NYT bestselling author Ramit Sethi and I continued our earlier discussion about getting your first consulting client by addressing a common pain point for freelancers/consultants, particularly those just starting out: how do you price your offering?

If you want me to tell you “You’re a Rails developer?  $100 an hour if in Iowa, $150 an hour if in SOMA, best of luck” you’re in the wrong place, because you should have learned in our previous installment that you need to present yourself as someone solving business problems rather than as a mere technologist.

Instead, we’re going to go beyond the tactics and talk about the psychology of customers (and consultants) that poison cheap relationships, why we typically underprice to begin with, how to walk up your rate in such a way that your customers continue to perceive outsized value from your services, and more.

When we recorded this, our agenda was to talk primarily about freelancing/consulting rates, but both Ramit and I have run product businesses for many years, so we couldn’t resist tossing in a bit about pricing for e.g. SaaS companies and info-products as well.

(Want to hear even more about this topic?  There’s a podcast coming up next week with Keith Perhac and Brennan Dunn, where we talk about how we transitioned our three very different freelancing/consulting businesses from where they were when we were young and stupid to three different models which work out fairly well for different reasons.  Subscribe to the podcast to hear it when the audio engineer gets done with the editing.)

If You Want To Listen To It

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[powerpress]

Transcript: Ramit Sethi and Patrick McKenzie On Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More

[Patrick notes: I have annotated the transcript heavily with my remarks, in this format.]

Patrick McKenzie:  Hey everybody, my name is Patrick McKenzie, perhaps better known as patio11 on the Internets. I’m a small software entrepreneur who has run a series of software as a service businesses for the last six years. Concurrent with that, for the last couple of years, I’ve run a consulting business largely helping software companies make more money by delighting their users and increasing sales. I’m here today with my friend Ramit Sethi to talk about how you can price your freelance or consulting offering better.

Ramit Sethi:  Hey everybody, Ramit Sethi here. Patrick, thanks for having me. I am the creator of a site called iwillteachyoutoberich.com. I also have a New York Times bestselling book by the same name. My background is in psychology and persuasion. I teach people how to use behavioral change, principles to change their own behavior, and to influence other people. That may mean learning how to automate your money, how to earn more money through negotiation or freelancing, or even to find your dream job.

I give away about 98 percent of my material for free and then I offer information products, also known as online courses, and they tend to be premium prices and they tend to be for the right customer.

Today, I’m really excited to talk about pricing, qualifying your customer, and working with the right people. God knows I have contemplated suicide many, many times thanks to the freeloaders who run rampant and wild on the Internet. What do you say, Patrick?

How You’re Collecting Pathological Customers And How To Stop

Patrick:  Yeah, I have a word for them I’ve been calling for the last couple of years, “pathological customers.” The kind of customer that even if, technically speaking, they’re giving you money, they are giving you radically less money than other folks in the space. They feel a sense of entitlement towards you as a result of that.  The general thing that people find both in pricing products and in pricing services is that at the low end of the scale you deal with people who perceive less value from you, less value from your offering, and have more and more unreasonable demands. Like if you’re writing iPhone apps, you’ll receive reviews like “This 99 cent flashlight app didn’t do my taxes, one star!”

[laughter]

Patrick:  Or in a service business, if you make the terrible decision to sell your engineering services for $3,000 a month to a Japanese megacorp (like someone here might have) then you’re going to have people with expectations like, “Oh, you should totally be willing to come in at 3:00 AM in the morning for nothing.” Versus if you get to a better point where customers start perceiving more value out of your services, there will be no talk of 3:00 AM in the morning and also no talk of any number in the general vicinity of $3,000 for a month or anything else. That’s a little brag-y, oh well.

[Ramit laughs]

Patrick:  Yeah, we’re going to talk to you about not under‑pricing things. In particular, I love Ramit’s advice on this. It’s really informed my thinking on the subject.  Ramit’s advice has helped me 7X my consulting rates in the last two years.

Why Ramit Has Happier Customers at $12,000 Than He Had At $4.95

Ramit:  I like that. I like the sound of that. OK. Let me start off with a couple of thoughts on pricing. Some of these seem straightforward and some of them seem a bit controversial. I’ll say this, in terms of consulting rates, I have started my consulting career back when I was in college, I charged approximately $20 an hour. I now rarely do consulting. I turn down the vast majority of clients. When I do charge, I charge $3,000 an hour.

So I have gone up the gamut of consulting rates and I’d like to share some of the findings and insights I had along the way. In terms of products, my first information product was a terribly priced, terribly positioned eBook called Ramit’s 2007 Guide to Kicking Ass, that’s right, and it was $4.95.

