Charged €450 for a workshop, 9 people came, and I learned more from the 4 who didn't

Ran a two-day smalti workshop in a borrowed space last month. Priced it at €450, which felt fair for sixteen hours and materials, and I spent weeks anxious about it being too much.

Nine signed up. Fine. But the four who filled in the form and then vanished before paying are the interesting part. Two of them I know, they are not broke. One wrote back that she assumed the price included tools she could keep. It did not, and I never said it did, but she read the page and made that up on her own.

So my whole booking page is now wrong. It doesn't say what you get, it says what it costs and hopes you'll guess the rest.

I don't think the answer is discounting. I think the answer is that I described the workshop like a hotel describes a room, and people filled the gaps with whatever they wanted. Next one I'm listing exactly what's in the box, including the tesserae you take home, and I'm going to say out loud that no, I will not teach you to grout a shower. Third person asked about that.

Anyway. Nine people set real stone for two days and one of them, a retired dentist, cut the cleanest andamento I've seen from a beginner in years. So the money part was annoying and the work part was good.

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Kasia Nowak·2h

The part about her inventing the tools thing is what gets me. She did not misread you, she filled the gap you left with the most generous version for herself. I think people do that constantly and the price page is where it shows up.

I teach a bit of pastel, small groups, and I resisted the "here is exactly what you get" list for a long time because it felt like over-explaining. Then I added it and the strange questions mostly stopped. Not because people got smarter, just because there was nothing left to guess at.

Also, €450 for sixteen hours plus materials is not too much. I know that anxiety well, but looking at it from outside it is honestly fair. The four who vanished probably were never going to pay, and the two you know not being broke does not mean they were ready to spend it on this. That is about them, not the number.

Dimitra VasilakisOP·2h

"Filled the gap with the most generous version for herself" is exactly it. I keep telling myself nobody lied to me, they just got to write the page in their own head and I was not there when they did it.

The pastel thing is useful to hear. My objection to the list was the same as yours, it felt like I was insulting adults by spelling out what a workshop is. But there is a difference between insulting them and leaving room for the imagination to go shopping. I am rewriting it now and the hardest part is not the list, it is deciding what to actually include so the list is true. Do I put tools in the price or not? That is a real decision, not a wording problem.

And thank you for the last part. Sixteen hours on your feet plus a couple hundred euro of smalti, €450 was not greedy. I think I priced it low out of fear and then worried about it anyway, which is the worst of both.

Ananya Iyer·2h

This is such a specific thing and I think you've put your finger on something most of us avoid looking at. The blank space on a page is not neutral, people fill it with whatever suits them, and they mostly fill it generously to themselves. Nobody feels like they lied.

What struck me is that you had to lose four people to notice it. I've done the same thing with workshop listings here, priced modestly and then wondered why nobody took it seriously. Turns out cheap and vague reads as "not a real thing" and expensive and vague reads as "probably a scam", and both are the same problem wearing different clothes.

Nine out of thirteen is not a small result, by the way. Sixteen hours of smalti is a serious commitment and you got nine people to hand over €450 for it. The page being wrong is a fixable thing, that's a good problem to have.

Dimitra VasilakisOP·1h

"Cheap and vague reads as not a real thing, expensive and vague reads as a scam." Yes. That is the whole thing in one line and I am stealing it.

What I keep coming back to is how long I defended the vagueness. I told myself a good page gives people room, respects their intelligence, doesn't bore them with a list. Really I was just scared that if I wrote down exactly what €450 buys, someone would look at the list and say, that's it? So I left it open and let each person build their own workshop in their head. Four of them built one that cost nothing.

The new page is almost embarrassingly literal. What's included, what isn't, what you take home, what your hands will look like at the end of day one. I feel like I'm spelling out the obvious and I don't care, because the obvious is exactly the part people were filling in wrong.