What should your first course cost if nobody knows your name?

You have finished recording your first course, opened the checkout page and reached the awkward question: what number should sit beside the buy button when the people reading it do not know your name? Set it too low and the course can look disposable. Set it too high and a stranger may decide that the risk is not worth taking.

Start with the transformation

Nobody buys a course because it contains six modules, twelve videos or a set of worksheets. Those details describe the container. The buyer is paying for a change: completing a portfolio, understanding a difficult tool, preparing for an exam, or building a repeatable process for work.

Write the promise as a before-and-after sentence. For example: “By the end, you can plan and publish your first four-week newsletter without guessing what to send.” This does not make the course valuable by itself. It gives you something to test. Ask whether a particular person wants that result now, whether they can recognise the problem and whether the course removes a meaningful amount of uncertainty or effort.

The more concrete the result, the easier it is to justify a price that is not simply based on the number of hours of video. A short course that helps someone avoid a costly mistake may be more useful than a long course that covers a broad subject without a finish line.

Use a simple opening-price model

You do not need a perfect formula. You need a price you can explain and a way to check whether the explanation matches the offer. Start with four questions:

1. 1What result does the course help the buyer reach?
2. 2How urgent or costly is the problem it addresses?
3. 3How much direct support, feedback or access is included?
4. 4What evidence can a new buyer inspect before paying?

This is not a market-rate table. It is a distinction between different products that happen to be called courses. If two offers contain the same videos but one includes a live call or individual review, they do not have the same delivery cost or the same buyer experience.

Let trust affect the opening price, not the promise

An unknown creator has less proof available to a cautious buyer. That does not mean you should make a smaller promise than you can deliver. It means you need to reduce the risk around the promise.

• Show a complete lesson or a useful sample, rather than only describing the syllabus.
• Explain who the course is for and who should not buy it.
• Name the work the buyer must still do. A course cannot create a result while the student remains passive.
• Include a clear outcome for each module, so the buyer can see how the parts lead somewhere.
• Use early feedback to improve unclear lessons, exercises and instructions before trying to charge more.

You can also make the first version deliberately smaller. A focused course with one job to do is easier for a stranger to understand than a large library assembled to prove that you worked hard. If you sell it through store.fan, the online courses feature gives you a place to present the course as a product rather than sending people between separate payment, video and delivery tools.

Choose a number you can defend

A useful opening price has three properties. It is high enough that you can deliver the course properly. It is low enough to reflect the limited proof available. And it is simple enough that you can say it without apologising or inventing a complicated discount story.

Before launch, write five sentences that support the price. State the buyer, the problem, the result, what is included and the limitation. Then read them as if you were a stranger. If the price sounds disconnected from the result, improve the offer or narrow the audience. If you are relying on phrases such as “this should be worth more” without naming the change, you are pricing your feelings rather than the product.

Treat the first launch as evidence

Do not decide whether the price is right from one polite comment or one quiet afternoon. Set a review point and collect observations that relate to the buying decision. Note which questions arrive before purchase, where people stop reading, which lessons cause confusion and whether buyers complete the work.

The useful question is not simply “Did it sell?” It is “What did the price ask the buyer to believe, and did the page give them enough reason to believe it?” A course may sell slowly because the audience is small, the promise is unclear, the timing is wrong or the checkout is hard to find. A price change is only one possible response.

If you offer an opening rate, give it a clear boundary. It might apply to the first version, a defined founding group or a limited period while you gather feedback. Say what changes later, if anything. Store.fan can support this kind of launch with discount codes and flash campaigns, but the campaign still needs a reason that buyers can understand. A countdown without a real change is just pressure.

Make the maths visible

Your price also has to survive the practical work behind it. If you sell a course for £100 and Stripe’s processing fee is £3, the amount before your own tax and other costs is £97. If ten people buy, that is £970 before those costs. If the course includes two hours of individual feedback per buyer, those ten sales represent twenty hours of delivery, before marketing and administration.

That calculation may tell you to remove personal support, limit the number of seats or charge more. It may also tell you that a smaller self-paced product is the honest first offer. With store.fan, sales go straight to your own Stripe account and store.fan takes 0% of sales; Stripe’s own processing fee still applies. You can review sales activity from the iOS app with instant sale alerts, but alerts do not replace a proper review of revenue, delivery time and buyer outcomes.