[Patrick notes: Let me elaborate on reasons why Ramit and I probably agree that was a poor decision: the eBook is very underpriced, because at $5 it competes with lattes and Ramit’s advice is substantially more valuable than lattes, hurting uptake among people who stand to benefit from it.  Putting 2007 in the title of theBook destroyed any residual value he could hypothetically have gotten out of it in 2008 ~ 2012, whereas his other course offerings go into “evergreen” status after launching successfully and continue contributing meaningful amounts of money to the business every year.  I also feel, audience mostly unseen, that Ramit would attract a less mature audience who would be less likely to make meaningful progress as a result of the advice than if he had positioned it to someone just a little more advanced in their careers.  For example, note that when Ramit talks to young, competitively oriented men these days, he talks less about “kicking ass” (helping college sophomores manage beer money more effectively) and more about “top performers” (helping, let’s pick an example, 27 year old men in professional careers land $15,000 raises).  That’s a fairly small change in target audience and messaging but a huge change in customer perceived value.]

Ramit: I had been writing for free on my blog, no ads, no nothing. This was the first thing I ever released and predictably the comments went something like this, “Ramit, you jumped the shark. You’re just trying to make money off us now. I could find this kind of stuff for free online. You suck.”

OK, compare that to a recent course I launched which was $12,000 and compare it to another similar course, which was $2,000 or $3,000. That course called Find Your Dream Job, and over a million people heard about it. I can tell you exactly how many complaints I had about price, because I tracked them. The answer was five. Not five percent, five.

We learned how to change and radically become more sophisticated with our positioning. So today, I want to talk about how you can actually charge more, deliver more value, get better customers, and also choose who not to serve.

One thing I’ll mention is that I have policies that cost me over $1 million a year because I don’t want to serve certain parts of the market. I’m going to tell you about those and tell you about how you can use some of the same principles to choose who you want to work with, charge more, get better clients, help them more, and actually not want to kill yourself every morning when you wake up and look at the kind of emails you have in your inbox.

Patrick, have you got those kinds of clients?

Patrick:  I have had [pathological customers] in the past. I’m largely getting to a point in my business where I don’t have to deal with them anymore.

There are spectrums within spectrums here. My first software product was priced for $24.95, as a one-off purchase, and that’s something I will never, ever actually do again.

[Patrick notes: Don’t ever sell a product without a reoccurring revenue component.  Starting with $0 revenue every month and then having to fight your way back to last month’s numbers sucks.  Words cannot express how much easier it is to grow revenues at Appointment Reminder, which is SaaS on a monthly model, than it was at Bingo Card Creator – equivalent levels of savvy are rewarded vastly better over time with the recurring model, because a $29 account sold once contributes literally almost a thousand bucks in AR when a $29.95 account sold once for BCC contributes, well, $29.95.]

Patrick: Be that as it may, BCC debuted against perhaps six other similar products.  I think the very day I launched I was the second most expensive. [Patrick notes: There was one product sold directly to school districts for 10x the price, and I didn’t want to have to deal with purchase orders and whatnot to address that customer segment.  I was about double the pricing of the next software under me.]

I have a very manageable support load with that product, even though the users are very non‑technical and I occasionally get emails that make me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon, like, “How do I download the Googles to my printer?”

Ramit:  What? That’s a reasonable ‑‑ [laughs] to your printer?

Patrick:  Yeah.

Ramit:  [laughs] You had me until you said printer. OK, that is ridiculous.

Patrick:  My users occupy a place of love in my heart. So I say this from a position of love, and not to make fun of anyone, but rather to tell you that real people really think like this: I’ve had to convince people that there are not two physically distinct Internets entitled “the blue Googles” and the “the green Googles.”  This means they can use their login on my website regardless of whether they’re on the blue Googles or the green Googles.  Believe it or not, any site that you can reach from the blue Googles is available on the green Googles as well.

(Wondering how someone would come to this misconception?  A particular customer used the Internet using IE opening to MSN at school and IE opening to Google at home.  They did not realize that Microsoft and Google were not the same company.  They interpreted this as “the blue Googles” and the “green Googles”, because the Googles is the Internet to them.  When they typed stuff into the two different boxes on the two different Googles, different results came out.  Their natural inclination for, “Why does this strange, devil box work in different ways?” was, “Oh, they must be two different devil boxes.”)

Yeah, I deal with fairly few people like that these days.

The next time I make a software business, it will intentionally not include that sort of client in the scope of it.

Ramit:  But I feel like there are certain types of people who have really dark senses of humor, and they tend to be people who work in the dark or deal with the general public at large. These people include radiologists. They include anyone who deals in video, and of course, engineers or in particular, system administrators. God bless you all for still existing on this earth, despite the kind of things you have to put up with every day.

