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A friend of mine runs a fairly well known business community for professional service companies.

For years the model was simple: members paid an annual membership fee to be in the room, to learn from each other, to get better. To improve their business.

This past year, he did something dramatic and tore up his own pricing model - away from annual dues and started charging based on a % of EBITDA growth.

The impact wasn't small.

Support tickets launched, questions were asked, and no doubt, customers churned.

But the ones who stayed have now changed the course of the business, in the most positive way.

Here's why it matters to you, even if you'll never run a community.

That flat monthly due was essentially a seat. So is your retainer. So is most "membership," "subscription," and "access" pricing.

You're charging people for the right to be in the room, or for your time, but not always for the thing they're actually paying to get.

And that link is breaking.

You've heard the loud version of this everywhere as of late.

Seats are dead, outcomes are the future, software's going to stop selling access and start doing the work.

In the short-term at least, most of this is hype.

The people who track this closely will tell you almost nobody has pulled off charging for pure outcomes. It's hard, it’s messy, and there are too many external factors to consider.

What's actually happening is quieter. Companies charge for execution, for how much work the product does and how sophisticated it gets, then they bolt it onto what they already sell. Day.ai prices by the agent, not the seat. The CRM record is table stakes. The work is the product.

So don't picture a clean leap from "recurring" to "outcomes."

Picture a hybrid. Keep a base that covers your costs, add a layer tied to the result.

That's what some entrepreneurs are already doing.

Hybrid is the realistic move, not a heroic jump, and it's the only version of this that works for most businesses.

And this isn’t even necessarily a radical “new” thing — recruiters have worked on contingency forever. Performance marketers often take a cut of what they drive, or ad spend. Hell, even lawyers bet the fee on the verdict.

Before you touch anything in your own business, run this filter. Pricing on results only works when the result is:

As B2B guru April Dunford puts it, this works when you can clearly define and measure success, but "it fails spectacularly when those definitions are ambiguous."

Miss any of the four and you've signed up to do free work and argue about who gets the credit.

When it fits, the math tilts your way. You stop leaving money on the table with your best clients.

You self-select for people who believe in the result, which quietly upgrades your whole roster. The tradeoff is real too. Revenue gets lumpier, and you take on the downside and the measurement work a flat fee used to absorb for you, which is definitely something worth acknowledging on the way in.

I'm in the middle of this myself.

I’m currently moving an advisory client or two off my old-school flat retainer and toward a more outcome-based, hybrid model. It’s exciting, and at least in my situation, totally worth exploring.

If you want to test it, don't blow up your pricing. Bolt a result-based tier onto what you already charge and see who bites. The ones who say yes are telling you exactly how much they value the outcome and if there’s true alignment.

The question underneath all of it is one line: is what I charge for still the thing my customer values?

A seat answers "how many people touch it."

The market's moving to "what did it actually do."

I'll cop to thinking I'm naturally a great negotiator, always have been, but if a hard conversation makes your stomach drop, this Claude skill is for you. It runs the prep that actually matters: your BATNA, what the other side really wants, and scripts for when they go hardball. Built on Stanford GSB frameworks, it's basically a coach in the room without the fee.

Meta, Shopify, and Salesforce are quietly pushing employees to use as much AI as humanly possible, leaderboards and all. Shopify went from half its people using AI daily to basically everyone, and the heaviest users are pulling away from the pack fast. Good breakdown if you want to see how AI adoption is actually shaking out inside big companies, and whether your team's keeping up.

Gavin Baker went on Invest Like the Best and it's the rare episode where you can tell the guy knows his stuff cold but isn’t a boring nerd w/ zero charisma. He walks through the tech buildout, the chips, and where the money's actually flowing, and he makes a genuinely complicated space feel obvious. Super sharp and in plain english, and worth the listen if you want an investor's lens on the AI hardware race.

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Hope everyone has a great weekend.

And until next time, thanks for reading.

Jordan