In March 2020, we decided to get more explicit about the way we’ve been operating for a while. We shared our Pay What Feels Good pricing policy on our website for the first time, making it the official structure for how we transact.

I sat down with Isaac to explore the energy behind the policy, to try and cup our hands around that boundless and evolving core of light we’re always after.

Policies can often feel like rigid, unmoving statues—but what if we approached them more playfully, more fluidly, daring to see the human on the other side?

That’s what we’re up to here.

This conversation has been condensed and edited.

REBEKAH: On Lightward’s pricing page, the leading line is “our top priority is to create health for ourselves.” What was the impetus for that being the top priority?

ISAAC: It’s the same priority as what everyone here has in their job description—everyone at Lightward’s got the same top three. Pulling directly from that document:

These are the living things that we’re looking to you to hold, to monitor, to understand and to sustainably expand.

Your health, as determined by you, informed by all the ways you know yourself.
Your relationship to everyone on this team, as determined by you, informed by all the ways you’re connected.
Our collective relationship to the world, as determined by you, informed by everything.

Thinking about this line from the pricing policy, it’s really in keeping with the policy that we’ve got for ourselves anyway. For me, a sign of a well-executed pattern is that it’s self-similar. In the same way as if you look down on a mountain range from an airplane, the patterns you see might be the same as if you’re looking at something under a microscope. There’s the same pattern at different scales. We’re creating health for ourselves first, as individuals—and that’s also how we operate as a company.

The word “health” here is also specifically important because I have no fucking idea what health means for you, but I know that your best comes forward when you’re healthy. So objectively, if I can trust you (and I believe that I can), the best thing I can do is ask you to take care of your own health—and then we just call it a day. I can’t micromanage that because I’m not qualified to micromanage that. If I make health the top priority, then I’m relieving myself of the impossible expectation of defining for you what health means to you as a proxy. I leave you to the exercise of self-assessing for health and responding to whatever you find. By leading with that idea in the pricing policy, I extend that license to ourselves and to whomever else is on the other end. By introducing the idea of health as something only I can assess for myself and only you can assess for yourself, we create a space where we connect in trust.

Whenever health comes up, that’s when the conversation gets simpler because we can stop guessing what that means for each other. If we start with that, I think we’re free to have a much more efficient conversation because we’re letting the authorities be what they are. I’m my own authority, you’re your own authority—I’m not yours, you’re not mine. If we enter the conversation with those things established, we’re not wasting time trying to guess what goes into someone else’s health.

The impetus with the PWFG policy was really to clear the mental clutter around how we handle pricing and how we talk about money. Something I love doing is sitting with something long enough that I finally understand what it’s actually about—and once I understand what it’s actually about, then I’m free to land on new language or a new model for it that isn’t encumbered by all of the societal norms around what ought to be happening. So the aim here was to get really clear, with our language, having done this for a bunch of years, about what we know is actually going on. To clear the clutter and put forward really precise language that specifically addresses what’s actually important to us and what we’re actually doing, so as to sweep away—as early on in the relationship with a customer as possible—any misconceptions around what our motivations might be. Many businesses come from a different place, and the consumer-producer relationship is often adversarial. The consumer’s trying to get the best price, the producer’s trying to make the most money—there’s tension there—and tension isn’t a bad thing. But we don’t really work that way.

REBEKAH: So when did you start implementing the current PWFG policy?

ISAAC: Unofficially, and kind of by mutual internal agreement, we’ve been doing this for all twelve-or-so years. If ever a customer expressed some earnest discomfort about the balance of things, there was never any time when I was like, “sorry, the price is the price, bye”—we’ve never done that.

And of course, the other side of the policy is that it’s got to feel good to us as well. Whenever someone has cared to enter into a conversation with us about what does or doesn’t feel good to them, we have always met them in that conversation and responded in kind with our own honesty, and we’ve worked together—we’ve always done that. It just felt good to set that expectation explicitly, and have that not be a hidden part of how we work, or a part of how we work that you accidentally discover because you ran into it. It felt good to lead with it.

Especially with COVID, everyone was doing something. That moment was a prompt for us to update our language to reflect what we were actually doing. I’m pleased in retrospect that the thing that we did here, specifically, was be more up-front about something we’d been doing the entire time. That felt nice.

