Why are your courses so expensive?

2025-07-29 · Short · Ali · recording, 2:57 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship · mode: Answering questions · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, He changed his mind

Asked why his courses are so expensive, Ali explains the barbell method: almost everything his business does is free or cheap, and it makes its money by charging high prices to the top 1% of the audience, which pays for the team, a better customer experience and higher-quality customers.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Why his courses are expensive: the barbell method

• ★★ Ali admits his team's courses are expensive, but says it offers scholarships for most of them and gets scholarship applications every week for the YouTuber Academy. — 00:00:00 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

• ★★★ Ali explains his courses' prices by the barbell method, a way of doing business he learned about in which your offerings are either free or expensive, with no middle ground. — 00:00:00

  “something that I have learned about called the barbell method”

• ★★ Ali likes that roughly 99.9% of what his business does is free to anyone with an internet connection and that his book is cheap and sold everywhere; it feels like a community service. — 00:00:29 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

• ★★ Putting out all of his free content requires money, Ali says: he wants to make money from the business and to pay his team good amounts, so the business has to find a way to earn. — 00:00:29
• ★★★ Under the barbell method, Ali says, you only worry about monetising the top 1% of your audience: 99% of his audience will never buy anything, and the business works because it monetises that top 1%. — 00:00:58
• ★★ The top 1% of Ali's audience who buy are generally professionals with jobs who want to pay for a good service; the median age of those who sign up for his more expensive courses is about 38 to 40. — 00:00:58
• ★★ High prices let a business hire more of a team to support its customers, Ali says, so customers generally have a better experience. — 00:01:27
• ★★ Ali calls it a fact of business that customers who pay more tend to be higher-quality and less of a nightmare to deal with, while those paying small amounts tend to be more annoying. — 00:01:53
• ★★ Hearing that idea when he was broke at 18, Ali rejected it; after he got money he came to appreciate the premium experience, and he likes to position his business as premium. — 00:01:53
• ★ Ali says he thought of not answering the question about expensive courses, and his team wondered whether they would really be honest about it. — 00:02:23
• ★★ Ali knows many people who run lower-ticket businesses selling cheap things and have far more issues with their customers than his business has, even though his customers pay far more. — 00:02:23

Threads in this video

• refine · How should you price your first offer? — Ali explains his courses' prices by the barbell method, a way of doing business he learned about in which your offerings are either free or expensive, with no middle ground. (00:00:00)
• refine · How much of what you teach should you give away for free? — Under the barbell method, Ali says, you only worry about monetising the top 1% of your audience: 99% of his audience will never buy anything, and the business works because it monetises that top 1%. (00:00:58)

Mentioned

Central: barbell method

Also: Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

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