, as my dressmaker, you are not reduced to your labor and to the commodity that you can produce on my behalf.

Joey: No, this is so real. Really like a lot of the tension and I'm even casting my memory back to seeing where I felt some of the edges of this, a lot of the tension in charging more is this conditioning that says, if somebody pays me more, they own me at that price.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They own...

Simone: And I don't wanna be responsible for that. So people unconsciously charge less because I don't wanna take that on.

Joey: I don't want to have to work myself to the bone to deliver what they expect to be privileged to be entitled to extract from me at that price.

And so, once again, this comes back to the capacity to hold money, to bring in money is inseparable with the capacity for so many other human skills that we have to learn. And in this one, we're naming boundaries and we're naming the ability to self-validate your own human worth without being reduced to a commodity like this.

These skills have to be elevated at the same time.

Simone: A hundred percent agreed. Before I forget or we move on to something else, there's something else that I want to make sure to hit. And that is the idea that — and this is especially salient for us because Joey and I, we are offering these courses only for people of the global majority.

And it's this idea that people of color, people of global majority, don't have money. And that prices need to be adjusted downward in order to be more accessible to more of them. I want to acknowledge that there is an important truth here, which is that we live in a world where so many currencies are at a disadvantage, due to the hegemony of this US and Western Europe-driven industrial and military complex. Right. But this is true that, you know, a dollar means something very different. We can't bypass that. And it's also very false and patronizing to say that just because you're not white, you don't have access to money.

Joey: Absolutely, yes.

Simone: There are tons and tons of capital moving through those countries, through the hands of people who aren't white. Yeah.

Joey: Absolutely. It is extremely reductionist and patronizing to just assume that the only people then who can afford my offering at this price must then be white. And that erases the histories of power, of wealth, resourcefulness, of wealth, of everything that that is.

And that goes again to reinforce this white supremacist narrative, right? So yes, on the one hand, we can acknowledge not everyone will be able to access this. That's not lost on us. And at the same time, it was never our intention to make this open for everybody. We could not even handle those numbers.

Simone: This thinking veers into kind of saviorism, right? Yes. Because here's what I think, okay. It's very true that there is someone living in an extremely currency-disadvantaged country.

Let's say someone lives in a village in a country that is in that kind of situation and they can earn like 30 bucks a month, you know, working full-time, right?

Are they going to be able to afford our course priced at $3,000? No, they're not. And here's the important thing. I don't think I'm qualified to teach that person because I do not share the life experience of that person. I don't think that I am a good fit teacher for that person. Right. And the thing is like, "oh, you have to be accessible to everyone."

That assumes that somehow I need to go and save all those people by trying to reach all those people... that person probably doesn't wanna learn from me. Because what do I know about living in the village and earning $30? I don't know. There is probably someone out there in that country speaking their language who is able to teach, you know, some version of what I'm doing in a way that's a lot more applicable to that person.

My qualification kind of ends at the level of people who share my experiences and my perspective.

Joey: Yeah. And I'm remembering what you said in our last episode. Your business by accumulating reserves then gets to exist as sort of a grant machine, right? A grant engine.

Simone: Exactly.

Joey: That can fund other projects and maybe not every single project in the world, but for those for whom you are connected and in relationship and it makes sense.

One of my goals and dreams is to exist so that I can fund the people I'm in relationship with and their work at the tip of the spear because they don't have the time and energy to also create the windfall of money. So it's all about symbiosis. And the other thing I was saying too is that you are also serving by providing education.

The people who can access your education then get to turn around and apply it in their context.

Simone: Exactly.

Joey: In their relationships, in their communities. That's actually the whole vision, the whole goal —

Simone: Exactly.

Joey: — of doing this interconnected web of work.

Simone: Exactly. We are all nodes in this complex, interconnected system. You don't have to be everything for everyone, nor are you qualified to be everything for everyone, and nor is everyone asking you to be something for them. No one's asking you. Right.

Joey: Well actually, you know, let's peel that back even more. I think that this is also an intentional myth fed to us by colonialism, that saviorism is the model for doing good works.

Simone: Having spent a lot of time in nonprofit and having a lot of friends in international development, quote unquote, international development, I just see like, whenever people sitting in conferences in New York and Switzerland, in London, like, what do we do about this problem in Africa?

