Did you miss last week’s newsletter?

Wondering if it ended up in spam?

It didn’t.

I just didn’t write one.

For the first time in 81 weeks.

That is more than 18 months of showing up every single week - and last week, life happened.

It was my birthday.
The kids had a field day.
And somewhere in the middle of the morning chaos, we realized we had forgotten to pack their lunch.

The day escalated fast.

And honestly?

The newsletter completely slipped my mind.

It also exposed something I already know about myself:

I don’t batch my newsletters.

I write about what I have been thinking about that week. Something I’ve seen in a founder conversation. A pattern from a pitch session. A mistake I keep hearing. A lesson that feels alive.

That is part of why I love writing this newsletter.

But it also makes the system vulnerable.

Because when life happens, there is no backup.

And yes - I should probably have one ready for a cloudy day.

Which brings me to this week’s topic:

Never build a business that is too vulnerable to survive one bad week, one aggressive competitor, or one player with deeper pockets.

One of the most dangerous ways to do that?

Competing on price.

There is one position I almost never recommend:

Being the cheapest.

It can feel smart in the beginning.

You lower the barrier.
You make it easy for customers to say yes.
You create momentum.
You win deals.

But here is the problem.

If your main argument is price, someone with deeper pockets can always beat you.

They can undercut you.
They can subsidize the market.
They can run at a loss for longer than you can survive.
They can buy distribution, attention, partnerships, and customers until you are out of oxygen.

And once you have trained the market to see you as “the cheap option”, it becomes incredibly hard to raise your prices later.

That is the trap.

You think you are making it easier to sell.

But often, you are building a business that becomes harder to defend.

I saw this happen up close

Several years ago, I coached a Swedish founder who was incredibly early in her market.

At the time, there was only one real competitor, based in the US.

The founders product was stronger. The platform was easier and most importantly - customers loved it. The market timing was right.

Her investors understood the opportunity immediately.

They knew that if she was going to win, she had to move fast.

She basically got capital from on a napkin.

They paid for her flight to the US, and she went over to start building the market.

And it worked.

She got customer after customer. They loved her product.

But then something happened.

The American competitor, who did not have as strong a product, suddenly raised an enormous amount of capital. Millions of dollars. From an investor who had deep pockets and knew they could win.

Not because the product was better.

Because they had enough money to buy the market.

They could outspend the Swedish startup on everything: her sales, marketing, partnerships, distribution, pricing, visibility.

And then her investor said something brutal, but honest:

“You should come home. We can’t compete with that.”

That is the reality many founders underestimate.

The best product does not always win.

The clearest brand does not always win.

The founder with the strongest customer love does not always win.

Sometimes, the company with the biggest wallet wins because they can afford to lose money longer than you can afford to exist.

Competing on price makes you vulnerable

When you compete on price, you are not building strength.

You are often exposing weakness.

Because cheap is easy to copy.

Cheap is easy to attack.

Cheap rarely creates loyalty.

And cheap gives you very little margin to recover when the market shifts, when customer acquisition becomes more expensive, or when a better-funded competitor enters.

A low price can be a tactic.

But it should rarely be your position.

There is a big difference.

A tactic is temporary.

A position is what the market remembers you for.

And if the market remembers you as the cheapest, you have put yourself in a corner.

The real question is not: “How can we be cheaper?”

The better question is:

Why should customers choose us even if we are not the cheapest?

That is where positioning starts.

Are you faster?
More trusted?
More specialized?
More effective?
More premium?
More tailored?
More credible?
More connected to a specific customer pain?

Because if you cannot answer that, price becomes your only argument.

And when price is your only argument, you are easy to replace.

Investors see this immediately

This is also why investors get nervous when founders build their story around being cheaper.

Because cheaper often means weaker margins.

Weaker margins mean less room to grow.

Less room to grow means less room to survive.

And less room to survive means a competitor with deeper pockets can crush you before you ever become profitable.

Of course, there are exceptions.

Some companies are built around cost leadership from day one. But then the whole business model, supply chain, operations, distribution, and scale logic must support that position.

That is very different from simply lowering your price because you are afraid customers will not buy otherwise.

That is not strategy.

That is fear.

Your price sends a signal

Price is never just a number.

It tells the market how to value you.

It tells customers what kind of company you are.

It tells investors what kind of business you are building.

And it tells competitors how easy you are to attack.

So before you lower your price, ask yourself:

Am I making this easier to buy - or easier to kill?

Because those are not the same thing.

Competing on price might help you win the first deal.

But if you are not careful, it can cost you the company.

That’s it for this week.

If you know a founder who is trying to win by being the cheapest, send this to them before it costs them the company.

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