Patrick:  Ah, well. I think, honestly, sometimes we could stand to learn a little bit more from the non‑technical customers, particularly about how we pitch them on the value of our services, because we always pitch them as tech services rather than as solving an actual problem they have in their lives.

Ramit:  OK. So let’s…

Patrick:  We talked about that plenty on the last video. Let’s talk about how we can work up our prices to get better customers who are happy to pay the amount of money that we’re actually worth.

Why We Fear Charging What We’re Worth

Ramit:  Yes. So, first of all, in general, we can just stipulate that the basic message of this call is if you charge more and deliver more value, you’re going to get better customers and have better outcomes. OK. That seems fairly obvious. So the question is why don’t we do it? Just like it seems obvious that we all know we need to work out more, we need to eat better, we need to manage our money, we need to call our mom more. All those are obvious. They’re axiomatic. So why don’t we do it?

Primarily, one of the biggest reasons is our own psychological barriers. When it comes to pricing, we are afraid of charging more for all the reasons that I myself went through. When I first charged, I was truly petrified. And you can actually see it. I’ll direct you to the page. Go search for “Ramit’s 2007 Guide to Kicking Ass.” You can actually see the fear in my copy. My copy was rudimentary. It was pedestrian. I even justified why I had to charge.

Do you know when I charge for a twelve or three or four or five or ten thousand dollar course ‑‑ I don’t justify that? I tell the people who I don’t want to leave. And I let the rest come and bubble up to the top.

So you have to understand that if you make an amazing product and you’ve tested it and you know it will help, it is your obligation to get it out to the market as aggressively as possible.

Now, if you have a shitty product ‑‑ you’re just trying to pull the wool over someone’s eyes, or you haven’t tested it at all? Then, of course, it’s going to come across as fearful, because it should be. You don’t know if your product is good or not. If I know my product is good, if I have tested results, it’s my obligation to get it out to the market.

[Patrick notes: I think this is important enough to emphasize, twice. If you got into this business to make peoples’ lives better, and you have produced something which will succeed with that, and you are aware of truth about reality such as “better marketed products beat better engineered products every single bloody time”, then you have an obligation to get better at marketing yourself. To do otherwise is to compromise the value of your offering to the world based on selfish desires such as appeasing your own vanity (“Everyone should realize how great my work is without me needing to tell them”) or indulging your own unspoken fears (“If this were really good, it would sell itself, so if I try selling it, it must not be good.”)]

Ramit: Here are some of the fears I went through when I was first charging. I’m scared of finding out that people won’t pay for this product that I spent 12 months building. I’m scared of making them mad and them calling me a sellout. And my favorite one, which is exclusively the paradigm of engineers: is if I have customers who pay me, then I’m going to have to offer customer support. That is seriously the most crackpot crazy thing I’ve ever heard. If you have people paying you, money solves many problems.

[Patrick notes: Ramit is a very responsive guy, but also has had a team of people working for him for the last few years, answering customer support inquiries.  Can I mention that I also thought that CS would be a major timesuck prior to launching my products?  Turns out, nope, not so much.  I support hundreds of thousands of users, and thousands of customers, by myself.  No CS team or virtual assistants involved.  I even did it when I had a full-time job.  If this notion scares you, read Start Small, Stay Small – Rob Walling gives great ideas on how to systemize the process then ship it off to virtual assistants.]

Patrick:  Yes.

Charge More, Get Less (And Better) Customer Support Email

Ramit:  If you have money, you can hire a customer support rep to deal with your customers.  By the way, when you start charging, you’ll find that paying customers ask for support much less often than free customers do. What do you think, Patrick?

Patrick:  That is absolutely the truth. This is very relevant to people here who run products. You can actually draw a graph versus whether someone is a free user or a paid user of the product, and see the support request decline. I have four tiers for one product of mine. The level of support requests per account per month (lower numbers are, generally, better)  in the various tiers goes something like:

• The cheapest tier ($9 a month) has 7X
• The Professional tier ($29) tier has 4X
• The Small Business tier ($79) has 3X
• The Office tier ($199) has X

Patrick: Customers who pay more also tend to be more sophisticated in the use of the software. They have more internal resources that they can ask questions to, rather than emailing me “How do I reset my password?” or “The Internet’s aren’t working. Can you get me back the Internet?”

Instead, users on higher tiers tend to ask questions like: “We’re using this to create value for our business. We have this scenario that we don’t know how to work with in your tool. Can you explain to us how we can do that to get the next big win for our business?”

Ramit:  Yeah.

Patrick:  I’d much rather answer that email than “I forgot my password. Can you reset it again? The find account box didn’t work for me.”  Particularly because the problem was likely “I didn’t type my email address correctly.”