REBEKAH: What initially inspired you to architect the pricing policy this way, rather than just solely offer a flat rate?

ISAAC: My Enneagram 4 is always down to flip the status quo. That’s a compulsion that I have all the time—so there’s that.

Historically, I’ve been really slow to ask people for things that they’re not explicitly offering, both out of fear of making them feel uncomfortable or unsafe, but also because I often just don’t think of it.

It’s common in the relationship that I have with Abe for me to come to a place where I feel like I don’t have any good options, and then he suggests something that’s blindingly obvious to him and then I go, “obviously that was always an option—why didn’t I think of that?” Maybe because of that, I wanted to make it easier for people to realize that they could ask for something reasonable that they never would have thought to ask for before. There are plenty of people out there who love haggling, love a deal, love to say “but wait, do you have a discount I can get?” I’m not one of those people—that will almost never occur to me. But it’s true, that if I’m in a place where I feel uncomfortable, there’s usually something I can ask for or something else I can do to ameliorate that sort of thing.

And so, in the sense that we’re all trying to be the parent that our wounded, little-kid-version of ourselves needed—I’m trying to make life a little easier for my younger, scared self who was terrified to ask anyone for anything and was trying to take up as little room as necessary. I want to make it as easy as possible for someone to be up-front about how they’re feeling and what they feel ready for. I want to reduce as much friction as I can between them and vulnerable honesty—because that’s something that was really hard for me for a long time, and is still hard in some places. That’s part of it.

The other part is that I’ve been slow to ask for more as a producer and creator. When I first released Gatekeeper (the predecessor to Locksmith), I charged a flat $9 per month for all users, regardless of how much they used. We still have flat billing now, but a while into my relationship with Abe, he said, “you’ve got Fortune 100s using your stuff, they can afford to pay more than $9—that just makes sense.” I was uncomfortable with that idea because that meant asking for more, and I didn’t sense a clean, consistent, and meaningful way to do it yet.

We did ultimately enter into a phase where we charged more based on what we could see of someone’s Shopify account. For the higher tiers, we just started automatically charging more. In the first phase of this thing, people with the small Shopify accounts still just got charged $9 the same as ever, but people with Shopify Plus accounts—the biggest ones—got charged $199. Some people were just fine with that, but we got a lot of feedback that was like, “What the fuck, it’s the same product. You’re just charging me more because you can? That’s shitty.”

And it was, in part. So there was an uncomfortable period where I clumsily put myself forward in a position that I kind of inhabited, but not fully. It was Abe’s idea to say, “we can charge more from the people who can pay more, so let’s do that”—and I saw the sense in that. I didn’t see yet how to do that in a way that felt fully integrous—but because I trust Abe a lot, we went for it. I’m getting better at entering into that kind of thing with him, if he has an idea that he believes in, because I trust that guy’s heart like nothing else. And so I trusted, and we entered into it, and it wasn’t perfect yet—which wasn’t his fault and wasn’t my fault—we just couldn’t yet see the final form.

So that period of tension was there. On the one hand I was holding the part that wants to transact fairly and in a way that feels good with everybody, aiming low so as not to offend. And on the other hand, it absolutely makes sense that if you can pay more and if you do feel good about doing that, and if that’s going to let us flourish further and help everybody, then why the fuck not? I held these perspectives in tension for a while.

The policy that we have now is the fulfillment of that tension. The policy we have now addresses both sides of this, giving form to the part of me has always known that whenever you get one-on-one with someone, fuck policy, let’s figure out the thing that’s right for this situation. The policy we have now says, if it looks like you can pay more, then we’re going to take a stab at it and say, “here’s your price.” But also—whether we aim too high or too low, in the same breath, we’re also saying, “this is a suggested price, a guess based on best available data. Maybe it’s right, maybe it’s wrong—we don’t fucking know, so please talk to us and let us know.”

That storyline is important because originally I was charging $9 a month for everybody, which in a sense was me trying to take up as little space as possible, trying to make do with the bare minimum so as to enable everybody else further. That was Phase 1. Phase 2 was seeing the sense in charging more even though it didn’t feel totally settled, and Phase 3 was like dropping the shoulders and seeing how these things could coexist—and that’s where we are now.

