project_log: 016

Yo.

This week was crazy

I hit my highest freelance hourly rate ever: $500 p/h.

The wild part was: I didn't set the price. The designer I worked with did.

Here's the story of how it happened:

Last year I worked on a project for a high-profile interior design client based in NYC. We built a simple but clean website to display their products and the interiors they designed.

They reached out this week about features they wanted to add.

The designer, who was managing the client, asked how long the feature would take and the cost. I sent back: "It'll take 2 hours and cost $200." and jotted a note to look at this in a couple of weeks.

I got another message that day saying they want it done by 9am the next day. As in 9am Saturday morning…

I received this request on Friday at 12:01pm. I typically finish work around 4:00pm. This left just 4 hours to complete this task as well as finish my other client work otherwise I'd be working late.

The next message I received changed the way I think about pricing for good:

"Since they want the category thing this Saturday (as in 9AM NY). Rather than telling them no chance, I wanted to run by you the idea of saying 'Yeah sure, $1k.'"

I agreed because I'm super busy with other work, and taking this on would mean working into a Friday evening.

30 minutes later I received the message: "They approved!"

This was my first time experiencing the power of urgency-based pricing: If a client needs something done urgently, they will pay significantly more:

Now the beginner freelancer may not see the problem with charging their standard rate for urgent work. More billable hours the better right? Wrong.

Not charging for urgency is like saying: "I like to be extra stressed for free."

You're committing to:

• Increased stress without compensation

• Being "available" at your client's lift of a finger

• Opportunity cost: You'll have to sacrifice something to get the work done

Which all sound like a shit time to me, personally.

So what do we do?

Next time a new project or client request comes in with the label 'Urgent' or 'Need ASAP,' stop the auto response of "here's my regular rate" and try this:

1. Think about how the stress will feel

2. Think about how working late will affect your life outside of work

3. Think about how it'll affect your other work commitments

4. Think about how it'll affect your relationships

5. Think about how it'll mean you won't get to go surfing early when the waves are good

Then add an extra 200% - 500% to the price you'd usually charge.

Putting future you top of mind helps to remove the fear of charging more because you realize what you're giving up. You realize that giving up what's important needs to be compensated for.

Benefits of urgency-based pricing

The benefits of using urgency-based pricing are more than just a big payday:

1. Price discovery: You gather valuable data on how to price your service. Which in my experience has been one of the most difficult challenges as a service provider. Urgency pricing helps you to discover what your services are worth. If the client doesn't flinch at your urgency price, it's probably time to increase your regular rates.

2. Respect for your time: You show your clients that your time is valuable and needs to be respected. You are not available at the lift of a finger.

3. Client prioritization: Urgency-based pricing helps a client determine if the task is actually urgent or not. If they aren't willing to pay extra, it's probably not that urgent.

I found this banger quote that sums this up super well:

"Your client's failure to plan does not equal an emergency for you."

Charge accordingly friends.

Ballpark progress update.

For context, Ballpark is an embeddable estimation widget I’m building to help freelancers and studios get more leads for their business.

I’ve made a commitment to have this ready on my own website by the 31st of March. That deadline is creeping up quickly so I don’t have time to fuck around.

This week has been all about tidying things up and preparing for the private beta.

You can now edit your widget styles from within the flow builder. I’ve added some basic styling like colors, logo, logo size entry message, button text, etc.. to help people make the widget feel as native as possible to their site.

Still not sold on the widget design but the backend is looking solid:

Let’s talk about how estimations are generated.

I’ve been holding off talking about this for a while now but todays the day I share.

Inside there dashboard there will be a tab labeled projects. In here you’ll upload all of your past projects (if you don’t have any, you can upload mock projects).

They’ll look something like this:

When a prospective client runs through you widgets flow and hits the “send my estimate” button, we take their data and run it against your projects to find similarities.

For example: You’re a web developer who builds both marketing sites and ecommerce stores. When the prospective client submits that they want an ecommerce store, we find previous stores you’ve created and use that information to provide an estimation on timeline and price.

This way the estimation is based on your previous projects.

If this does well, I’d like to add a feature that allows you to: “Increase the price by 20% from my previous projects”. That way you can continue to increase rates while you sleep.

Pretty dope in my mind.

That’s all for this week. Keep crushing. Talk soon.

- Will