What Would a Customer Pay You $10k For?

If you're working on a startup idea and I ask you what your (eventual) customers would pay you $10,000 for, you'll give a little half chuckle and say, “Nothing.”

I know this because I ask our founders this question all the time. It doesn't matter if the product they're selling (or planning to sell) is legal software or a dating app — I ask it to everyone. And because I ask it so much, I know what happens when founders realize I'm serious. They all say the same thing:

“Oh…well…I guess if I had to charge someone $10k, I'd have to find people who have a whole lot of money.”

And this is why so many founders struggle.

All Startups Are Equally Hard

One of the best entrepreneurs I've ever met runs a wildly ambitious company that builds electric airplanes from scratch. During a chat at a coffee shop a few years back I asked him for the one thing he'd tell every entrepreneur that came through Tacklebox. He answered immediately:

“Every startup is equally hard. They're all the maximum amount of hard. Any idea that seems easier than any other idea isn't. So, since they're all equal, you might as well work on something that really matters. And you should never pick an idea because it seems ‘easier,’ because it isn’t.”

A little further into the conversation, he backtracked a bit on his first thought and said that he actually thought the most seemingly ambitious businesses ideas were the easiest.

“The whole game in the startup world is energy — you need to be energized, and your customers need to be energized, and important problems do that. They also energize the smartest people — so, it’ll be easier to hire and raise money. I guess it’s a bit counterintuitive: The hardest things are the easiest. And the ‘easy’ things are endlessly hard. Because no one cares about them, they create zero energy. Maybe tell them that.”

What Imposter Syndrome Actually Is

Nearly every founder shows up to Tacklebox with self-diagnosed Imposter Syndrome. Many of them wear this as a badge of honor — of all the syndromes, it definitely seems like the most self-aware. And if it manifests you in being humble and working hard, fine.

But the real impact of Imposter Syndrome isn’t just “feeling like you don’t belong.” It’s subconsciously lowering the bar for every part of your business to protect yourself from failing at something that matters. It’s going after the “easier” thing, thinking that’s a good strategic idea.

Here’s what our founders with the damaging type of Imposter Syndrome do:

1. They go for customers that have a problem that isn’t all that painful or urgent. If it isn't solved, the world will keep spinning. This reduces the pressure on the founder to actually solving a meaningful problem. It’s usually rationalized by saying they’ll “create value later” rather than solving something important now.

2. They charge customers nothing or a fraction of what they should in the name of “data” or a “gaining a design partner” or “learning” or “testing.” This removes any chance at painful (read: useful) feedback. People only get upset if they had high expectations and those expectations weren’t met. Critical feedback is difficult to give — if you aren’t actually upset, you won’t give it.

3. They build products with lots of features because they aren't confident in one feature that's strong enough to support a business. This makes marketing easier — “We do all these things, which do you want?” — under the guise of “letting the customer tell us what to build.” Really, it just shields you from people actually looking for a solution to a hard problem and doesn’t force you to choose what you’ll actually do.

And obviously lots of these can be strategic — you need to work with customers to root out the hard, important problems. You won’t know them to start. But, you need to realize when a problem isn’t worth your time to solve and move towards one that is.

Which gets us back to the $10k question.

So, what’s worth $10k?

Who knows? Maybe nothing. And as you might’ve guessed, it’s the thought process that’s important here.

Generally, there are three ways to charge someone $10k dollars.

1. You can save them $20k (or more) that they’re already paying and take a $10k cut.

2. You can remove $10k of pain they have to deal with now.

3. You can help them generate $20k (or more) of new revenue, and take a $10k cut.

The first two are where you probably want to live. Generating new revenue (#3) is extremely hard, but also requires a bunch of trust and product maturity. Helping people generate new revenue is tricky, as they’ll be hesitant to attribute it directly to whatever you helped them do.

So, thinking of the first two, how can you do these for your customer? What customer that you’ve spoken to is already paying $10k to solve the problem that you can help remove? Who has $10k worth of pain and frustration?

The Shift

Money isn’t always a perfect proxy for value/importance, but it’s pretty good. The best problems are usually the most expensive to solve because few people know enough about them to solve them.

But this general shift should help reorient your business. It forces you to think about customers with painful, urgent problems you can solve. It gets you past the garbage of building a “passive recurring revenue stream,” or something else dumb that’ll never work.

It gets you to the hard, fun, energizing problems.

So — who will pay you $10k?