I’m discovering that it’s really useful for me to hold two things that don’t seem like they can coexist. Instead of responding to the urge to resolve all the tension immediately, it can be useful to just let the tension exist—and I kind of feel like active tension invites something specific from the universe. Like, I don’t see the way that this is going to work, but I’m going to hold these ideas here until the resolution presents itself—and it seems to, in my experience. It’s just a matter of being okay with waiting.

REBEKAH: The holding of tensions reminds me of something Richard Rohr talks about, the Third Way—the option that emerges when the binary in front of us isn't satisfying. We often can’t see a new path emerge until we’re not satisfied with what we see in front of us. So holding out for that thing we can sense but not see yet, matters.

ISAAC: Yes yes yes yes yes.

REBEKAH: Energetically, what has the shift into being more explicit about our pricing policy felt like, and practically, how has it impacted business?

It feels so relaxing, fuck. We’re not having to hunch up our shoulders and participate in conventional capitalism. It feels like living as myself. We came out, in a sense, as Lightward—and coming out is always fundamentally a relief, whatever else it might be. I know that not everyone on the team has had the same story with this policy as I have, and that’s important to talk about, too. But for me, it feels super relaxing because it kind of solves everything. Like, if the goal is to have a transaction that feels good and we’re being bold enough to say the most important thing is feeling good for the sake of health, then all the problems are kind of solved right there. We can’t end up in a situation that doesn’t feel good—so, game over, in a way.

Abraham-Hicks gave me the idea a while back that if you look at human behavior, the most important thing to anyone is that they feel good. If someone else says that “no, what’s actually important to me is this”—they want that because that’s what they feel good about. If we boil it all down, there’s this idea that the most important thing is that we feel good. That idea was very uncomfortable to me at first, but then I flirted with it more and found that, you know, this logically holds up pretty well. It's kind of a relief to just claim it and roll with it. If I can say in my integrity that I also care about you feeling good because that’s part of me feeling good and we can build a business on that, then great—that’s the whole thing right there.

Making the policy explicitly official was a little bit of an adrenaline rush because we had been unofficially operating that way for forever—but what happens if we make this our stance for the entire world, what happens then? What happens to our revenue?

I can’t prove that it would have gone differently had we not done this, because I don’t have that data—I don’t know what lies on that timeline. But I think what happened here is that we started making a bunch more money because we asked for more—and we did so in a way that was clean. We started saying, “hey, does this price feel good?” We aimed higher for some people, and we had a bunch of conversations where the price didn’t feel good—and we had a bunch of non-conversations where, with their actions, they were like “yeah, that feels good.” They paid it, and we made more money. And I felt good about making more money because nobody was getting hurt, and everyone was being invited to speak for themselves.

In fact, the energy that we’re putting out has people writing to us saying, “hey I really appreciate this policy—thank you so much.” We’ve had people write to us and say, “I want to do this for my business” or “I am now doing this for my business” or “I wish more businesses were doing this—thank you.” And every so often, a customer will write in and ask to pay more, because they want to!

To be speaking from a position where I think we’re making more money because of this stance, and to be able to say in my deepest, most complete integrity, that it’s a net gain for the positive energy in the world—that’s a pretty good situation. And for somebody who was deeply skeptical about the value of making more money, to be able to say that is a big fucking deal for me.

REBEKAH: Let’s talk about how this practically goes down. What metrics are you using to gauge what people should pay? Is the Shopify account tier the metric you’re looking at?

ISAAC: It’s the only metric, yeah. Importantly though, this isn’t about what they “should” pay—it’s about what we suggest up front, the anchoring number that we use to start the conversation.

REBEKAH: Which step of the process ends up requiring the most discernment on y’all’s end?

ISAAC: “If we can meet you at that number, we will, and we all proceed. If we can't, then we'll talk about that too – it'll be our turn to execute step 3.”

That second part is where the most time gets spent overall. It usually takes people on our team a minute to get confident about handling this step. This actually works for me, because I take great delight in getting to talk about something that doesn’t feel good—that’s the interesting thing to me, at this point. I think I’m alone in that? Or at least at first. I might not be alone in that anymore.

