bdunn

Yeah, when I was there for the inaugural FH launch we were up at 5am, at KSC by 6, and then I think the launch was at around 4pm.

The idea of another 10+ hours baking in the Florida sun...

(But, seriously, no one there would have preferred an unsafe launch. For us, the booing was targeted toward high atmospheric winds!)

Was able to grab seats in the "Feel The Heat" section for the inaugural Falcon Heavy launch last year - it was incredible! (Olivier: your writeup brought back a ton of memories.)

I especially liked this picture I grabbed of someone who had his photo taken in the exact same spot for one of the earlier Apollo launches: https://imgur.com/a/xAqbTGL

What I teach is largely about repositioning yourself and focusing on the value you create vs just the tech. Not surprisingly, few freelancers focus on business outcomes. Higher budgets and pay are a natural side effect of doing that.

Great job, seems you're doing really well!

We're constantly reworking our marketing site, but to make it more technical for the HN crowd (our audience is mostly marketers), it's an "if-this-then-that" engine for your website.

- If referred by foo.com OR came over with particular UTM params OR landed on /foo THEN change out testimonials to be able foo (using similar underlying tech that Optimizely, et al use)

or

- If visitor, who has opted in previously, has the "Customer" tag in the ESP/CRM that our customer has linked their site to, then ditch the signup form on the homepage and put a training video (or something)

It's basically a rules engine that looks at on-site behavior (pages viewed, referring domain, query string params, cookie data, etc) and allows you to combine that with ESP/CRM backend data (tags, custom fields, subscriber vs anonymous), and make content changes (replace text, hide an element, swap out an image, etc) as a result of a visitor belonging to a particular segment you've defined.

Forgive me, but I'm not sure what we're doing that's disingenuous?

If you clicked through after the initial welcome page (that just overviews the tool) that's not a lead gen form. That's exactly what the tool advertises: a questionnaire for deconstructing your funnel value.

In fact, there's zero lead gen until the end – and that's entirely optional. There's no "put in your email address to get your numbers!" – we display it all anonymously. If you put in your email address, we send you an email course.

I'm not sure if you saw the same thing we built, or if I'm misreading your comment?

Correct. We're leveraging localStorage to save answers across "pages" (using Vue). We could probably serialize / base64 encode the object we've saved and then let someone share it.

Thanks! Yeah, frankly we sort of just threw in that scrolling list of ideas... and didn't put nearly enough thought into the display of them.

https://convertkit.baremetrics.com/

$727k MRR

I own a Model S and have clocked 23k miles on it over the last year, most of which on long roadtrips.

I love it. The car mostly drives itself between superchargers, and the SCs are usually next to coffee shops or restaurants. I don't mind getting up and stretching / having a drink every few hours.

But if minimizing recharging/refueling is your main priority, yeah, you can't beat ICE.

Because AR takes mental space, even if someone else you hire is managing it.

Focusing on one thing is best. I recently sold my SaaS for the same reason — I wanted to eliminate needing to worry about it while working on growing my other (more profitable) business.

(Lastly, as things that probably make Patrick excited to get out of bed and work, I'm assuming Starfighter > AR.)

That's great! We're actually running weekly profiles on people who have used my advice to help grow their business, and I'd love to feature you. Here's the link: http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/student-success-spotlight-a...

It does. My business goal with my email course is to generate qualified leads for my course. My personal goal is to make people better off than they were before they started the course.

If the free course is nothing but the "sizzle" and a giant pitch for something paid, that's a problem. You're probably not going to get many sales for your paid course, and no one's going to refer others to the free course.

But if it's valuable independently of the premium course, and allows the reader to determine if it makes sense to go pro, then it's a win-win for all involved. At the end of my course, I ask people to reply back with what they got out of the free course and what they plan on changing as a result of it — I get a fair amount of awesome responses (which turn out to be great testimonials) from this last email: http://i.glui.me/1A3VNtx

Those who might consider your paid course would only have the persuasiveness of your sales site to go off of. By offering a free email course, you're able to figure out whether Paul's capable of providing you value. If he is, he'll have a call-to-action that upsells you on his paid course which provides even more value.

There's nothing at all wrong with this formula, and IMO it's much "safer" for the buyer.

Not necessarily true. I offer a free email course (also for freelancers), and I position the free course as the strategy - how should a freelancer think about sales? The premium course is the tactics - an actionable deep dive into the content covered in the free course, along with templates, scripts, video interviews, accountability, and more.

It's worked really well. People love the free course, and those who want a more tactics and accountability buy the full course.

...Is this built by the same company behind SendOwl? https://www.sendowl.com

I bill by the week. At the time, my agency rate on this project was $10k a week, which included the full time attention of a senior developer (~4 full days), plus part time Q&A and PM oversight.

It has everything to do with freelance web development, because I (a 1099'd freelancer) am still doing web development. I've just come to realize that clients don't pay me for lines of code, therefore I don't sell lines of code :-)

Figure out WHY a project's being commissioned and then propose what your clients actually care about (hint: not code), vs. doing the usual "here's a proposal with a bunch of technical line items, a quote, timeline, and a signature field"

I've done them all. Here's my writeup on the pros/cons of each: http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/the-definitive-guide-to-pro...

Sure. So I had a client who wanted us to rewrite their 10 year old MS Access app as a web app.

The engineer in me would have immediately jumped into "OK, how do I migrate this database into Rails and recreate the functionality and UI of this app?" I would have priced the going rate for web development, and tried to gauge how long it would take to complete.

