I tripled my prices on a hunch and the only thing that changed was the type of customer I attracted. Wish I'd done it years sooner.

Around $3M/yr, physical products, 7 years. Last year I did something that scared me. Tripled the price on our flagship line, not a careful 15% test, roughly 3x, on a hunch that we were attracting the wrong buyer.

Conventional fear said volume would crater and revenue with it. Volume did drop, a lot. Revenue stayed close to flat. But that's not the interesting part.

The interesting part is who left and who arrived. The cheap-price customers were, on average, my worst customers. Highest support load, most returns, most complaints, lowest lifetime value, the ones who'd leave a one-star review over a delivery delay they caused. They were price-shopping and we were the cheap option, so we got price-shopper behavior.

At 3x, those people left. The customers who arrived treated the product as a considered purchase, barely contacted support, returned almost nothing, and bought again. Same product. The price was filtering for a completely different relationship.

The confession is that for years I competed on being affordable and read my high support costs and returns as just "the cost of doing business," when really they were the cost of the customer my price was selecting for. Cheap didn't just mean lower margin, it meant a worse customer, and I was paying for that twice.

I'm not saying price high reflexively. I'm saying the price isn't only a number, it's a filter for who you get, and I treated it as just a number for six years. For operators who made a big deliberate price move: did you also find the customer quality changed more than the revenue did? And how do you talk yourself into the leap when the volume drop looks so scary on the way in?