Pricing Your Consulting Services Cheaply Does Your Customer No Favors

Patrick:  You talked about mispricing your first product at $4.95 and how it was partially out of a fear of charging people money for value. The first time I ever consciously started working on consulting was I went to visit a business friend of mine in Chicago over Christmas one year. The only thing on the agenda was we were getting coffee. A couple of minutes into the coffee date, he locked me in a conference room with him and one of the cofounders of the company and said, “We just want ask you some questions about the stuff that you do, in terms of search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization, that sort of thing.”

I love talking about this stuff. We talked straight,for the next three hours. Then he said something to me, literally life‑changing words, at the end of that. He said, “I just want you to know that if today had not been a coffee date, you could have charged for this conversation and I would be pulling out my checkbook right now and write you a check for it.” I was a young engineer. I had this mental model that a young engineer’s time is worth a hundred dollars an hour and that is an iron law of nature.

I said, “Well, I’d expect that would be about $300, and $300 doesn’t feel worth worrying about right before Christmas. I don’t even know if I would have been comfortable doing that.”  I was inventing excuses – in real time! – as to why I couldn’t have possibly delivered the value he already reported having gotten from the conversation we just had.

He said, “No, I think I’ve got $15,000 worth of value out of this. I would write you a check for $15,000 right now.”

He asked his cofounder, “Do you think $15,000 is about right?” His cofounder said, “Well, I don’t know about $15,000.” I’m like, “Oh, thank God. Sanity.” His cofounder said, “For $15,000, I would need to see a printed report about it too. But $5,000, yeah. We could pay that out of the petty cash. It blew my mind.”

Ramit:  Yeah.

Patrick:  If you are genuinely creating value for businesses, you are no longer in the “trade defined small units of time for defined small units of money” business model.  This is what most employees do.  This is how you have spent most of your life working.  You have left that life behind.

You’re suddenly judged against the price of other strategic initiatives. Amounts of money that are mind blowing to an individual human’s personal experience are nothing next to what a business pays for even the most trivial of things.

Ramit, you run a pretty motivationally sized business yourself. You have probably spent more on, I don’t know, website hosting in the last year than my Hacker News buddies could countenance spending for the next century.

Would You Rather Work With Successful Businesses Or Bottom Feeders?

Ramit:  [laughs] For me, it’s very simple. It’s not about cost. It’s about value. Let me just tell you all the things I don’t want to do, as a non‑technical guy. I don’t want understand how web hosting works. I don’t care. Just make it work. I don’t want to understand how security works and I certainly don’t want to read textbooks about it. I don’t want to get paged when I’m out to the bar on a Friday night. I don’t want to do all these things. I only want to do a few things.

Let me pay for the rest. Listen, you can find clients who are willing to pay. They are the ones whose businesses are already doing relatively well and they want to do better. Or you can go after bottom feeders, who are going to try to negotiate you at every single turn. They will question the value of what you’re doing. They’ll say, “Can’t I get it cheaper? Can’t you do this? Can’t you do that?” Those are not the clients you want.

We have talked about how to find those. We’ll talk about those on a future call as well. When it comes to pricing, again, we have talked about the main axiom we are covering today, which is deliver a better product, charge more, find the right customers and everybody wins. That’s how you can go from thinking, “Oh, I’m only a hundred dollar an hour engineer,” to actually charging gargantuan amounts, but, more importantly, delivering gargantuan value.

There are a couple of people who have influenced me. I’ll share one. One is Jay Abraham. He is a very, very famous marketing consultant, particularly from the ’80s. He is one of my mentors. He has talked about putting the client at the center of everything you do. One of his books, called Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got, made me six figures in one month. Then I got on his email list, after buying his $10 book and making six figures a month.

Let me just tell you how I paid Jay a lot of money. I got on his email list. He announced that he was having a course, where you would have to fly out to LA once a month for 15 months. I live in New York. You would have to apply. You would have to get your references checked. By the way, if you doubled your revenue during that time period, you would have to write him a big fat check. Do you know what I said? I said, “I’ll do anything to be in this course.”

I applied. I haven’t written an application like that since college. I had him call my references. I met him. Here’s what I paid for it. I paid thousands a month to fly to LA on my own dime, sit in a chair next to him and asking questions for 45 minutes ‑‑ 45 minutes a month. I paid him thousands. That investment alone, and notice I called it an investment, not a cost, has already paid off in multiples of what I paid.

These are the customers. You want to find the customers, who look at the thing you are charging for, the service or product you are delivering, as an investment. It doesn’t just have to be ROI financially, although that’s the easiest to justify. It could be, “Look, I’m sick and tired of having to wake up in the morning and do all these tasks. I want an assistant.” That’s ROI for me. It could be to take away fear. I fear that my data is going to be lost. Therefore, you have solved my problem by giving me arrayed storage or cloud storage or whatever it is you want to do.

