How to Make More Money, Happier Clients, and Go from Surviving to Thriving as a Freelancer with Jonathan Stark

If you are a freelance software developer, designer, copywriter, photographer, videographer, editor, or anyone else who works with clients, the ideas in this episode could change your business and your life. That's what happened to my business after I discovered Jonathan's work.

Episode notes

Jonathan Stark is a former software developer who is on a mission to rid the world of hourly billing. He is the author of Hourly Billing Is Nuts, the host of Ditching Hourly, and he writes a daily newsletter on pricing for independent professionals.

In this episode we discuss:

How Jonathan Stark went from working a typical job to becoming coach for independent software developers
Why is hourly billing so bad?
The problem with growing your business by hiring more people
What are the alternatives to billing by the hour?
How else can you price project based work?
What is value based pricing?
How you should create and structure your proposals to maximize your income AND the client's happiness
How to deal with (inevitable) scope creep on a fixed price project
Avoiding adversarial client relationships by aligning your incentives with your clients
How many options should you offer in a proposal and why?
How can you figure out how valuable the work is to the client
The importance of uncovering an actual business outcome
The exact questions to ask a prospective client before giving a price or writing a proposal
How to get a prospective client to sell themselves on working with you
The important question that most people are too afraid (or too shy) to ask
You have more options than you realize!

Links:

Jonathan's free Value Pricing Bootcamp (start here)
Lots more free resources on Jonathan's website
Alan Weiss who helped inspire the "Why conversation"