Before you let anyone put a number on your judgment, you should ask what qualifies them to price it. Fair. I have spent twelve years defending numbers in enterprise scale pricing rooms, the credentials are on this page, and every claim this site makes carries a label you can check.
NATHAN BATTIN · FOUNDER, IGNATIUSTHEYOUNGERAI · AUTHOR OF THE BOOK · PRICING AND GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGIST · TWELVE YEARS IN CORPORATE PRICING · EVERY CLAIM LABELED
TWELVE YEARS IN ROOMS BUILT TO FIND THE HOLE
"The job, most days, is defending a number in a room full of people looking for the hole in it."
MY JOB DESCRIPTION, TWELVE YEARS RUNNING
I am a pricing and go-to-market strategist. For twelve years I have done corporate pricing and go-to-market advisory at enterprise scale, all of it built on data rather than instinct, and most of it ending in a room where smart people are paid to find the flaw in my number.
That room teaches a discipline no course does. A number survives it when every input has been traced, every assumption written down, and every convenient figure treated as a suspect until checked. Verification stops being a virtue and becomes a reflex. This site runs on that reflex, and its method is arithmetic, because arithmetic is what survives a budget meeting.
Pricing your judgment is the same work. Someone will go looking for the hole in that number too. This framework is my attempt at helping you defend the price of your judgment.
FOUR THINGS YOU CAN HOLD ME TO
Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Triple major plus a minor.
That is the academic credential. The last three are all street cred.
I sat for the CPA exam and went two for two: passed FAR and BEC, then stopped on purpose. Audit and tax were the sections left. "Those are the sections that certify you to do work a company can simply buy."
The parts worth owning in-house are the ones nobody sells off the shelf: pricing judgment, margin instinct, knowing which number in the deck will move. It was a make-versus-buy call, run on my own skill set. This site asks the same question about your judgment.
I built five machine-learning models independently: demand forecasting, churn, segmentation, market basket, and price elasticity. No data science team behind any of them.
So when this site makes a claim about what a model can and cannot do, I have built enough of them to check it myself before you have to.
In my twenties I helped grow ChickenLimo, an Indiana small business built around a limousine shaped like a chicken. Yes, it is real, and people really book it.
A small business teaches you where the money actually comes from, what an owner is afraid of at 2am, and how fast a bad assumption compounds when there is no department to absorb it. "Those pain points do not disappear at enterprise scale — they just get more expensive and better hidden."
A CREDENTIAL IS A CLAIM · A SYSTEM IS A CHECK
Every empirical claim I publish carries one of five epistemic labels. Where I am reasoning rather than citing, the label says so, including for the central thesis.
Claims that could age out of date carry a review date, and each one lives in a public library you can audit at any time.
Every citation in the book was checked twice before the first copy sold: once by me, once by independent audit against primary sources. The row-by-row record is public.
ONE AUTHOR · ONE FOUNDER · ONE PERSON WHO MAKES THE FINISH POSSIBLE
I am Nathan Battin: founder of IgnatiusTheYoungerAI and the author of the AI "Keep Your Career" Bible. Twelve years defending numbers in enterprise pricing rooms, and every claim on this site carries a label you can check. This is the desk I write from.
Founder of ACHI Studios. My wife, the love of my life, the woman with all the talent. Every finish on this site has her name on it whether the page says so or not.
THE BOOK POINTS THIS DISCIPLINE AT YOUR JOB
The book takes the discipline on this page and applies it to your work: the documented AI failure modes to check for, the control that catches each one, and the 90-day plan that ends with a defensible number on your judgment. If you want proof of the standard before you spend a dollar, a full chapter is free.