Understanding what it is and who your customer is, which would have covered before and will cover again, can help you determine your price. Just in general, then you want to look at the band of pricing that you have available to you. You want to think, “Am I in that band? Can I be higher than that band? What do I want to format my pricing at? Do I want to charge hourly, weekly, et cetera?”

Working For Free (Don’t!)

Ramit: Patrick, why don’t we talk about working for free? Also, you and I somewhat disagree on how to quote our rates. Let’s talk about that as well. What do you think about free work?

Patrick:  This is largely from the perspective that we are talking about technologists here. If you aren’t aware of it already, the market for people across most of the United States and increasingly other parts of the world too, who can successfully execute technology projects is just absolutely on fire right now. If you have heard the whole “software is eating the world” thesis, it means that the people on the top of the food chain right now are the people who can get software to do what they want.  This is particularly true if you can solve business problems using software. If that is you, the world is your oyster. There is no reason you have to give away the pearls for free.

I understand that there are other people in the world, who might just be getting started or not become comfortable with that, who might actually benefit from building a portfolio of a project or two delivered for free. If you put a gun to my head and said, “You are doing a project for free. Get value out of it,” I might think of telling the client, “OK. Look. As a prerequisite of doing this project for free, I would like the ability to turn it into a case study that I can put on my blog, put in my portfolio, and shop around to other clients as social proof.”

Ramit:  Yeah.

Patrick:  “You, this company that people have respect for, entrusted this part of your business to me. Therefore, they should also feel that it’s less risky for them to entrust a part of the business to me.”

Ramit:  I love that.

[Patrick notes: Let me pull back the curtain on why I use words like “entrusted” and “ownership” when talking to clients. Peons do “work”, where tasks are created by other people, carried out by the peon, and then judged by other people. I have never desired to be a peon, so I have always made a point of not talking like a peon.

Can I tell you a little anecdote?  I was once a $10 an hour CSR for an office supply company (had to pay for college) and was, in actual fact, a peon.  When I applied, I a) very much wanted to get the job and b) wanted to never work as a CSR again.   When I went into that job interview, they walked me to the telephone bank and started going through a sample call, then the CSR started explaining some minor trivia about how to arrange a dropshipped order in their systems.

She started to explain: “A dropshipped order is…”

And I finished “A dropshipped order is when, rather than shipping from your warehouses, you take the order from the customer and transmit it directly to the manufacturer of the product, who ships it to the customer directly.  Most relevantly for our purposes, this means that dropshipped orders don’t use the standard shipping service, and as a result aren’t quite as flexible with regards to delivery options as we generally are.  They can only get delivered to the front door if there is no elevator or, if there is an elevator, to the floor which the customer physically resides on.  For $45 we can instruct the dropshipper’s shipping company to use a dolly and take the order to the customer’s actual location at the site.”

This rather surprised the people who were interviewing a 17 year old for a near-minimum-wage job, so I said “Umm, page 78 of the catalog.  I called up and asked for one last week.  I made it my business to learn your business.”  (I knew, as soon as I said that, that I was a mortal lock for that job.)

They offered to make me head of that department the next year, but I didn’t really want to manage CSRs doing paper sales for the rest of my career, so I passed.]

Things Clients Value More Than Money

Patrick:  That’s a big thing, by the way. Clients pay for two things in the main, either increasing revenue or reducing costs. But they will also pay, in a very direct way, for trust and for the perception of reduced risk. One of the things that allows you to increase your rates over time is think of it that there is a tremendous fear in every client’s mind, when they get into a new technology project (or any kind of project really), that the project is just going to totally blow up and they will get no value out of it. So they discount the rate that they are paying to you, the maximum rate they think they can afford to pay you, by the chance of the project totally blowing up. If a client thinks that, “OK. The last five times I hired a tech guy, I only got one project which created business value,” he is probably going to discount the rate that he could pay you by about 80 percent.

But, if his perception is that you are not a 20 percent chance of success guy, you are a 95 percent chance of success guy, then it’s worth paying you much, much more that he would pay the 20 percent chance of success guy, just for that feeling that you are more likely to actually deliver on this product.  This is true even if the business value you are claiming is the same as the other guy.  It is true even if maybe the other guy is technically superior to you.

There are ways that you can influence that perception of likely success. One is by being able to actually communicate what you are doing, better than the typical engineer can. If you are talking about RAID arrays, performance optimization, HTTP headers, and all the other stuff that engineers love so much, we run the risk of losing business folks.  Instead, we should say things that they understand and will perceive value from, like: “Here are other people in the industry that I have worked with. Here are their problems. Here are the problems that I surmise you have, because you are in this industry. Am I right?  Awesome. Here’s how we can align our work together such that it influences these core things that you care about in your business.”

