Correct - when you can't pick and choose - you're picking to work with anyone so you can pay the bills. Nothing wrong with that. This is for when there is a choice that you can make.
That is true, but it also means you really should work towards getting into that position partly by reducing your personal burn rate (ie spending) and partially by charging more since that allows you a longer famine.
I'm a cynical sort with a lot of experience in the industry consulting, and I can't help but view a lot of these pieces as heavily...embellished. Akin to "fake it to make it". Ala "I'm so overwhelmed with business at 30K per week....but would you like to buy some tupperware?"
I understand the author is here, and hopefully people don't embarrassingly downvote this purely to try to act civil -- I think the embellishment is doing a massive disservice to the entire industry. It is often complete fantasy. I will also say that I found the claims the other day about the 30K+ per week consulting engagements, apparently chosen at whim, completely ludicrous (again, having worked with countless organizations). It has zero verification or believability, but is a nice draw for someone's new initiative.
i can't speak for anyone else - but by the same token, i'm not embellishing anything. verifiable? no, because i'm not sharing my bank account statements. believable? definitely - most of my friends make about what i make a year freelancing, so it's not totally out of scope or outside the norm (i also never said i make $30k/week freelancing - some weeks i do, but others, i definitely don't).
i've built a career and an audience by being very honest, even about my epic failures and shortcomings. i know you don't know me from adam - but luckily my audience and client-base does, and really they're the ones i cater to. my pricing is listed publicly on my website, and i wouldn't do that if clients weren't willing to pay for it (i don't have a sugar daddy or sugar mama to support me).
i also appreciate that you voiced your opinion in an actually civil way! i hope it doesn't get down voted.
The 30K thing was related to a post on here a few days back where an author claimed that they had their pick of "30K / week" engagements. As an interesting contrast with your policy, they claimed that they kept their rates hidden, thus allowing them to magically and endlessly ramp it up.
In any case, I've long come to learn in the freelance industry that the more people talk about their success (which can be "so many clients I turn them away", or "I am now charging 50K+"), the more unlikely that success actually is. e.g. the guy who puts "published author" at the top of his blog likely has an Amazon Digital Delivery PDF book. The guy who talks about "top clients" had someone from Apple visit their blog once. And so on.
The more bombastic about success someone is, the more incredible the claims, the more likely they're struggling for relevance, using the escalating accomplishments to create it. Again, this has been my experience in the industry, where when you look behind the curtain you find Lenny asking you not to tell anyone how he lives.
In no way am I saying that about you, but just in general HN has been awash in "so much success I have to wear shades....now would you like to buy some tupperware?" type posts (I'm not being facetious with the tupperware thing -- it's people claiming boundless success, and then pitching something so petty that it puts it all in stark contrast), and I have to think it does a massive disservice to most of the readership, putting in their notice on this notion that there are endless lines of clients throwing money around for vague needs.
Well, I thought like you for a long time because the idea you can make more by turning down some work and markerting yourself in a niche is is very counterintuitive.
Before trying this approach I lose a lot of time racing to the bottom.
I didn't say that it was counterintuitive, or that you can't turn down clients.
I was observing the reality that most freelancers are more likely to find themselves absolutely starving for business, and shouldn't look at this and wonder what they're doing wrong. Telling a client to keep their money because it's an "ego project", when they're your only client over a month period, is a quick recipe for bankruptcy. It doesn't magically make other clients come knocking.
Once you get to the point where you're reaching saturation, sure you start to evaluate engagements for most reward/utility/etc. Many if not most freelancers will never come anywhere close to that.
One alternative is to live below your means and build up some savings so that you are not living paycheck to paycheck as a freelancer because that is even more of a recipe for disaster.
Look, $30k/week does sound ridiculous to me too, but Patrick doesn't strike me as a bullshitter either. He's just a great combination of programmer, businessman and marketer. As far as I remember, he never claimed to have a continuous stream of $30k/week projects lined up, those are words you're putting in his mouth to make it appear more embellished than it actually is.
