Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More
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Re: Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More
#2This is the 2nd part of the interview mini-series with Ramit Sethi on starting a consulting business, though we both talk products in this interview as well.
I'm happy to answer questions, as always.
P.S. I normally try to space out publishing things, to avoid a) reader fatigue on my favorite topics and b) imposing on HN goodwill by showing up on the front page too often. That said, the next two weeks are going to see a few more posts on the blog than usual. Several independently managed processes, with varying numbers of steps, people in the loop, and pipelines, all decided to terminate roughly simultaneously. I apologize in advance if it's mildly irksome -- believe it or not, it is the exact opposite of a planned media blitz.
Re: Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More
#3I'm putting together a fun little video this weekend where I'll be reading aloud (and toasting to) emails from people who have read my book (http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com) and are now charging more.
The dozen or so responses that make up this upcoming video and the corresponding shifts in worldview are directly inline with everything Patrick and Ramit have to say in this interview. Here are my takeaways from these testimonials:
* Most people price themselves in the same way commodity markets price corn, oil, and hogs.
* Fear keeps us from breaking away from market/cost-plus pricing to a pricing strategy that's focused on the value we deliver to our customers.
* When you focus on why people hire us (to increase revenue or cut costs) and approach everything with that end goal in mind, you can dramatically increase the value you produce and the cost for that value. Commodity pricing is thinking "I write Ruby for my clients" or "I setup Wordpress sites". Pricing based on the value you deliver is "I help businesses increase profits by minimizing the amount of clicks the sales team needs to make in order to process a new transaction."
Re: Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More
#4This is the 2nd part of the interview mini-series with Ramit Sethi on starting a consulting business, though we both talk products in this interview as well. I'm happy to answer questions, as always. P.S. I normally try to space out publishing things, to avoid a) reader fatigue on my favorite topics and b) imposing on HN goodwill by showing up on the front page too often. That said, the next two weeks are going to se…
Hideho Patrick ... the first one was great and having read through your blog a couple times already, I don't think fatigue is an issue.
I hadn't really thought about it but it's interesting to me that I find myself more or less fatigued based on the writing style.
In any case ... thanks for sharing! (and yes, I'm an old BoSer)
Re: Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More
#5This is the 2nd part of the interview mini-series with Ramit Sethi on starting a consulting business, though we both talk products in this interview as well. I'm happy to answer questions, as always. P.S. I normally try to space out publishing things, to avoid a) reader fatigue on my favorite topics and b) imposing on HN goodwill by showing up on the front page too often. That said, the next two weeks are going to se…
Fun observation: Ramit is fond of using the word "gamut" to describe his experience. In both this post and the first one, he uses the word at roughly the same point in the meeting to describe roughly the same idea: going from $x/(unit of work) to $x0000/(unit of work).
Some google-fu and http://bit.ly/OJALPO It seems to be a word he likes and uses well.
Re: Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More
#6Wow. This is a great piece, even though I realize I've been guilty of just about every single thing they say NOT to do...
Re: Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More
#7This is the 2nd part of the interview mini-series with Ramit Sethi on starting a consulting business, though we both talk products in this interview as well. I'm happy to answer questions, as always. P.S. I normally try to space out publishing things, to avoid a) reader fatigue on my favorite topics and b) imposing on HN goodwill by showing up on the front page too often. That said, the next two weeks are going to se…
Fun observation: Ramit is fond of using the word "gamut" to describe his experience. In both this post and the first one, he uses the word at roughly the same point in the meeting to describe roughly the same idea: going from $x/(unit of work) to $x0000/(unit of work). Some google-fu and http://bit.ly/OJALPO It seems to be a word he likes and uses well.
You'll find that many authors have words, analogies, literary devices, etc that they go back to. It's part of having a voice.
I'm occasionally downright embarrassed by HNSearch. Easy example searches to demonstrate include [ROFLstomp], [pathological customer], [patio11 "charge more"], etc. Or, if you want things that take a little effort to spot, you can see that I really, really like parenthetical statements (one English teacher of mine estimated that I used them 20x more than her reference sets... oh, there I go again) and extended surprise expectation inversion as a device, particularly in introductions.
A related issue is that these two interviews were recorded with a 30 second break in between and, since the topics are spiritually adjacent and our memories were fresh, we both recycled good turns of phrase and ideas from the previous interview.
Re: Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More
#8This is the 2nd part of the interview mini-series with Ramit Sethi on starting a consulting business, though we both talk products in this interview as well. I'm happy to answer questions, as always. P.S. I normally try to space out publishing things, to avoid a) reader fatigue on my favorite topics and b) imposing on HN goodwill by showing up on the front page too often. That said, the next two weeks are going to se…
I think it's awesome how aware you are of your own impact of appearing on the front page more than normal and how considerate your attitude is towards the impact of that on the experience of other HNers. Total. model. citizen.
Re: Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun observation: Ramit is fond of using the word "gamut" to describe his experience. In both this post and the first one, he uses the word at roughly the same point in the meeting to describe roughly the same idea: going from $x/(unit of work) to $x0000/(unit of work). Some google-fu and http://bit.ly/OJALPO It seems to be a word he likes and uses well.
You'll find that many authors have words, analogies, literary devices, etc that they go back to. It's part of having a voice. I'm occasionally downright embarrassed by HNSearch. Easy example searches to demonstrate include [ROFLstomp], [pathological customer], [patio11 "charge more"], etc. Or, if you want things that take a little effort to spot, you can see that I really, really like parenthetical statements (one En…
It's also functional, in the "tell me three times" sense. Effective teaching tends to involve lots of repetition.
Re: Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More
#10Whilst I agree with the basic thesis of "charge more and compete by providing value".
The difficult part for me seems to be finding people who have money they can part with in the first place, you can't really sell somebody on the benefits of something they can't afford.
I've recently been trying to pick up some part time freelance work to supplement my income and pick up a wider range of experience.
So first stop was elance.com/Guru.com and similar sites. Looking at the jobs it seems like around 90% of the bids were from individuals in India or the far east happy to work for $7 per hour. So I figured I could "compete on quality" , however a lot of the individuals I would be competing against had CS or design degrees (often from western universities) , 5+ years experience and portfolios full of slick looking corporate websites. Besides, at the rates on offer I figured I'd have to complete at least one fairly large project a week to match my current salary and I'm not confident about producing quality on those kind of deadlines.
Most of the project descriptions were also either extremely vague (I want a website), impossible (I want a website, must be #1 on google for ) or possibly illegal (I want a keylogger, must not show up on AVG).
It also seemed like a lot of the bids came from various outsourcing companies who had a bunch of different skills in house and providing 24 hour coverage which would kill my timezone advantage (besides a lot of buyers were in the US when I'm in the UK or were in India/Far East themselves).
Looking at the profiles of freelancers from the US/UK etc , most of them appeared to have never won a project despite being on the site for over a year often.
So I gave up on that and figured, "It's all about networking right?" so I attended a local business networking event for "entrepreneurs". First bad sign was after sitting down and introducing myself to the lady next to me, "what do you do?" , "I build websites , computer software and mobile apps" , "wow, you TOO".
Everyone there who wasn't a freelancer of some description desperate for business was either a recent university grad full of enthusiasm, bright ideas but no funds at all or some small mom and pop operation who were stressed out about meeting their mortgage payments that month and absolutely not looking to drop a chunk of change on any kind of bespoke software.
Now I'm sure there are people out there with money to spend, but they are probably hiding behind an army of secretaries etc. Besides even people with money are looking to save it, and there are plenty of monied businesses like investment banks etc who are still offshoring all of their dev work.
Any bright ideas on how to break through this firewall?