Avoid undercharging and strategic free work

Patrick notes: Hiya long-time blog readers.  Last year I wrote two articles on career advice for young engineers, largely informed by conversations with a buddy of mine, Ramit Sethi.

Over the last twelve months, I have tagged every message in Gmail I’ve gotten from someone who applied the advice in those articles to effect in their careers.  Sample comments: “Your advice made me $20,000 in two minutes.”, “Your advice made me $35k”, etc etc.  The running total is at about $280,000 (a year!), which makes those two articles probably my highest ROI ever from just writing blog posts.  (n.b. If this were the whole of my business I’d need to have a quick heart-to-heart with myself about obvious inefficiencies in that monetization model but, luckily, the business does well enough to cross-subsidize the blog.)

Ramit offered to do a series of interviews about freelancing/consulting, which I know is of interest to many of you, so I naturally took him up on the offer.  (Though I think much of what we talked about applies just as well to the software business, to be honest.)

If you weren’t already aware: I don’t talk about it on my blog that often, but I do high-end consulting,  typically for improving the engineered marketing of software companies.  Ramit is a NYT best-selling author who makes a living teaching people how to do this sort of thing better.  Ramit is extraordinarily credible on this topic — in addition to his take on most things jiving with mine, I have word-for-word stolen some suggestions from him for e.g. client proposals, to the mutual benefit of my clients (they took the engagement) and myself (they paid $$$ for the engagement).

This is the first in a series of three interviews — the other two will be out later.  Want to make sure you don’t miss them?  Either subscribe to the podcast (details below) or to my email list.

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MP3 download (~50 minutes, ~120 MB): Right click to save.

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[powerpress]

Transcript: Ramit and Patrick on Acquiring Your First Customer

[Patrick notes: Shoutout to CastingWords for this transcription, which I paid $75 for.   I always use them for transcription and then make a hand-pass to make things flow a bit better and format for the Internet.

Can I mention they have an interesting pricing strategy, since it is relevant to y’all?  They price per-minute, but there are three levels based on how rapid you want the estimated turn-around to be.  I picked $1.50 a minute for the 6-day turnaround.  You can also buy 1-day turnaround for $2.50 a minute.  The same exact service, sold for a 67% premium based on expressed customer urgency.  I sometimes even get 1-day delivery when I paid for the 6-day delivery, but you understand I’m not paying for outcomes, I’m...

For the full transcript see here.