The very terminology you use—"saturating" one's freelance schedule—is a mindset I've been in before, and I now think is dangerous. If you are overworked and stressed about money and billable hours, there is no free time or headspace to move up the food chain. Even worse, the quality of your work can slip due to minor hiccups like scope creep, unforeseen rabbit holes, or just getting sick for a few days; then you are undermining your future pitches and word-of-mouth!
Admittedly it's not easy to start charging more, you need to find the right clients, and you need to shift to a value-based billing where you take more risk on yourself. This is phenomenally difficult for anyone with expenses and wage-earner's mindset. However I wouldn't write off Patrick as being too privileged, lucky, or any other excuse—those things may be true, but that doesn't mean there aren't lessons that can be applied to people grinding it out at a lower level.
Saturated means that you've filled (or can fill at will) the time you've allotted and targeted, not 100% of your possible time. e.g. 100% of 50% of available time.
>he never claimed to have a continuous stream of $30k/week projects lined up, those are words you're putting in his mouth
He claimed it was his so-called "rack rate". His standard rate. Over a year long period. The prior year his "rack" rate was 20K/week. He didn't say "I put out a ridiculous rate and wouldn't you believe it this one guy bit!", but claimed that it was a ongoing day to day rate that saw continued success. That was sort of the whole, rather odd, basis of that part.
Extraordinary claims, as they say, require extraordinary proof. Yet we don't know a single client, or a single project, that paid these grossly out of the ordinary rates, and I can tell you that I don't know a single organization that would even consider such a rate for an individual freelancer (respected consulting shops -- the sort that you hire because no one ever gets fired for hiring them -- with armies of bodies yield less on their contract). People can wave their hands and say that it's because it saved so much but that sort of argument leaves me agape, wondering if a bunch of people just discovered the business world.
It just doesn't work like that.
I have absolutely no fundamental reason to believe Patrick a "bullshitter", or to accuse him of being so. On the flip side, I have absolutely no reason not to consider that he might be. Because it turns out that a remarkable number of people are -- particularly when they're trying to get attention for something -- somewhat aggrandizing. And we all know how important signalling is, and how if you act the part, maybe, the myth goes, you'll become the part. It plays a part of quite a few HN front pagers.
> The prior year his "rack" rate was 20K/week. He didn't say "I put out a ridiculous rate and wouldn't you believe it this one guy bit!", but claimed that it was a ongoing day to day rate that saw continued success.
But how many weeks do you have to work at that rate to constitute "continued success"? He came off a salaryman job, if he kept his expenses in check he would only need a couple of those jobs per year.
> (respected consulting shops -- the sort that you hire because no one ever gets fired for hiring them -- with armies of bodies yield less on their contract)
The type of companies that hire those consultancies are generally big slow and bureaucratic. They have plenty of money, but they don't have the agility to hire a single consultant and effect quick changes that move the needle. A corollary is that they also have
established tech staffs and probably have some reasonable level of optimization.
By contrast there are a lot of mid-tier companies that have revenues in the 6-8 figure range which are generally not operating their tech with an enterprise level of sophistication. They fly under the radar of the tech establishment because they aren't tech-focused and they aren't really attractive to the big consultancies, but they are profitable because of domain knowledge and relationships in small niches. In these companies a hybrid technical/business consultant can move the needle far more than he can in a large company.
Why do you find it ludicrous? The organization I work for just spent $50,000 for work that many of its employees could have done in about a week. However, since we're all booked up with work for the next 5 years, it made sense to farm it out.
Various flavors of this are probably playing out in those "ludicrous" $30k/week engagements.
So what about when you're just starting out, OP? When you haven't quite reached the Torvaldian heights of subject expertise in a niche, but you are somewhat competent with everything. What's the best strategy for finding / choosing gigs and building your brand then? Also, how long did it take you to reach expertise in your niche area?
