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

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"