How I Earned A Lot More on Projects by Changing My Pricing Strategy

I have to respectfully disagree. While I think the ideas have merit, the book reads like "the secret" or some other motivational junk. It feels simplified or dumbed-down to the point where it doesn't feel authentic anymore. He got the wrong person to write his story, IMHO.

Smart customers have their own method of pricing to compete with the value-based pricing suggested in the post. It's called market-based pricing. Even if my programming work will make the client $100,000, if the client is convinced he can get that programming work done for $5,000, he will pick that over my $20,000 quote.

I've read these several posts along these lines. The one huge assumption they make is that you have good clients who aren't on a budget and won't go shopping. Those clients are much harder to find as a freelancer.

Thomas has explained this in more detail, but:

+ The minimum billing increment switching to 8x your 40x your previous increment will, by itself, scare away the worst pathological clients in the pool. (If you have a $50 hourly rate, some clients might naively assume that they can get meaningful software development done in 3 hours. Where's my website? I've paid for three whole hours. What do you mean you're still setting up the dev environment?)

+ If you bill hourly, you have to account for your time in fractions of an hour. This will lead to more overhead (spend 17 minutes on a phone call? Record that fact somewhere! Maybe dicker over whether it's really .25 hours or .5 hours and whether this totally inconsequential $12 difference matters to the client.), more stress from your client reviewing your work on a minute-to-minute basis, and more friction about clients misunderstanding the nature of knowledge work. I can't just slam keys for 8 hours straight, and you wouldn't want me to do that if I could.

+ [I'll add something here in a moment but Ruriko wants breakfast.]

Good clients don't care about you charging daily/weekly. I never lost a client over it. I'm the professional, my standard practice for doing my thing is the standard way for working with me. If you can't deal with that, that's fine, there are other people out there. (Relatedly, I never, not even once, got a contract from a "job posting.")

I don't read things like this (pricing and getting the most money is a specialty of mine so I don't have much need to mess with what is already working for me) but your comment piqued my interest so I took a look at a bit of the beginning of the pdf.

It's essentially an advertisement for freshbooks and agree with the "motivational" aspects complete with the obligatory testimonials (which I'm sure will or have been reciprocated). The story telling to me is annoying like a childrens book.

The "I'll show you how" uses this single example to make the point of why the information is valuable:

"I completely revamped how I ran my design firm to the point where I worked 19 days in one year and generated over $200,000 to fund my side project."

So we have n=1 here and no further data to back up the initial claim (could be elsewhere so if it is someone please correct me) of how all of this works.

I wouldn't base writing a book on making 1 or 2 smart moves that worked to generate $200,000 (I've done that by the way and over the course of many years so at least I could back the claim up with n= a much larger number btw.)

This is not to say these ideas don't work (some of the ideas do have merit) but we don't exactly a long history here of these tactics working from the author since it seems that after making that money he switched into starting freshbooks.

Speaking of schmucks, here's one that got me to give up on consulting from couple years ago: http://cliffkaplanfraud.com/