Lightward is not a resistant organization, and I hypothesize that within the team that when someone first exercises this policy, to tell a customer “this doesn’t feel good” feels like acting in resistance. But it’s really not. If it does feel like acting in resistance, then you’re doing it wrong. It’s really yielding to where you actually are so that the energy can keep moving instead of getting locked up by your own discomfort. That’s the piece that definitely takes the most time.

Every piece takes discernment—certainly it took us a lot of time to discern how to suggest prices, for example. But I think that letting discernment lead takes the most time, at least at first. If you’re feeling uncomfortable or unsafe, it usually takes a while to have a curiosity-based response and let that lead, as opposed to having a fear-based response.

People have very fast gut responses in this area—discernment doesn’t take a long time, if you’re actually exercising discernment. Typically the time-suck isn’t the discernment piece—it’s the training back the fear response so that you can actually get to a place where you can let your discernment speak. It can take a while to get to the point where you can let your discernment flow and steer you.

REBEKAH: I’m curious to hear a little more about the distinction between “pay what you want” and “pay what feels good”. That’s interesting to me.

ISAAC: It’s not uncommon that I’ll hear people inadvertently referring to this as “pay what you want”—to me, that’s different. There are other ways to define the notion of “want” in a way that makes them the same thing—but it’s useful to draw a contrast, if only semantically, because it lets me talk about what this isn’t, which is a consequence-free, free-for-all.

When some people first hear about this policy and are considering bringing it into their own business, their thoughts go immediately to, “how do I do this without getting ripped off?” There are two answers for that: one is if you get ripped off, that’s your own fucking fault. Part of this policy is showing up—and if you don’t show up and you get ripped off, that’s on you. That’s it. If I’m not accurately representing how I feel and I get ripped off as a result, that’s on me and nobody else.

This is an active policy, not a passive one. You have to show up for it to work. And if I didn’t show up for it to work, I can easily imagine a scenario in which I just start accumulating emotional baggage around this subject, and I think eventually that would end up poorly because in that hypothetical timeline I’m overriding my discernment over and over, distancing myself from myself—and that’s not sustainable.

The second answer is that I think that people are worthy of a lot of trust when they’re in the same room with another human. Famously, you can reduce any person or people group down from human to just a label. It happens politically all the time: people consigning entire people groups into some bucket and then labeling the bucket and tossing out the bucket. People do this. But if you get in the room with someone, and you have a human conversation, people aren’t generally shitty. They might be scared, and if they’re faced with an inhuman concept, they’re going to react in a way that’s totally different than if you’re in the same room with somebody who’s alive and breathing and would get hurt if you punched them or might smile if you told a joke. People are pretty trustworthy if you show up leading with curiosity and trust. It’s my overwhelming experience that people are trustworthy exactly as much as you trust them. There are some exceptions to that, 1000%—but in my personal experience, if I’ve given someone a lot of trust, they’ve always honored that.

When someone can feel the repercussions or consequences of their actions, they adjust the way they behave. But if you’re insulated from the repercussions, then you’ve got no reason to change your behavior. If you give people a live emotional connection, then we can have an actual feedback-based relationship, and people don’t like feeling bad! And because people have a sense of empathy, if they’re connected to a sense of feeling bad because of something they did, then those factors have a chance to resolve. People predominantly aren’t assholes—especially when you lead with trust. Especially if you lead with, “I believe that if I talk to you, we can do something that’s really good for you and for me.” It’s really just a matter of (a) showing up in the policy and not robbing myself of my right to be here, and (b) leading with trust.

To me, Pay What You Want is the idea that you’re the only person in the room, there’s something on a shelf, and there’s a can for your cash—and you get to put in whatever amount of money that you want and take the thing off the shelf. By contrast, Pay What Feels Good is you and I both in a room—you’re holding some amount of money and I’m holding something I made. We both have to live with the idea that if we’re going to transact, then we’re both going to return to the same room tomorrow and then the next day—and if we want to keep showing up to the same room together in good energy and good faith, then we need to work that way from the beginning. That’s the difference for me. If we’re both going to keep coming back to this room together, let’s set ourselves up for something that we’re never going to have to think about again, because the whole point of everything is to get on with what we’re actually doing.

