Every freelancer starts out undervaluing their work
kenwestgaard.com
Every freelancer starts out undervaluing their work
1–10 of 83 posts
Re: Every freelancer starts out undervaluing their work
#2Please don't fuck around with the scroll behavior.
Re: Every freelancer starts out undervaluing their work
#3Please don't fuck around with the scroll behavior.
What did they do? I don't notice anything different.
Re: Every freelancer starts out undervaluing their work
#4Please don't fuck around with the scroll behavior.
What did they do? I don't notice anything different.
Smooth scrolling but that interferes with my scroll rate and vimium which also optionally does smooth scrolling.
Generally, web designers really shouldn't touch scroll behavior at all, it's rather bad practice.
Re: Every freelancer starts out undervaluing their work
#5> pass on the cheap, low-value projects. Hold out for the clients that have budgets and value your time. Every second you spend with clients that don’t have money and don’t value your time is another second you have wasted.
I just finished my first 8 months of consulting work and while this is true, it is so difficult to actualize. When we had zero projects, I would take any meetings I could get. A part of me would hope that during the meeting, the client would realize where I could add value and increase their willingness to pay. In reality, however, it was the client who tried to push down our rate time after time. A hard lesson for a novice, but I lost hundreds of hours to clients that I knew, deep down, didn't have the budget.
With that being said, this is dangerous advice to internalize pre-maturely. Without underpricing yourself in the beginning, it's difficult to derive self-worth (IE: confidence) and increase your rate later on. And the last thing you want is an early freelancer to turn down work because they think they are worth more.
TLDR; Underpaid work might just be a rite of passage in freelancing. It was for me.
Re: Every freelancer starts out undervaluing their work
#6Isn't the title "12 Gurus Got 5 Questions About How They Set Their Rate"?
Re: Every freelancer starts out undervaluing their work
#7> No one is paying you for your “time,” they are paying you for a result, so stop charging for your “time.”
I wish regular employers would adopt this more as well. My value is what I do/produce, not how much time I spent doing it. Some days I produce massive amounts of value, while others I barely get anything valuable done. I'd like a work place that would encourage me to go home and enjoy myself on the bad days and stay as long as I want on the good days, instead of expecting a regular 40 hour work week every week (I have flex, but on average...).
On the other hand, I guess my employer has this issue too. We usually have an upper (money or time) limit on a contract but charge by the hour. And this is pretty much the standard in my industry and a requirement from our clients. How did we end up this way? It makes no sense!
Re: Every freelancer starts out undervaluing their work
#8Isn't the title "12 Gurus Got 5 Questions About How They Set Their Rate"?
HN has some form of "no numbers in titles" policy. I'm not even sure list articles are allowed at all.
Re: Every freelancer starts out undervaluing their work
#9And yet, nobody answered question #2 (What was your defining moment when you realized you were worth more than what you were charging) like so:
"I read a blog post or a book on how to charge more."
This is not to say that a post like this doesn't have any value - or a book like Brennan Dunn's book. But sometimes, when I read stuff like that, I wonder how much is actually survivorship bias and how much one can REALLY learn from a post like this.
It's a bit like Amazon reviews of books: Half of them are for people who have read the book and start to discuss things retrospectively.
Re: Every freelancer starts out undervaluing their work
#10Isn't the title "12 Gurus Got 5 Questions About How They Set Their Rate"?
HN has some form of "no numbers in titles" policy. I'm not even sure list articles are allowed at all.
Right, but not against the numbers per se (or else it could just be machine-filtered), but about titles artificially framed in the listicle format:
>If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."