All these white people, right? And it's like, do you — I always like, do you have any idea how many fucking brilliant people are in Africa who are African? Like, what do you, like, why do you think this is something that you need to solve for them? Like, you know, like, do you have any idea?

And it's like, oh, well, like "we have all the knowledge and there are these poor, clueless people." No, shut the fuck up. You're stupid. You know? To further remove ourselves from the saviorism, my business, because I am able to steward a certain amount of money, has acted like an unofficial grant-making entity and inshallah, god willing, it will continue to. And the thing is, that is how I know I am serving the people that were born into much greater structural disadvantage than me. Right?

There is gonna be certain projects that I have funded and will continue to fund that goes into the hands of people who are locally experts at whether it's like, you know, drilling wells for a village or creating whatever, a food sovereignty, right? I don't know shit about fuck about what — I can do is funnel money towards it, right?

Yeah. And then for the people who are closer to me in terms of lived experience, I have these courses and they have the purchasing power to be able to afford them. Which brings me to the next really important cluster of ideas, which is what you can do to make your work more equitable is different at every stage of business.

Joey: Mm-hmm.

Simone: I can act like an unofficial grant-making entity because I've been in business for a while. I have accumulated a healthy reserve of money with which I can fund those things. That is not true of everyone.

If you are starting out and you are just trying to get a business to be profitable so it can replace your day job... And it'll also be different if you're in a kind of middle stage where you're not exactly starting out, you've got some momentum going, you have some stability, you have a lot of ambitions for growing it even bigger, even more sustainable with bigger cushions for all of life's contingencies, right?

Joey: Mm-hmm.

Simone: For the purposes of discussion, I'm gonna simplify it to early stage, intermediate stage, and more mature stage business. Mm-hmm.

And what you can do to be equitable is different at each of these stages. And I think the more you have, the more you have the responsibility to steward and redistribute. What I really wanna stress is that for people who are in earlier stages —

Joey: Mm-hmm.

Simone: — please consider the cost of complexity. It is a lot of work learning how to believe in what you are selling and learning how to get settled in your self-concept as an entrepreneur.

Right. Learning how to stand for the price that you have decided on. And also never forget to factor into your price that your price also needs to account for the fact that you are not gonna be working 24/7. You need to take breaks, you need to go on vacation.

So is your price accounting for that as well? And it needs to, 'cause you're not a machine.

Joey: Mm-hmm.

Simone: You don't exist to labor. And so that in itself has enough complexity and I think what a lot of people feel is a kind of anxiety of like, I'm not doing enough.

And they try to solve for growing their business and trying to be everything for everyone at the same time. Like, I wanna give you permission if you needed it, to just focus on learning how to be excellent at business. Learning how to be excellent at doing what you do so that you can provide fantastic value for the people who are buying from you, for people who are in your audience.

That is really hard work. And I'm not saying that you have to reserve all giving and redistribution for later, but I'm just saying if you do any redistribution at this stage, let it come from a place in your heart where it feels like giving from overflow.

Joey: Mm-hmm.

Simone: As opposed to a sense of guilt. Because I remember even when my business was teeny tiny and I had very little, I did a lot of work for free, I did a lot of work at very discounted prices when it came from a place in my heart where I was like, you know what? I don't have — it's not like my calendar's overflowing with clients anyway.

It would give me so much joy to work with this person. It would feel like I would be getting paid in like good energy. That's the place from which I made decisions to discount or give things for free. Not like, oh, I don't want to be an evil capitalist, or I have to, you know, give scholarships.

So whether it's actual material overflow or energetic overflow, give from that. If you don't have overflow, energetic or material, work on resourcing yourself first. Expand, and you're building your capacity and your skills first, so that you can fill yourself up materially and energetically, and then the overflow will come, and then you can give from there.

Joey: Oh my gosh, so many good gems dropped. My pragmatic Asian auntie mind is kicking in right now, and I almost want a worksheet. So what I want folks to do is start to map out what Simone just said — three stages of business. You talked about a different mindframe around delivering free services or free offers. And what does that look like when it's not delivered but it's a very strategic, pragmatic choice? 'Cause I'm hearing my Hakka auntie in my ear, right?