2 - you can still be picky if you're just starting out and are able to (i.e. rent/food/etc is covered). this helps you define a niche that you want to operate in. niches are important because it's easier to become known or stand out in small group of similar people or companies (instead of trying to stand out for EVERYONE).
i've gone through about 3 niches in the 17 years i've freelanced (pro sports, valley startups, person-as-a-brand online entrepreneurs). each time it's taken about a year to reach critical mass (i.e. many more work offers than i have time for). each time i've been very focused on what i talked abut in original article here.
Patio11, back when he still did consulting, charged 30k/wk, primarily by getting close to the value the business provided (e.g optimizing a signup flow on your customers Most Important Website is a lot easier to show will result in $MEANINGFUL_AMOUNT_OF_ADDITONAL_INCOME than building an entire rails app to improve developer productivity, ignoring that the first is easier).
"Patio11, back when he still did consulting, charged 30k/wk"
He says, adding heavy draw to an initiative. Absolutely nothing or anyone can validate those incredible claims, though. Every engagement was, to us, like the girlfriend from Canada.
If you said you could I increase my bottom line by at least 300k by working on some low hanging fruits that I've missed so far, I wouldn't hesitate to give you $30k... Of course, I'd pay you after I have results though.
> If they’re too new, they may not know much about their business or their audience yet.
Isn't that what they're hiring you for? I mean your previous point about the right niche makes sense. But if your niche is healthcare and a new healthcare businesses shows up ... are they not leaning on you to provide expertise in that market? And wouldn't that help build your brand?
> – but those are all much harder to do if a client is starting from a place where they’re making no money or worse, spending more money than they are making.
This has nothing to do with "can't afford you". If the business truly can't afford you then as a freelancer you're doing yourself a favor by not offering discounts to accommodate. You're not doing the potential client any favors here.
Otherwise most businesses actually do spend more money than they're making on marketing and creative, especially early on as they build their brand. You should definitely take their money. How else are they going to grow if you can;t help them at that critical early stage? Send them to get a free website first? You might as well start writing the obituary.
Established businesses that are already making money hand over fist would typically already be happy with their freelance creative, but if they're willing to spend money on something new with you, then you must have done something early on that contradicts the premise of this paragraph in order to earn their trust.
> If a client assumes that hiring you will completely turn their business around instantly, bring them bags of money every day, and skyrocket their brand into the stratosphere…
As a freelancer, if your work is high quality, really good, award winning type stuff, then I would expect all potential clients would think you're a miracle worker. That's high praise.
At that point it's your job to set expectations, not turn them away.
While I do agree with some of the points, the author seems out of touch with reality - we regular folks don't have the recognition or word of mouth machine to be this picky. And at the end of the day it's all about setting client expectations. Not the other way around.
point #1 - there's a difference between a startup who's figuring those things out (and has the business acumen to know how business' work) and a person who's never run a business before. i'm talking to the latter point, since a freelancer can't really do everything for someone's business (like figure out their market, audience, how to run a business, etc). that's more of a business partner relationship than a freelancer.
point #2 - this again is speaking to people who start business' without knowing how business' work (for me personally, i get a lot of leads like that). through experience i've found that until a person has a good grip on how their business works and how it can make even some money, the spend they'd have on a site design is wasted money (just setup a free squarespace or WP site).
point #3 - there's a big difference between realistic expectations and totally unrealistic expectations. sure, good freelancers can make a business go from not awesome to very awesome, but it has to tempered with reality.
i (the author) am a "regular folk" too. i've been freelancing a long time, so i'm in the trenches. the only reason that i have the word of mouth machine going is because i am picky with my clients :)
A bit of a tangent, but as a freelancer who picks and chooses who to work with, have you ever been hit with a discrimination claim, e.g. you turn down a job, and next thing you know they are claiming you won't work with them because they are black, or gay, or whatever.
