Ask HN: How can I get my hourly rate from $65 to $125 in the next 90 days?

I have to agree with a lot of the other comments, start thinking on a project basis vs. hourly.

I have a friend who runs a small dev shop and has spent the past few months selling a simple Facebook app she built.

She charged a company around $10k for the app and got that rate by explaining how it would benefit their company. ie. Another form of interaction with customers, better brand recognition online, lead generation, etc etc. Apparently it took her about 2 weeks to build and she had to outsource some design work for ~$500. Assuming she worked 80 hours over the 2 weeks, she made roughly $120/hr.

Now, that's really good money, but that hourly number keeps increasing over time because she realized she could resell it to other companies by simply changing the branding and some design elements. She continues to sell it for $10k, but her investment each time is significantly less because the bulk of the work is done. It just costs her a few hours and the price of the design work.

In the past few months I think she's rebranded and sold it to 4 other companies. There are a bunch of factors into calculating the hourly rate for the project, but she essentially made $500/hr for that work.

Think about your work differently and what you offer, sell a product or solution - you won't get your rates up if you make your clients think of you as just another employee.

'Please don't post something like "just ask for it" because I just can't believe that it's that easy.'

It's certainly not, but keep in mind _not_ asking for it is 100% sure to stop you getting it. You _do_ have to ask for it before anybody will give it to you, but instead of "just asking" you're going to need to ask and have already demonstrated (or at very least be prepared to justify) why you are worth twice as much as some random PHP/MySQL guy off Craigslist.

You're not going to get $125/hr as a "PHP Programmer". You'll get it as a firm delivering solutions.

You'll likely need to partner with/subcontract out to others with the skills you need to offer a complete package. Marketing, design, copywriting, photography, and SEO come to mind.

As a fulltime and fairly successful freelancer now going on my third year, I completely agree with rwhitman here. However, I have something else to offer. The original poster needs to stop thinking of freelancing as the only thing he does. He needs passive income and affiliate marketing projects. But that requires free time. My suggestion on getting free time is to take those periods where you do sales/marketing/advertising stints for new gigs, and outsource that to offshore virtual assistants. That gives you a little bit of free time to slip in the start of a project, and then in the next month you can finish it. For ideas on what to do, visit mixergy.com and let your mind wander from there. As for affiliate marketing, just start with the advice on affbuzz.com and move from there.