When you're in that pre-profit phase, the need for testing is enough to say, okay, I'm gonna offer X amount of free offers because what I'm getting in exchange is data. What I'm getting in exchange is feedback that is going to help me tweak, that is going to help me build better, right? I mean, huge companies do this. It's called market research, where they give away free products of new things that they wanna release. People respond to — people's reactions, and they use that in their marketing, in refining the product. It's called R&D, research and development. And these are the skills that you need to upskill in order.

Your charge was "get good at business," right? My teacher mind is saying, anyone listening right now, take out the notepad and start to list down what are the hard skills that I could get better at? Is it my budgets? Is it R&D? Is it talking to my potential customers so I can understand their needs better?

Is it mapping out where I am in business so I can understand my decision-making flow?

Maybe here you can start to break down a little bit more about what you've seen in your decades of business and what are the biggest pitfalls that you've observed again and again. And like we touched on earlier in the conversation, the harm of complexity in your business. Okay.

Simone: Thank you so much for that. 'Cause I don't wanna end this podcast without talking about that. Early stage entrepreneurs always underestimate the cost of complexity.

Joey: Can you illustrate the complexity of offering scholarships, because that was a huge learning moment for me. Yes. From you.

Simone: Oh my god. Okay. So when I contemplated doing scholarships for the first time, I was talking with an elder of mine and he said, do not underestimate how much time and labor this is going to take just to administer the scholarship process. And I was like, "okay." And then of course I underestimated it. I was like, "it'll be fine. Oh, it'll be work. I understand." But to set up a scholarship system, you have to figure out — and it's like an application process, right?

Or some kind of thing that people can tell you who they are and what they need, right? You have to set that up. You have to set up a way for people to tell whether they qualify for the scholarship or whether they should just pay for your thing. And then you're gonna be fielding questions for people who aren't sure, and you're gonna be talking to people who think they qualify for the scholarship, but aren't, or vice versa.

Those conversations are gonna be happening. And then once you have the application set up, you're gonna be receiving applications, you're gonna be reading the applications, and then you are going to be doing the worst part of this, which is the emotional, intellectual labor of deciding who is worthy of the application.

That is costly. And then there's the labor of sending out the notifications. Like you are qualified, you're not, and then if the scholarship is like a hundred percent scholarship, then you have to create a separate way for people to access your offer without the paywall.

And if there's like a partial scholarship, then you have to create a different payment system. And then if that payment system happens to have multiple payments, like spread out over different months, then you have to keep track of it every month. And if somebody happens to drop off, then you have to... so it is a whole thing.

And it's the same thing with tiered pricing, sliding scale. And I say this as somebody who has done that for a long time. Actually, to me, the hardest part was this:

When you have something like that, you hope that everyone's gonna operate on honor code, right? Right.

Is that somebody who picks a lower tier because they are genuinely in need, that they're being truthful when they make those decisions. So somebody who applies for a scholarship, they are being truthful. Now, there is no way to assert that they are indeed being truthful short of you making them submit their tax statements — that doesn't make any sense. Right. So I was like, if we're gonna do this, we have to trust people. Yeah. And I have no way of knowing how many people abuse that trust.

And my overall impression is that not many people did. But I also know that a few people did.

Joey: Mm-hmm.

Simone: They might have been a minority. How big of a minority? I can't know. But the few people who do break the trust because, and they'll abuse the system because they can — it's really hard. It's really hard for me and it's also incredibly unfair to everyone else who participates in the system in good faith. And this is how I know that this is working, is because I have different payment points and people consistently, voluntarily opted into the highest tier, highest second-highest tier when they didn't have to.

So I know that there were many people operating in good conscience, and it's people gaming that — wildly unfair to everyone else. And it just left a bad taste in my mouth and it made me — I'm not gonna say maybe not wanna do it ever again, but it's a whole other thing that I have to consider.

Right. And so a lot of the times when people have good intentions and wanna implement these systems, they don't consider these costs of complexity. And what I wanna tell you is that this is not the only way that you can use your business and offers for liberation, right? Sliding scale, scholarships aren't the only way.

You are not being inequitable because you are gonna choose against complexity, especially if you're neurodivergent, especially if you don't have someone helping you. I am enormously fortunate to have someone who is extremely intelligent and conscientious and on top of it, helping to administer all these things for me.

