If you’re courting customers who don’t value your service, you’re charging too
little.
For personal service businesses like coaching, as well as for many idiosyncratic products, people use price as a cue for quality and value. Charging more informs customers that that they are paying for something valuable and they use this information when making assessments of your work and reflecting on their own satisfaction.
Low prices appeal to people with strained budgets and/or people who are reluctant to invest very much in the service they are looking to receive. By need or desire, they inherently want to get as much as they can for as little as they can.
These customers, generally, suck.
If you want customers who are less value-sensitive, you want customers who aren’t too worried about money and who are used to paying good money for good services. Your higher price will be familiar and unthreatening to them, and it will start them off with the idea that you do good enough work to deserve it.
That said, you need to be able to back up what you’re selling. You need to actually do good work to charge good rates to have good customers.
The hardest time of any independent service career is the beginning, when you actually don’t do very good work yet and do need to charge discount rates to be honest about your quality. You do middling and inconsistent work, that challenges your skill, for the worst kind of customers, and somehow need to grind through it long enough to get better and come to charge more.
So if you’re still at that stage, the advice is: stick with it. It just gets better as you get better, provided you can start courting better customers as you grow.
And if you’re past that stage and are still getting bad customers: raise your fricking rates.