How much do you need to document the reasons for turning away a client? Or is there some kind of "at will" protection that applies to freelancers?
but there's no employee/employer relationship, and i would never turn down a gig based on religion, gender, sexual preference, etc.
at least for me personally, it's never come up. it may also help that i rarely work with clients who live in the same country as i do (international law is typically too expensive to litigate for something as tiny as a freelancer saying no to work).
The main problem is that someone isn't a client until you're taking their money.
People ask me to take their money to help them solve their website problems, which are actually their business problems, which are actually their life problems. They do this when they find out I'm a coder, that automatically confers upon me a magical ability to fix their lives. This typically happens in the context of a bar conversation. I tell them, "no, I generally don't moonlight unless there's at least $5K involved, but, hey, as long as we're here, tell me what's going on and I'll see if I can help you."
So we unwind their problems a little bit. Inevitably there's a lot of emotion stored up and I'll encourage them to release it with some 'tough love', letting them know that without either a good bit of capital or a lot more willingness to figure hard things out on their own on their part, they're not going to achieve their goals, and they need to acquire one or the other if they want to find success.
Tears start flowing, catharsis happens, no, I still won't take your money. Accounting headache, you see. Tell you what, if you can do X, Y, and Z, to get this monkey off your back and learn something truly useful, then give me a call in a month and you can buy me a few beers and we'll talk next steps.
I call this 'community outreach'. Happens roughly twice a month, ever since I started taking my laptop to the bar. Someone in a bad situation can always count on my Houston air traffic controller delivery of the hard truths of trying to make money on the Internet. Thought about building a business around it, maybe if I find the right partner...
26 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 73.5 ms ] threadGoing 1-2 months without work because you turned down a client and can't find another one can be really shitty.
I understand the author is here, and hopefully people don't embarrassingly downvote this purely to try to act civil -- I think the embellishment is doing a massive disservice to the entire industry. It is often complete fantasy. I will also say that I found the claims the other day about the 30K+ per week consulting engagements, apparently chosen at whim, completely ludicrous (again, having worked with countless organizations). It has zero verification or believability, but is a nice draw for someone's new initiative.
i've built a career and an audience by being very honest, even about my epic failures and shortcomings. i know you don't know me from adam - but luckily my audience and client-base does, and really they're the ones i cater to. my pricing is listed publicly on my website, and i wouldn't do that if clients weren't willing to pay for it (i don't have a sugar daddy or sugar mama to support me).
i also appreciate that you voiced your opinion in an actually civil way! i hope it doesn't get down voted.
In any case, I've long come to learn in the freelance industry that the more people talk about their success (which can be "so many clients I turn them away", or "I am now charging 50K+"), the more unlikely that success actually is. e.g. the guy who puts "published author" at the top of his blog likely has an Amazon Digital Delivery PDF book. The guy who talks about "top clients" had someone from Apple visit their blog once. And so on.
The more bombastic about success someone is, the more incredible the claims, the more likely they're struggling for relevance, using the escalating accomplishments to create it. Again, this has been my experience in the industry, where when you look behind the curtain you find Lenny asking you not to tell anyone how he lives.
In no way am I saying that about you, but just in general HN has been awash in "so much success I have to wear shades....now would you like to buy some tupperware?" type posts (I'm not being facetious with the tupperware thing -- it's people claiming boundless success, and then pitching something so petty that it puts it all in stark contrast), and I have to think it does a massive disservice to most of the readership, putting in their notice on this notion that there are endless lines of clients throwing money around for vague needs.
Before trying this approach I lose a lot of time racing to the bottom.
I was observing the reality that most freelancers are more likely to find themselves absolutely starving for business, and shouldn't look at this and wonder what they're doing wrong. Telling a client to keep their money because it's an "ego project", when they're your only client over a month period, is a quick recipe for bankruptcy. It doesn't magically make other clients come knocking.
Once you get to the point where you're reaching saturation, sure you start to evaluate engagements for most reward/utility/etc. Many if not most freelancers will never come anywhere close to that.