Otherwise, I could not have dreamed — with my ADHD brain, no fucking way I can administer this complexity by myself, and that does not mean I don't care about accessibility. Exactly. Yeah. So the point isn't this is good, that's bad. The point is there's many ways, and creating flexibility around your pricing is one way.

It's not the only way, it's not the best way in many cases. And so I just wanna remove the moral pressure around it.

Joey: I am also thinking about the cost, the spiritual cost, the emotional cost that you are naming here in this experience.

Simone: That's the biggest thing, honestly.

Joey: And you named neurodivergence, but I'm thinking even into some of my personal experience where when you are a person of color and you start to have these experiences where people expect your prices to be lower and they choose then not to invest in you because of your price being whatever it is, and then you watch them go and invest more in a white person in somebody who is more capitalistic because they are selling more directly to that person's pain points, and then that person still doesn't get to wherever they wanna go, and maybe one day it comes back to you or doesn't or whatever. There is an emotional, spiritual toll for being seen as somebody —

Simone: The discount option.

Joey: — that can be extracted from. The discount option. Yeah. Yes.

Simone: Yeah. But someone that's amenable to negotiate with.

Joey: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm hearing all of your wisdom and your years of experience and this — to me, it just sounds like a word of love to those of us who are coming up after you on this journey to, it is a noble thing to care for your spiritual resources too. Your emotional resources too.

Simone: Oh, that's such a lovely way to put it. And I also wanna say there is, it's very subtle. It's a lot of times it's unconscious, but there is an extra expectation that people of color, women of color, not only need to do their businesses, but also have to be fixing the world at the same time.

Yeah.

And at the same time. And if they are failing to do so by very specific standards that some random person has, then you're a bad person. Yeah. And that we don't have to carry that —

Joey: That is not ours.

Simone: — that is somebody else's.

Joey: And as you said at one point, like these same people feeling entitled to discounts from you 'cause you're a creator, a teacher of color, they're not going to ask for a discount when they go to the Apple store to buy an iPhone.

You know, because to them that is not negotiable. Yeah.

Simone: Right.

Joey: And by allowing yourself to be seen as negotiable, it's advertising, Hey, I'm someone you can extract from. And you don't have to be, you don't have to do that. You don't have to be that.

Joey: That is one of the major lessons that I've taken from where I come from. Growing up in a working-class community in California, very diverse community, a lot of the people in my community come from situations of poverty, but when someone wants something enough, they're gonna find a way to get it, you know? Are you existing in somebody else's frame of mind as something that can be commodified, discounted, extracted from?

Or are you gonna stand firm, root firm in how your ancestors saw you, which is a whole human blessed with immeasurable gifts, and that cannot be discounted.

Simone: A hundred percent. And also another thought that I have is that I only wanna work with people who are thrilled to see me thrive.

Joey: Yeah.

Simone: Want me to be extraordinarily well-provided for. Who are going to laugh and jump up and down with joy when they see me being well-provided for and I want to offer that for everyone. Like, you can take that on for yourself as well. You deserve to be surrounded by people who are thrilled to see you succeed.

Joey: Mm-hmm.

Simone: Who are happy — if they can't pay you abundantly themselves, who are so happy to see other people paying you abundantly.

Joey: Yes.

Simone: They see you as worthy of that. Yeah. And they're on your team and they're on your side and they're rooting for your success. Like, you deserve to be surrounded by people like that. If you aren't surrounded by people like that, it's time to make some different choices.

Joey: Absolutely.

Simone: That was pretty, that was pretty good. We covered so much.

Joey: We covered it all. I think.

Simone: We covered it all my friends. Joey and I'll be back to talk about yet another aspect of wealth and liberation. So stay tuned until the next episode. Thank you so much, Joey.

Joey: Thank you.

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Hey, thank you so much for listening. If what we share today resonated with you, I want to invite you to take our free course Building Post-Capitalist Wealth. It's designed specifically for people of the global majority. It's completely free, and it's also a beautiful introduction to the work that Joey and I will be doing together in our full eight-week course, Ancestral Wealth, starting in December. You'll find the link to the free course in the show notes, and I'll be back next week with more with Joey. Until then, may you feel the love and protection of your ancestors.