He is thinking, “He gets it. He can talk with me. When I have a problem, I can talk to him and get it fixed, rather than that other guy I worked with, where I sent off an email and didn’t get a response for two weeks and then it was two lines, “OK. I rebooted the server.”

The Unreasonable Difficulty of Shopping In A World Of Infinite Choices

Ramit:  [laughs] What you are talking about, I love it. It’s really understanding the client’s hopes, fears and dreams, in many ways better than they understand it themselves. With my students, I want to be like the wife, who knows her husband better than he knows himself. She can predict what he’s going to say. We know this from research. People will be reading my sales page and they are about to have an objection. They will say, “Does that work, because I live in a different country?” Right as they are about to consciously think that, they are scrolling down the page and they see, “Yes. This works for international students. In fact, here are 10 from the UK, Spain, everywhere.” What do they think, after that happens two or three times? They think, “This guy understands me. He gets me.”

It is so rare in today’s day and age that someone understands you that you will pay almost anything. I’ll give you an example. Put yourself in the mind of, let’s say, a 30‑year‑old young woman, living in Manhattan. She is shopping at Nordstrom.com. She sees this shirt and it looks incredible. She says, “Oh.” She clicks it to enlarge it. She sees a model wearing it, who is 27 or 28 and looks just like her, walking down the street with her purse. She says, “Yeah.”

Then she clicks the next button. She sees another photo, but this time it’s some 16‑year‑old girl, who has got a punk look to her, wearing the same shirt. Then she clicks the next button and she sees a 78‑year‑old grandmother wearing the same shirt. What’s the first thing she does? She closes the window, because, in a world where something isn’t made exactly for you, in a world of infinite options, if it’s not made for us, if it doesn’t speak our language, if it doesn’t speak to my hopes, fears and dreams, I’m gone.

When you can actually do that, when you can deliver that, pricing really becomes a mere triviality. My competitors will often charge $49 for an e‑book. I’ll charge $3,000. Is my course better? Yes. Not only does it have more in it, it is tested with thousands and thousands of people. But selling a $3,000 information product is difficult no matter what, no matter if you have 80 TB of video. It’s about understanding the customer and client better than they understand themselves.

Why I Go Out Of My Way To Say “This Product Is Not Right For You”

Patrick:  Let’s circle back to a point you just made. The notion that a particular product is not right for other people is a very powerful one in sales. When you are doing client qualification, about which we will be talking in the next talk, you are explicitly telling people that, “I only work with people who stand to get a lot of value out of doing business with me and I stand to get value out of doing business with them. It is entirely possible that we might not be the best fit for each other. So, for example, if X, Y or Z is true, maybe we just shouldn’t do this and I can recommend someone who is better suited to your needs.” When you say something like that, when you tell people that you are upright and ethical and would rather turn down perhaps a motivational amount of money right now, just because it won’t be the best thing for them, if they hear that, “OK. I wouldn’t work with people, whose situation was X or Y or Z. But, when I am listening to your needs, you seem to be totally in the sweet zone. We should do this,” they will think “Hell, yes.”

Ramit:  Yes.

Patrick:  Let me give an example of that. These days, when I’m talking to a new company, basically, if they are not a software company, I’m not interested.

There’s no one thing that I do in my consulting practice. I guess I could call it, “Rent my brain and I make you money.”

[Patrick notes: The CEO at a prospect recently recommended me to someone internally and introduced me as “the [UX design] consultant I was telling you about earlier.”  (It wasn’t actually UX design – think “something that a software company would reasonably want which I have done before, successfully, but I wouldn’t actively seek out engagements for.”)  Pro-tip: “I don’t know if I would call myself a [UX design] consultant, per-se” would not have been good client relations.  Clearly, if the presentation I did for the CEO was impressive enough such that he is recommending me to their UX design team later, they stand to get some value out of working with me, and one should not dissuade happy clients from paying you money for advice which is in their best interests.]

Patrick:

I have previously worked with clients that I didn’t understand as well as the software industry. I couldn’t have that feeling of customer connectedness, when I was talking about them.  For example, I once worked with a company that sells something similar to… high‑end men’s shirts. I don’t really understand the market for high‑end men’s shirts. People in that market don’t tend to think the way I do.

People who have made high‑end men’s shirts their life’s work don’t naturally feel simpatico with me when we sit down at the table and start talking about things. Whereas, software? Man, I love software. I can get everybody at a software company, whether they are the marketer or the CEO or the head of engineering, to like me and feel like working with me will be valuable. When we talk, they’ll enjoy the experience and think that I’m someone they want in the foxhole with them on the next project.

When we are starting the Getting To Know You dance with the client, I just say, “Look, I’ve had client relationships in the past that have been very successful, generally when I’m selling a software product and specifically generally when that software product is sold to businesses. If your company is primarily interested in increasing their B2C sales, that probably isn’t the best fit for us. I have some ideas on how you could take that forward.

