In Part Two: Let's look at— How the information is positioned.
Take, for example, the story of a store owner.
Having managed several stores over the years, he wanted to write a book that would help other store owners avoid theft.
According to current statistics (Embroker.com), the situation is serious:
75% of employees have stolen at least once from their employer.
An estimated 60% of inventory losses are due to employee theft.
Retail businesses lost over $112 billion in inventory, with 29% attributed to employee theft.
There are more details, of course, but the scale of employee theft is staggering.
The store owner had enough experience to help others reduce these losses considerably. His challenge was that he couldn’t turn his knowledge into a long book. Everything he knew could fit on the back of a postcard.
What would you pay for information that sparse?
In a way, that’s the wrong question. The real question is this: how do you position the product so that it’s seen as valuable? How do you get clients to pay what you believe it’s worth?
In this case, potential clients were given two options to spot and stop employee theft:
Option 1: A comprehensive book with a few hundred pages.
Option 2: The exact factors to look for to achieve the same result—on the back of a postcard.
Which would you choose?
Exactly. The postcard reinforces the first point. People prefer the shortest path to a result. Most of us don’t want a 200-page explanation when a single page will do. When a problem is urgent or costly, the desire for speed only increases.
However, let’s look at this same idea through the lens of paid vs free.
When you position something, there is one subtle but critical shift. You stop presenting it as a collection of points.The moment you say “here are five points,” you begin to reduce its perceived value.
People don’t pay for points.
People pay for systems.
When people pay, they’re not paying for more information.
They’re paying for certainty. They’re paying for compression. They’re paying for the feeling that this is the path—follow it and you’ll get the result. A system does more than list what to do. It shows you the sequence. It removes guesswork. It highlights what to avoid along the way.
That’s what makes it valuable.
In a way, the postcard is almost a distraction.
It’s not the size of the content that creates value, and it’s not even the format. It’s whether the information is presented as a system—a clear, direct path to a result.
A result matters.
A precise path matters even more.
But nothing happens until you build in urgency. Clients may want your product, but you know how they hesitate, don't you? You'd think their hesitation comes from not being ready, or because they don't have a budget. Well, those are good excuses, but we know how quickly we operate when things are urgent. In most cases, your product will not be worth too much, unless the client feels an urgency.
At this point, we're getting into complex territory. We not only have to create urgency, but we have to make sure our product isn't seen as free, or not-s0-valuable. How do we go about the urgency factor?
3- Urgency of the problem
Let's look at something that's absolutely free. Let's look at AI, shall we?
You've probably dipped your toe into AI, dabbled with Chat GPT and possibly even Claude. In a very short while, you realised that you could do a lot of things without paying anything. Which means that if you woke up one day and asked AI: What if I could just improve my productivity using Claude and a program like Obsidian? Try asking the question and you'll almost certainly get an answer. Yes, free.
How come there's a $200 price on this information, if you can get it free?
If you go to MacSparky.com, you'll find that David Sparks is selling a guide for a whopping $200 or thereabouts. Doesn't make sense, does it? No, it doesn't until you realise that the first two conditions for this product are already in place. The product does offer a result, and it's well positioned. How well positioned?
Here's some text from the sales page:
You've probably tried AI. Asked ChatGPT a few questions. Maybe had Claude write a draft. It was interesting, but it didn't stick. The next day, it forgot everything. You started over. Again.
The problem isn't the AI. The problem is that a chatbot isn't an assistant. An assistant remembers. An assistant knows your projects, your preferences, your people. An assistant doesn't need to be told the same thing twice.
That's what we're building.
Hence, checkbox 1 and 2 are well in place. Now what about the urgency?
Here's the text, also from the website:
AI-powered personal assistants that manage your files, your tasks, and your workflows are going to be common. That's not a prediction. It's a trajectory. The tools are here. The capability is here. Most people just haven't figured out how to put the pieces together yet.
The people who build these systems now will have a tremendous advantage. They'll understand how to work with AI in ways that most people won't figure out for years. They'll have systems that are already trained, already refined, already handling real work while everyone else is still asking chatbots trivia questions.
The Robot Assistant Field Guide is for people who want that advantage now.
Now? Yes, now!
This is always the question that the client is asking: why now? Why not tomorrow? Or next year? Without urgency, nothing happens very quickly, if at all. Let's take a real-life example for this idea, shall well? There's a client who wrote a book about credit repair. Your credit can take a massive hit, and credit repair companies promise to fix things for you, at a price.
This person wrote a book: Yes, just 18 pages long at $9.97
So far we're on track because the book is offering a result. It's also well-positioned at just 18 pages. However, there's no urgency in place. There's also a slightly different problem slipping in:
A $9.97 product that solves a high-stakes problem feels suspicious.
A $75 or $200 system feels more aligned with the importance of the outcome. At the very least, the price needs to align with what the credit-repair companies are charging. In this case, at least, the urgency isn't to fix your credit. It's to fix the credit without stepping into the minefield of slightly shady practices.
I know, I know—these concepts are getting muddled, aren't they?
We seem to be talking about urgency but somehow the pricing seems to have slipped in. Then, the problem of dealing with possibly shady credit-repair practices. This brings us to an important point.
Urgency doesn’t always come from time pressure.
Sometimes it comes from:
- avoiding loss
- reducing risk
- preventing mistakes
To highlight the urgency, testimonials also help.
On the Robot Assistant Field Guide page, the testimonial reads like this: “I went from “this is neat” to “this is how I operate now” in the span of a few days.” See how that urgency comes through? If you have given some thought to the idea of sorting out your productivity, you're keen as mustard to do more than dip your toes into this wacky world of AI.
Okay, so that was a lot of information to digest. but it reveals something important.
We’re often hesitant to price our products appropriately—not because the product isn’t valuable, but because we haven’t fully accounted for the three elements:
- Result
- Positioning
- Urgency
When these three are in place, something interesting happens: With these three in place, the price often takes care of itself.
Cool, eh?
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