Christopher Murphy · 25 June, 2020

Summary: In this pricing walkthrough, I'll explore how I prototype pricing by ‘sketching with numbers' when I'm thinking through my pricing strategy. I'll think through the different price points for Mr Murphy Ltd. (Services × Products) and The School of Design (Products × Services), allocating indicative prices to them.

As I've noted in First Principles: We need to move away from selling our time as designers to selling our value, captured in products × services. This is why I'm de-emphasising time spent delivering services (time-consuming), instead emphasising time spent developing products (time-efficient).

Imagine you’ve set yourself a goal of earning £50,000 by selling products. That number may be too low, or it may be too high; replace it with a number that works for you; adjust the figures accordingly.

There are two extremes that will allow you to hit this number (I love extremes):

Unless you're Steve Jobs, or similar, £50,000 for a single item is unlikely. And selling 50,000 items for £1 is time-consuming (there are too many people to take care of). [[Cf. 1,000 True Fans]]

The reality is you're probably going to be hitting numbers somewhere in the middle, selling a variety of products × services at different price points: some at the high-end, some at the middle-end and some at the low-end.

Sketching with Numbers

The following is a first pass at prototyping the numbers for Mr Murphy Ltd. and The School of Design. There are three product × service offerings, targeted at different audiences:

Mr Murphy Ltd.

My work through Mr Murphy Ltd. is focused on design consultancy and designing and delivering learning experience for businesses like: PwC, EY and Deloitte.

This work is very much focused around digital product design: Design Thinking; Strategy; Ideation × Execution; Design and Build; UX +/ UI. I focus on:

MBA × Design Thinking ~£5,000

The School of Design