“But really, if we’re looking for a big win, the last times I got a 20 to 100% increase in revenue was with a client with parameters X, Y and Z. Does that sound like where you are and the expectations you have with regard to an engagement?”

I’m reasonably competent at using both the green Googles and the blue Googles, so I’ve presumably learned by now what their core product offering is, at this point, they’re like, “Uh huh. uh huh, uh huh. That sounds right. Yeah. Yeah, 20 to 100 percent. That sounds pretty good.”

Ramit:  One of the key takeaways that I am hearing here and that I want to highlight for everyone is study people who have mastered pricing. It’s remarkable to me how many start up websites you go to and it says, “Plans and Pricing.”

[Patrick notes: Copywriting microtip: this is the suckiest possible headline for your Plans and Pricing page.  I know you did that because WordPress put it in my default.  Is WordPress going to go home hungry if you don’t sell anything?  You are.  Get ye to CopyHackers and rephrase with something that your customers actually care about in the headline, like “Start [Core Value Proposition] In 30 Seconds.”]

Ramit: You click on it and it says, “$9 a month for $WHATEVER.” This kills the little Patrick and I have left in our souls, leaving us a vacuous void of what used to be human beings. It’s actually sad, because, first of all, just mathematically, it’s almost impossible to create a serious business on nine dollars a month. Those companies never actually run the models. They never actually say, “Hey, wait a minute. With customer churn and LTV and all these things, how can I ever justify nine dollars a month?” You can’t. It’s very difficult.

By the way, we all know the first dollar problem. Getting people to spend one dollar is the problem.

If you can get them to spend one and you have a very, very good product, you can get them to spend ten. You can get them to spend 100. Now, there are different gradations. For me, there is a taxonomy in my market of information products.

• eBooks: you can charge roughly $27 to $47
• eBooks plus video: $47 to $97
• Video courses: $497 to $997

There is this taxonomy that exists. It exists and it’s real. But it is also malleable. You can move things around. You can know that, to justify $1,000 for a product, there’s certain things that you’re going to have to do.

Patrick:  I love that point about the taxonomy of value. We were talking earlier about having different billing increments for consulting services. I often try to put things as weekly rates, which are roughly aligned to business goals. In a particular week, we will be able to get X, Y and Z accomplished, which accomplishes a meaningful result for the business. The reason I quote weekly rates is that I feel that people have a taxonomy of value for labor, based on how that labor is packaged.

If you quote hourly rates, engineers figure, “OK. A week is 40 hours. This means a weekly rate is mathematically comparable to an hourly rate, trivially. Why make this meaningless semantic distinction, foolish math-averse marketer guy?”

Why?  Because of the taxonomy for labor. People have a preconceived notion of the proper cost of one hour of time. An hour is worth, “Well, OK. Two figures, maybe low three figures at the high‑end,” where the equivalent amount of hours, balled up into a project aimed at accomplishing a business goal, occupies a different level of the taxonomy.

If you are in the taxonomy of strategic initiatives that can increase my business’s sales the next year from 20 to 100 percent, that is not priced against the, “high two figure, low three figure rate” for our wages.

Ramit:  Right. What we know what marketing is, for example, there is a reason why the maximum you can get for an eBook is roughly $97. Because of the race to the bottom in Amazon pricing, people often say, “An eBook? That should just be $13. Why should you charge more?” That is why marketers add video to the equation. It’s difficult to compare an eBook plus video.

However, don’t let this immediately make you think that this is a scam. It’s not like these marketers are just trying to get one over on you. Virtually every information product out there has a money back guarantee. For me, you can take my entire course, which costs thousands of dollars, depending on what course you join and if you don’t like it, just ask for a refund and I give you all your money back, even the credit card processing fees. Why? Because I have to prove myself and so do most of us.

With engineers it works a little differently. You prove yourself up front. Then you probably have milestones. There is rarely a money back guarantee, although that something you could experiment with as well.

[Patrick notes: Customers who ask for a money-back guarantee for consulting services are typically signaling a poor match between you and them, because they have high uncertainty that you will be able to deliver what you claim you can deliver.  In general, I would be hesitant to work for someone who believed this, because even if I successfully execute everything I set out to execute, it is highly likely that a client who is not trusting of me will not perceive that as a win.

