One final design decision

First things first, let me not bury the lede: I've just opened up enrollments for Smart Creative Leadership. There's one cohort starting next month for the real eager beavers and another one running in January. 4 weeks, 4 projects, 4 live sessions. $10001.

And that leads me to the final design decision, which is less about content, presentation, or user experience and more about pricing. When I launched the first pilot of the course, within 24 hours of opening enrollments I got like half a dozen people DMing me to say, "this is priced way too low." And I knew that at the time, but I still did it for a few reasons:

1. I didn't actually want to spend too much of my effort selling it. If it wasn't an easy sell at a seriously discounted price, then it probably wasn't speaking to an acute enough pain.

2. Honestly, I knew it was still an experiment and wasn't totally certain how it would turn out...and if it was a dismal failure, I knew I would feel bad about how much I charged people for it2.

3. The real biggest reason? I was agonizing over how to price the course to make it accessible for anyone who would benefit from it. What's affordable in one place can be outrageously expensive somewhere else, and over years working in emerging markets I saw how pricing often acts as an implicit way of gatekeeping opportunity. There's that old chestnut about how talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not, and the price of a thing can be one of the ways to uphold that unequal distribution. So I decided that I'd be fine leaving some money on the table in order to prioritize access.

But not anymore!!!!

I kid, I kid.

But here's how I decided I want to take on the access challenge for now: I'm going to depend on the people in my extended network3 to help me price it right for the market in which they operate. That can mean geography, that can mean industry. If the current pricing is still out of reach in your market - if you know immediately that companies that should send some of their people wouldn't even consider it based on the price - then respond to this email directly and tell me what the right price in your market should be, and I'll get you a custom discount code that you can share4.

I thank you in advance for joining me in this fairly weird experiment.

Would you care for some links?

• I live in a social democracy5. The taxation level is high...but the level of benefits is also really high. I am very much OK with this both at an individual and societal level. Anne Helen Peterson articulates the case for paying for civilization6.

• Electric car batteries seem to be reaching a Moore's Law like level of progress. Just check out what Chinese battery company CATL has in store.

• It's a little bit of a throwaway thought in this nonetheless fascinating story (maybe a paywall), but the education use cases for LARPing are intriguing to contemplate as far as alternative educational models. VR gets the hype, cuz tech, but I bet the actual learning benefits from student-driven LARPing would be much greater.