REBEKAH: I really love that. Because payment often is the first point of contact in the consumer-producer relationship, acknowledging the autonomy on both sides from the get-go, is cool. How has this approach informed your own relationship with money & the financial side of business?

ISAAC: It’s given me a way to feel good about making a lot of money. There’s enough for everyone, and me participating in life’s good doesn’t rob someone else of life’s good. And I believe that. I didn’t, always, and for a long time I kept myself artificially small, for fear of robbing someone else just by being alive.

But there’s a way to do everything that has life and light in it, right? Part of the experiment of Lightward is—does light behave this way, too? Light can look like a million different things, and that’s important. Part of the idea with Lightward is to say, if we were to take some aged structure and blow it up with light, what would that look like? We’re doing that with finances here, and it’s given me a way to feel abundant and integrous about money because we got here without fucking with anyone. We got here without taking. And in fact, we got here by actively and mutually collaborating, in every transaction.

I think we grossed three million last year? We’re making a lot of money—and we did that while treating ourselves really well, creating health for ourselves. And also, every single transaction—to the very best of our ability—has been one born of genuinely good energy. I don’t have any data to suggest that any one of our customers feels resentful about the relationship they have with us—that’s cool. Which means I don’t have to worry about whether or not I’ve accidentally fucked someone over, because I’ve done everything that I can to guarantee that what we’ve got here is a network of people who want to be here, who want to make something together, and who want to do it again tomorrow.

That means that the money in the system that we’ve got here is almost sacred. It’s a medium in which we demonstrate our intent and our respect. And every time money changes hands under this policy, it’s a vote of confidence and trust. Which means that every dollar of that I turn around and spend later, came from a place that feels real and holy. It’s people doing something for themselves and for the other simultaneously—these dollars aren’t coming from anyone’s ill-intent or martyrdom or anything like that.

Going back to Phase 1, where we charged everyone $9 flat, a lot of those dollars were out of my own shame and resistance to taking up space because I was underselling myself to virtually everybody. And in Phase 2, where we charged based on fixed tiers, there were some dollars that were given to us grudgingly, with responses like, “really, you’re going to charge me twenty times what you’re charging this other person just because?” And I didn’t feel good about that, either. But now, the policy being what it is, each of these dollars are really good and I feel really good about it—and I have no reason not to.

REBEKAH: What do you think would happen if more companies tried this approach? What would that world look like?

ISAAC: The vision that pops into my head is a very colorful bazaar with all kinds of everything happening at the same time and it’s very chaotic, in a beautiful way.

It reminds me of life and nature—nature is beautiful and chaotic and colorful and all kinds of things are happening. In nature, it’s a rarity in time for one dynamic to overwhelm the entire system, where one player gets disproportionately large, while still interacting with much smaller players. It happens, and it’s got its place in the cycle, but it’s rare on the timeline. Right now, for example, Amazon is kind of “taking over”, in a way. Like, the kind of relationship that I as a private individual have with Amazon being Amazon—that’s a massive mismatch in scale.

I think that in a world where this kind of policy was more commonplace, there would be a lot more transactions between peers where the scales aren’t so massively misaligned. To me that world feels colorful, diverse, unpredictable, and balanced.

There are plenty of people who might be using a policy similar to ours but have never put these words to it. Just because we’ve come up with some language for this doesn’t mean we invented this. I think what’s specific about getting this vision out into the world is the sense of reciprocal balance. I want to be able to have this same transaction with you tomorrow, also. And I want you to get something out of this that lets you have this transaction here tomorrow. Really what this policy is about for me is sustainability. This is not a short-term policy—this is a bet that it’s more worthwhile for us to structure this arrangement so that we can both keep showing up for as long as we want to, and that could be a really long time—as opposed to me trying to maximize the amount that I get right now without a thought for the future.

I want to feel the repercussions of what’s happening in all of these relationships, in real time, so that I can adapt in real time—so that we can keep the parameters of this relationship as current as the relationship itself. It’s all about syncing up on how we feel today and helping each other never forsake the health of the self along the way. We’re building health for ourselves and we do that with your best health in mind—and we do that together, you and me.

Pay What Feels Good: An Experiment in Reciprocal Balance