How I learned to charge my customers • Hacker News Board

Re: How I learned to charge my customers

#81

Post by s1mon » Fri, Sep 18, 2020, 2:34 AM UTC

While this may be somewhat tongue in cheek, I often think of this post from Anil Dash:

"I talk to a lot of consultants, freelancers, and small businesses who do web work, and I used to be a freelancer myself, so sometimes I get asked for advice on how to price one’s goods and services.

I think I came up with my best suggestion today, and it involves only two simple steps:

  Slap the client in face.

  Tell the client your hourly rate.

If the person looked more shocked, horrified, offended, hurt, saddened, or wounded by the slap in the face, then you are still pricing yourself too low.

Your mileage may vary, this is not to be construed as legal advice, eye-poking may be substituted for slapping in some states."

https://anildash.com/2005/05/12/pay_by_the_hour/

Re: How I learned to charge my customers

#82

Post by gadders » Fri, Sep 18, 2020, 10:06 AM UTC

pauletienney wrote: post #21

I spent 10 years freelancing. If i can give an humble advice: you don't cost your customer some money, you produce some extra value for him. Charge between 10% and 30% of the extra value you provide to your customer. Charging per hour is a trap. It is nice to start, it is easy to read, easy to calculate but it makes you a commodity. Don't be a commodity, be an expert.

Brennan Dunn used to post on here on that topic as well: http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/category/pricing/

Re: How I learned to charge my customers

#83

Post by afarrell » Fri, Sep 18, 2020, 12:02 PM UTC

mechEpleb wrote: post #59

afarrell wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've hired someone who doesn't know how to predict how long the project will take and they suddenly stop development midway through, it is probably also your problem. > Imagine paying someone an extra $10,000 because they missed the deadline. That’s how hourly works. Yes it is. You should probably ensure you only hire people who have experience predicting the costs of the projects you hire them for.

There is no way to know ahead of time what kind of contractor you are. And if you're not making an active effort to bill as much as humanly possible for the minimum amount of actual work, you are bad at business.

> if you're not making an active effort to bill as much as humanly possible for the minimum amount of actual work, you are bad at business.

Deep Neural Networks who try too hard to maximize or minimize things will take weird misaligned actions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao4jwLwT36M

I won't go into details, but my experience from the past year of trying to minimize the chances of losing my home and work visa has provided ample evidence that this also applies to human mental health.

> There is no way to know ahead of time what kind of contractor you are.

Which is why any strategy that resembles "fire and forget" is a poor one for anything that hasn't been repeatedly tested before with mostly the same components.

It's better to have a process where you repeatedly get visibility into a risk than to imagine that you can wall yourself off from it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M

Re: How I learned to charge my customers

#84

Post by afarrell » Fri, Sep 18, 2020, 12:12 PM UTC

mechEpleb wrote: post #58

afarrell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are hiring someone who does not know how to tell how long it will take them.

You might (think) you know how long it will take you; we don't. We don't even know if you're being honest, or deliberately underestimating/overcharging for work. Because an hourly rate means you have every incentive to do so.

A relationship without well-founded trust is often a worse alternative to no relationship at all.

* A contractor who insists on an hourly rate for a project with unknown timeline does himself and the client the favor of killing the deal.

* A client who insists on a total-cost pricing for a project they need budget-certainty on does himself and the contractor the favor of killing the deal.

Re: How I learned to charge my customers

#85

Post by hackerman123469 » Fri, Sep 18, 2020, 12:49 PM UTC

edouard-harris wrote: post #77

zerr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding out about that extra value is trickier than it sounds, unless the accountant is willing to share the classified info with you.

There's certainly a knack to it, but it has nothing to do with accountants or classified information. If one has experience in this sort of thing, it's generally possible to ballpark likely value-adds based on a single 30-minute conversation. Experienced consultants in this tier often offer a free initial call with prospective clients partly for this reason.

You also don't need to match the profit entirely.

You just need to match it so it's worth more than what anything else would be.