How I Made $14,400/hr Fixing WordPress
Published in 2012, this chronicle by @jacobwg details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $14,400.
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
I appreciate the lesson in this post. I suffer from the same kind of 'guilt' myself, most of my freelance income right now comes from tweaking wordpress or javascript for Business Catalyst sites. It's easy to underestimate the value ones' own expertise in an area where that expertise, in the field at large, may not be very sexy or when you're dealing with non-technical clients who balk at paying more per hour than they would someone to cut their lawn, but just want their website to work.
And yet I've been told by other more seasoned pros that I should be charging three times what I am. It's kind of ridiculous how people can shortchange themselves.
When you're charging for work like this, you aren't just charging for the 30 seconds it takes to fix it - you're charging for the years of experience that enable you to do it, plus the 30 seconds it takes to actually do it.
To put it in strictly economical terms, it would have taken the client more than $120 worth of her time to develop the expertise necessary to fix the problem. Thus, paying $120 for the fix - no matter no long it actually takes - is worth it for her.
The title is completely inaccurate and misleading. He made $120 for what he says is 30 seconds of work. It's more like 3-5 minutes if you include communications back and forth with the client, connecting to the server, looking around etc.
This is only applicable when the project scope is pre-defined/fixed.
What would be the price setting methodology, i.e. how would this person charge in a case when smth truly innovative would need to be developed? :-)
I liked the article and thought it was good but ruined by the link-bait title.
As said, the the article itself was good though.
Yeah, I'm not the original author of this post, so I submitted this to HN to see what the community's feedback might be. Though I like his points about pricing for the value of the product rather than hourly time, it appears that HN doesn't like this specific example.