Look, $30k/week does sound ridiculous to me too, but Patrick doesn't strike me as a bullshitter either. He's just a great combination of programmer, businessman and marketer. As far as I remember, he never claimed to have a continuous stream of $30k/week projects lined up, those are words you're putting in his mouth to make it appear more embellished than it actually is.
The very terminology you use—"saturating" one's freelance schedule—is a mindset I've been in before, and I now think is dangerous. If you are overworked and stressed about money and billable hours, there is no free time or headspace to move up the food chain. Even worse, the quality of your work can slip due to minor hiccups like scope creep, unforeseen rabbit holes, or just getting sick for a few days; then you are undermining your future pitches and word-of-mouth!
Admittedly it's not easy to start charging more, you need to find the right clients, and you need to shift to a value-based billing where you take more risk on yourself. This is phenomenally difficult for anyone with expenses and wage-earner's mindset. However I wouldn't write off Patrick as being too privileged, lucky, or any other excuse—those things may be true, but that doesn't mean there aren't lessons that can be applied to people grinding it out at a lower level.
>he never claimed to have a continuous stream of $30k/week projects lined up, those are words you're putting in his mouth
He claimed it was his so-called "rack rate". His standard rate. Over a year long period. The prior year his "rack" rate was 20K/week. He didn't say "I put out a ridiculous rate and wouldn't you believe it this one guy bit!", but claimed that it was a ongoing day to day rate that saw continued success. That was sort of the whole, rather odd, basis of that part.
Extraordinary claims, as they say, require extraordinary proof. Yet we don't know a single client, or a single project, that paid these grossly out of the ordinary rates, and I can tell you that I don't know a single organization that would even consider such a rate for an individual freelancer (respected consulting shops -- the sort that you hire because no one ever gets fired for hiring them -- with armies of bodies yield less on their contract). People can wave their hands and say that it's because it saved so much but that sort of argument leaves me agape, wondering if a bunch of people just discovered the business world.
It just doesn't work like that.
I have absolutely no fundamental reason to believe Patrick a "bullshitter", or to accuse him of being so. On the flip side, I have absolutely no reason not to consider that he might be. Because it turns out that a remarkable number of people are -- particularly when they're trying to get attention for something -- somewhat aggrandizing. And we all know how important signalling is, and how if you act the part, maybe, the myth goes, you'll become the part. It plays a part of quite a few HN front pagers.
But how many weeks do you have to work at that rate to constitute "continued success"? He came off a salaryman job, if he kept his expenses in check he would only need a couple of those jobs per year.
> (respected consulting shops -- the sort that you hire because no one ever gets fired for hiring them -- with armies of bodies yield less on their contract)
The type of companies that hire those consultancies are generally big slow and bureaucratic. They have plenty of money, but they don't have the agility to hire a single consultant and effect quick changes that move the needle. A corollary is that they also have established tech staffs and probably have some reasonable level of optimization.
By contrast there are a lot of mid-tier companies that have revenues in the 6-8 figure range which are generally not operating their tech with an enterprise level of sophistication. They fly under the radar of the tech establishment because they aren't tech-focused and they aren't really attractive to the big consultancies, but they are profitable because of domain knowledge and relationships in small niches. In these companies a hybrid technical/business consultant can move the needle far more than he can in a large company.
Various flavors of this are probably playing out in those "ludicrous" $30k/week engagements.
2 - you can still be picky if you're just starting out and are able to (i.e. rent/food/etc is covered). this helps you define a niche that you want to operate in. niches are important because it's easier to become known or stand out in small group of similar people or companies (instead of trying to stand out for EVERYONE).
to find gigs + build an audience, here are few other articles i've written: https://pjrvs.com/a/scratch https://pjrvs.com/a/audience
i've gone through about 3 niches in the 17 years i've freelanced (pro sports, valley startups, person-as-a-brand online entrepreneurs). each time it's taken about a year to reach critical mass (i.e. many more work offers than i have time for). each time i've been very focused on what i talked abut in original article here.
hope that helps!
