Willingness to Pay: Own the Right Desire
Map the desire behind why customers pay — Love, Utility, or Coercion — and commit to the one or two kinds worth owning, without ever touching the price number. Adapted from Willingness to Pay and Price is Not Just a Number.
- Input
- Your current reality: who pays and, in your own words, why they buy and stay — pasted, in a file, a link to your pricing page, or drawn out by questions.
- Output
- A WILLINGNESS-TO-PAY.md: each paying segment sorted into Love, Utility, or Coercion, then a committed strategy — the drivers you will own, the attributes you will deepen, and the coercion you will drop.
What this is about
Economists use "willingness to pay" to mean the highest price a customer will tolerate. That single number hides the thing that matters: why the customer pays. Two companies can charge the same price and have very different futures. One has customers who advocate in public, forgive its weaknesses, and cheer when it profits. The other has customers who want a competitor to rescue them. The price is the same. The desire is not.
This skill maps that desire and helps you commit to the kind worth owning. Desire comes in three kinds. Love: customers buy something bigger than the product — a mission, a community, an identity — so they advocate for you and want you to charge more. Utility: rational buyers with a clear problem and an obvious ROI, who stay for logical reasons and will switch to something better or cheaper. Coercion: customers trapped by contracts, switching costs, or data lock-in, who flee the moment a real alternative appears. All three make a customer pay, so an economist treats them as the same. Strategically they could not be more different.
The skill works in three steps, and it draws the answers out of you. First it maps what is true today. It walks the whole list of Love and Utility areas with you — all ten Love areas and all thirteen Utility areas — and you mark each one: you have it, you have it in part, or you do not. It also asks the key question: if a good alternative appeared tomorrow, who leaves at once? Whoever leaves was held by coercion, not loyalty. Second it asks what you would do differently: which desire to own, which to deepen, and which to build, plus the coercion to drop and replace. It frames each one by the value your customer measures — revenue, leads, growth — not the cost it saves. Third it makes you commit. It pushes back on each idea and keeps only the one or two Love drivers you can truly own and the one or two Utility attributes worth deepening.
The skill ends there, at a committed strategy. It never sets or raises your price. What you do with a stronger desire — raise the price, drive advocacy, cut churn, reorder the roadmap — is downstream work this file feeds.
Example invocation
You can invoke the skill like this:
/asb-willingness-to-pay We run a $29/mo WordPress backup plugin. Everyone
says our market won't pay more. But we have a busy support forum and people
send us thank-you notes. I can't tell if that's real loyalty or if they're
just locked in. Here's our pricing page — help me work out why people
actually pay us.
The skill reads who buys and why, then sorts each segment into Love, Utility, or Coercion. It runs the fragility test to expose what only looks like loyalty. It walks the driver lists to find what you could truly own — that busy forum may be a community driver you are not yet claiming. Then it grills each candidate until you commit to one or two you can genuinely own.
One practical note: tell the skill where you are working. Name a directory when you invoke it, or point to your existing pricing and marketing files. The skill keeps its working file in that location. If you do not name a location, the skill asks before it creates anything.
From the source
The foundation of this skill is Chapter 6 of Hidden Multipliers: Price Is Not Just a Number — hiddenmultipliers.com — and the article it grew from:
- Willingness to pay — the three kinds of desire behind a price: Love, Utility, and Coercion. It gives the full driver lists, the ascending strategic value (Love beats Utility beats Coercion), and the proof that Love creates non-linear growth while Coercion is temporary. This is the core of the skill.
Supporting sources each supply a piece of the mechanism:
- Create more value, don't save money — price on the value you create, not the cost you save. The same capability framed as "grow revenue" instead of "save money" can carry several times the willingness to pay. The skill folds this framing into how it describes every driver.
- Mission and vision — how a mission can be practical and genuine even for a company that did not start with one. This grounds the Mission and Authenticity Love drivers, and the rule that a performed mission backfires.