Pricing Decisions Founders Get Wrong, and What I'd Do Instead

The pricing decisions that hurt most are usually not the number. Founders get four other things wrong first: they sell access and not an outcome, they price against the competition and not against profit, they show a price with nothing to compare it to, and they ignore how the customer has to pay. I would fix them in that order.

Wrong decision one: selling access

On my own site I list this as a bad call, and a common gym-industry trap: selling access, not outcomes, and then competing on price for that access.

A membership that means the door is open and the machines are there is a commodity. The gym down the road has a door and machines too. When two shops sell the same thing, the only question the customer has left is who is cheaper. You did not lose on price. You chose to be compared on price the day you decided what you were selling.

In a reel from June 2026 I said most gyms sell only equipment, and that is why people forget them. The fix comes before any price change: sell the outcome and the proof, never the commodity. A customer buying a result compares you with the cost of not getting the result. A customer buying access compares you with the cheapest access. I describe what selling access does to a gym's survival in why gyms fail.

Wrong decision two: cheap instead of affordable

India is a price-sensitive market. I said so in a clip posted in June 2024: the majority of the audience here wants to spend less. Founders hear that and conclude the lowest price wins. It does not follow.

In August 2026 I posted a short video about wording. Same product, different word, different value in the customer's head. Do not say cheap, say affordable. When people hear cheap, they assume the quality matches. When they hear affordable, they hear a smart deal. Do not sell features, sell results. That is why we say WTF is an affordable fitness brand.

Affordable only holds if the experience holds. In the April 2024 video where I explained WTF, I said we had optimised pricing so a WTF gym is affordable and experiential at the same time: the member should get the feeling of a brand at a much lower price. My line in a short posted in July 2026 was blunter:

I'm going to steal your customers by making luxury gyms actually affordable for every person in this country.

A low price with a poor experience is cheap. A low price with a good experience is affordable. The price can be identical. So before you cut anything, check which word a customer would use for you today, and why.

Wrong decision three: no anchor

In February 2026 I posted a short on price anchoring. The idea: our mind does not see the value of anything in absolute terms. We need a comparison. Whatever price we see first becomes the anchor, and every price after it is judged against that.

The cinema popcorn counter is the example I used. The small tub has one price. The medium costs far more. The large costs only a little more than the medium. Suddenly the large looks like the sensible buy, and that was the plan all along. The medium is there to make the large look good. The same thing happens with a course: quote one price cold and it feels expensive; show a much higher price first and the same number feels like a steal. I ended that video with a warning to buyers: the next time you see a discount, you are not saving, you have been anchored.

Read that from the seller's side. Your customer will anchor on something. If you show one price and nothing else, the anchor is whatever they saw last, usually the cheapest competitor in your lane. Decide the comparison yourself: put your fullest plan first, or put your price next to what the problem costs the customer every month it stays unsolved.

Wrong decision four: ignoring how people pay

The same price, collected differently, reaches different customers.

In a clip posted in June 2024 I talked about this from our own data. We made WTF memberships recurring, month on month, because people want to pay monthly and not hand over a year's fee in one go. The result I described was a change in who joined. People for whom a year's fee up front was a big household decision could now join, because a small monthly amount is not a big spend.

Monthly collection helps the owner too. A gym owner's month is a fight to cover fixed cost. In the April 2024 video I asked owners to imagine money equal to their whole fixed cost coming in every month, on repeat, and how much easier life gets when it does.

The same principle shows on my own program page. The fee for the Operator Program, ₹5,00,000 + GST per founder, is printed there, with No-Cost EMI and a ₹1,00,000 deposit that holds the seat. The fee did not get smaller. The decision got easier to make.

The decision under all four: price for profit

In the offer and pricing part of the system I run on there are three lessons: sell the outcome, not the access; price for profit, not for the competition; stack value so discounts become unnecessary.

Price for profit means the price is worked out from your own costs and your own target, and only then checked against the market. At WTF the per-gym breakeven is 90 days. Your test is the same shape: a price that cannot get one location to breakeven in a time you can afford is the wrong price, however good it looks next to the competitor's banner. I am not going to print our plan prices here; they would tell you nothing about your costs.

A discount is the last tool. If the customer sees the outcome, trusts the proof, has an anchor and can pay monthly, the discount is usually covering for one of those four being broken.

What I'd do

This week, on one page:

1. Write what you sell in one sentence. If the sentence describes access (a seat, a membership, hours, a login), rewrite it as the result the customer gets and the proof you can show.
2. Ask your last few buyers which word they would use for your price: cheap, affordable or expensive. Ask what they compared you with. That comparison is your current anchor.
3. Choose your anchor on purpose. Either put your fullest plan first on the price list, or put the monthly cost of the customer's problem next to your price.
4. Work out your breakeven: fixed cost per month divided by what one customer leaves after their own costs. That gives you how many customers you need at today's price. If that count is impossible for your location or your team, the price is wrong or the offer is.
5. List every way a customer can pay you today. If the only option is one large payment, test a monthly option on new customers for one month and compare how many say yes.
6. Stop one discount. Replace it with something added to the offer that costs you little and matters to the customer. Count the sales for a month before you decide.