He says, adding heavy draw to an initiative. Absolutely nothing or anyone can validate those incredible claims, though. Every engagement was, to us, like the girlfriend from Canada.
> If they’re too new, they may not know much about their business or their audience yet.
Isn't that what they're hiring you for? I mean your previous point about the right niche makes sense. But if your niche is healthcare and a new healthcare businesses shows up ... are they not leaning on you to provide expertise in that market? And wouldn't that help build your brand?
> – but those are all much harder to do if a client is starting from a place where they’re making no money or worse, spending more money than they are making.
This has nothing to do with "can't afford you". If the business truly can't afford you then as a freelancer you're doing yourself a favor by not offering discounts to accommodate. You're not doing the potential client any favors here.
Otherwise most businesses actually do spend more money than they're making on marketing and creative, especially early on as they build their brand. You should definitely take their money. How else are they going to grow if you can;t help them at that critical early stage? Send them to get a free website first? You might as well start writing the obituary.
Established businesses that are already making money hand over fist would typically already be happy with their freelance creative, but if they're willing to spend money on something new with you, then you must have done something early on that contradicts the premise of this paragraph in order to earn their trust.
> If a client assumes that hiring you will completely turn their business around instantly, bring them bags of money every day, and skyrocket their brand into the stratosphere…
As a freelancer, if your work is high quality, really good, award winning type stuff, then I would expect all potential clients would think you're a miracle worker. That's high praise.
At that point it's your job to set expectations, not turn them away.
While I do agree with some of the points, the author seems out of touch with reality - we regular folks don't have the recognition or word of mouth machine to be this picky. And at the end of the day it's all about setting client expectations. Not the other way around.
point #2 - this again is speaking to people who start business' without knowing how business' work (for me personally, i get a lot of leads like that). through experience i've found that until a person has a good grip on how their business works and how it can make even some money, the spend they'd have on a site design is wasted money (just setup a free squarespace or WP site).
point #3 - there's a big difference between realistic expectations and totally unrealistic expectations. sure, good freelancers can make a business go from not awesome to very awesome, but it has to tempered with reality.
i (the author) am a "regular folk" too. i've been freelancing a long time, so i'm in the trenches. the only reason that i have the word of mouth machine going is because i am picky with my clients :)
cheers! and thanks for the comment.
How much do you need to document the reasons for turning away a client? Or is there some kind of "at will" protection that applies to freelancers?
but there's no employee/employer relationship, and i would never turn down a gig based on religion, gender, sexual preference, etc.
at least for me personally, it's never come up. it may also help that i rarely work with clients who live in the same country as i do (international law is typically too expensive to litigate for something as tiny as a freelancer saying no to work).
Or (text from the article): 'Why you might not want to work with a potential client'
People ask me to take their money to help them solve their website problems, which are actually their business problems, which are actually their life problems. They do this when they find out I'm a coder, that automatically confers upon me a magical ability to fix their lives. This typically happens in the context of a bar conversation. I tell them, "no, I generally don't moonlight unless there's at least $5K involved, but, hey, as long as we're here, tell me what's going on and I'll see if I can help you."
So we unwind their problems a little bit. Inevitably there's a lot of emotion stored up and I'll encourage them to release it with some 'tough love', letting them know that without either a good bit of capital or a lot more willingness to figure hard things out on their own on their part, they're not going to achieve their goals, and they need to acquire one or the other if they want to find success.
Tears start flowing, catharsis happens, no, I still won't take your money. Accounting headache, you see. Tell you what, if you can do X, Y, and Z, to get this monkey off your back and learn something truly useful, then give me a call in a month and you can buy me a few beers and we'll talk next steps.
I call this 'community outreach'. Happens roughly twice a month, ever since I started taking my laptop to the bar. Someone in a bad situation can always count on my Houston air traffic controller delivery of the hard truths of trying to make money on the Internet. Thought about building a business around it, maybe if I find the right partner...