The business owner in me realized that this app is critical to their business. It's the tool they use to manage and close sales, and about 20ish people use it all day, every day. I also knew that the CEO was currently the maintainer of the app, as it was started when the company was a home business and the owner picked up a "Learn MS Access in 21 Days" book.

Knowing this, I went to work learning how I could not only modernize the product by making it web based, but I wanted to leverage my experience in usability to optimize how their team uses the app. How can we not just rewrite the app, but also optimize it? Is there a clear path to adding an hour or so a day of additional productivity per employee, and what would 100 hours of combined additional productivity a week mean (financially) for the business? And how much better would it be if the CEO of this small company wasn't needing to maintain the app himself, but could focus on what he does best — growing his company?

What I sold wasn't software or a rewrite. I ended up selling a better tomorrow for his business, and a more profitable tomorrow. This "decommoditized" what I was doing, and while he paid me a premium, he received a much better product at the end of the day.

Justifying your costs by basing what you charge against the costs of a similar employee is a good start, and in my experience it's how most of us start (the old "divide by 2000" trick). I like that Andy makes note that you need to include overhead (prospecting, writing proposals, ...), which a lot of new freelancers tend to miss.

However, I think the big takeaway is realizing that the formula presented establishes a minimum threshold. It shouldn't be used to figure out what you charge. My rates are way north of what the a developer/marketer would command on the open market, but I don't contextualize my costs against the equivalent costs of an employee; instead, I anchor my costs against the upside that a successful delivery of a project would yield for my client.

The single best way to substantially make more money consulting is to stop selling commodity services (web design, Ruby programming, whatever), and to truly consult. Provide your clients with a way to bridge the problem they face with the solution they desire, and charge accordingly.

Yeah, so there's a coupon offered that expires in a week. I'm applying an "Eligible for discount" tag in my marketing automation tool when I announce the discount, and retract it when the sale window ends. And my sales site checks for the presence of that tag before applying the discount. This effectively allows me to create a sale-for-one type system.

I promoted it to my list of ~22k, and asked opt-ins to share it on Twitter. It also got on Product Hunt and a few links from various blogs.

Haven't had a salaried job in more than 6 years, so no. All of my income is through the course I referenced, my SaaS (https://planscope.io), and a few other courses/books I offer.

I just crossed $200k in sales since I (re)launched in May, so yeah - about that.

About 8% right now, with an average sale of a little north of $200 (so it doesn't take many subscribers and sales to hit four-figures a day)

I have an email course (autoresponder) -> course sales funnel setup for Double Your Freelancing Rate which nets about $1-1.5k a day in sales, mostly on autopilot. This is by far the most successful funnel I've created for any of my products, and is performing really stinkin' well.

Product: http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/rate/

Email course: http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/free-pricing-course/

I think he's mainly trying to weed out people with one-off transactional sales, like online stores. Josh has mentioned a few times that occasionally they'll sign up and end up churning out because the model just doesn't work for them. But yeah, it could definitely work if you ran like a membership site off of Stripe. Not exactly a SaaS, but same sorta rules apply.

I've done, and know quite a few people, who are currently selling framework updates (https://railslts.com), a/b testing as a service (https://draft.nu/revise/), and not to mention selling blocks of time upfront — e.g. the retainer model a lot of agencies employ.

(Re)selling hosting, webapps, etc. situates you as a middleman; The margins are much better if you not not only sell them on an Optimizely account, but run it for them also.

Like many others have said in this thread, it's hard to make any meaningful dent in your profit from being a middle-man between your clients and who's hosting their sites.

I'm a fan of bundling — which sounds a bit like what luckyisgood was getting at.

Every consultant wants diversified and/or recurring revenue. This is why just about all of us inevitably create (or try to create) products of our own. Eventually, many consultants get wind of the idea of retainers, which can have the predictability of SaaS but without needing to build and market software first.

The issue arises with how most consultants put together retainers. It's usually something like "I'll sell you in advance 20 hours a month of my time for $2000."

Here's the problem:

Any first grader can figure out that you're effective hourly rate is $100, which is probably less than your real rate — but hey, it's a retainer and it'll relieve your need to always be selling, so that's OK for most.

Since you'll be making $100 an hour on this retainer, your income potential becomes constrained (you're now on the hook for 20 hours a month @ $100/hr) and the client knows what your hourly rate is. "Brennan, I need more this month. I'll pay you $2500 for 25 hours" or "Can I just pay you $100 an hour when I need you?"

And this is where the retainers of a lot of the consultants I've talked with go south, and the relationships sour.

A better approach (which is something patio11 and I talked about during an event we hosted last year) is to instead sell bundles — which could include your time, and hosting — and make these bundles really tricky to divide.

I could sell a client on:

- Hosting

- Backup management

- Framework / security updates

- A/B test experiments and management

- Up to 20 hours of upgrades and modifications

Now it's not so easy to divide the invoices I'm sending my clients monthly by X.

And I could charge... $5000 a month for that. Or whatever would make it so that my client gets both the peace of mind they're looking for (smart guy managing hosting, backups, security issues, etc), a product that's becoming more valuable (running a/b tests, analyzing their funnels, etc), AND a pool of time for me to do whatever random updates they need.

Imagine what it's like to walk into your Podunk suburban bank every two weeks with a $50K+ check in your hands from a company with a .com in their name. Yeah, that was fun.

But Patrick's absolutely right re: checks. If cash flow is tight, my favorite trick is to FedEx a prepaid overnight envelope to your client. Ask them to place the check inside. This elimates the "check is in the mail" song and dance, and it's only marginally more expensive than a wire fee.