Here’s an actual line I use on the few occasions where this comes up in prospecting: “We live in an uncertain world. I’ll be totally honest with you: not every engagement I’ve ever had has been an epic win. You’re a businessman – you know better than anybody that e.g. software development is risky, and sometimes you spend 6 man-months on something and end up with nothing to show for it.  That’s why, when things work out, the business profits way the heck more than what the fully-loaded cost for 6 man-months of engineering time is.  My clients often benefit substantially from the upside to our engagements.  If you need a guarantee from me for results, you’re asking me to shoulder the downside risk for this engagement.  I don’t typically do that, and here’s why: if I shoulder the downside exposure, I should likewise partake of the upside exposure, and my pricing for that upside exposure would sound like ‘Well, if I double your sales, to a first approximation I should end up owning half of the business.’”

This is not an offer presented for negotiation.  No successful software business will countenance giving 50% equity to an outside consultant, ever.  It will never happen.  Even an early stage startup, which I virtually never work with, would have a hard time getting sign-off for more than like a 1/4^th of 1% equity grant. (Worth mentioning: For a variety of reasons, I would almost certainly not work for that.)

This is a way to frame a discussion. I am just trying to reframe the discussion away from “Risk of a negative outcome” to the (true fact) that I have, in the past, delivered huge wins for my clients, and that next to the enterprise value of a huge win, my consulting paycheck is a tiny, piddling number. The only way that math works out in a mutually satisfactory manner is if the client pays the sticker price. Many do.

For folks who aren’t willing to, oh well.  Things cost what a buyer and a seller mutually agree on: if the buyer can’t make the seller a mutually satisfactory offer, no sale takes place.  I enjoyed the conversation and would be happy to introduce you to someone else if I know anyone.  As a consultant, you should be thrilled to let prospects go if they signal that they would not benefit from working with you, such as by not agreeing to your rates.  As the monopoly supplier of your time, you get to be choosy.  (P.S. This directly implies that if you have a more solid situation, via a filled pipeline or external financial resources or what have you, you can get away with charging more.  That’s Microecon 101 but people don’t seem to apply it, so let me say this for emphasis: If you’re scheduled at or near capacity, charge more.  If losing a client would not meaningfully impact your standard of living, charge more.  If you have a product business partially subsidizing consulting, charge more.

]

Ramit: But the point is, when you are pricing your service or product, make it congruent with the market.

Patrick, you know that your customers, on a weekly basis, care about their goals, how much they are allocating and stuff like that. You have properly priced it, as a result, like that.

For my students [of Earn1k, a course where Ramit teaches people to freelance without necessarily quitting the day job], hourly charging is a good way to get their feet wet. [Patrick notes: That’s an important point. I turned down all consulting offers prior to quitting my day job, and literally have never thought of balancing the two at once.]

Ramit: But my most sophisticated people then use other strategies, like retainer models, and packages and things like that. That’s how you can really get really rapid growth in terms of revenue and pricing.

[Patrick notes: That’s really good advice, if you and your clients are mutually amenable to that.  I have a baseline of recurring revenue, and an infinite sink for future hours, as a result of running product businesses.  Retainer models, which might commit me to future work with a particular client, don’t uniquely offer anything to me, and they also might commit me to working with a client while my businesses would really like the first crack at my attention.

But if selling your time is your main source of revenue, retainers are a great thing for you.

How might that work?  Well, let me spitball some numbers.  Say you charge $100 an hour for Rails programming.  You have delivered a project for a client.  You might write them a monthly retainer contract for up to 20 hours of maintenance work.  Crucially, you get paid $1,500 regardless of whether you do any maintenance work at all.  You tell the client that any time above the retainer is available on a new contract at your then-prevailing rate, subject to availability.  The client pays for the certainty that you will be available if they need you, not primarily for actually getting you to code patches.]

Ramit: The main things for everyone here to listen to are that you have to deliver a better product or result than anyone else. Without that, you can’t put lipstick on a pig.

[Patrick notes: Weak disagreement here – I think Ramit is overcorrecting to avoid a common criticism.  You don’t have to be better than everyone else.  Every doctor in America, save one, is not the best doctor.  Every lawyer, save one, is not the best lawyer.  Every Rails programmer, save one, is not the best Rails programmer.  Being the best isn’t a prerequisite to running a successful business.  You need to be capable, and to deliver fantastic value to your customers.  That does not require being a ninjedi gurumensch.  A lot of fantastic value can be delivered with capable, workmanlike coding. Enterprise Java, not exactly a well-known spot to find ninjedi gurumenschen, makes the world go round – planes don’t fall from the sky, cities don’t descend into bedlam, stores don’t run out of food, banks don’t suddenly discover they’re insolvent.  Well, most of the time, and that isn’t really a Java problem so it isn’t here nor there.]

Ramit: Two, make sure that you are charging as high as you can to find the right customers. If I were Target, I wouldn’t charge $500 for a scarf, because no one would pay it. However, if I am Barney’s, you had better believe I’m charging $500. It is strategic. The type of people that walk into a Barney’s are very different than the people that walk into a Target.

Finally, run some goddamn numbers. If you are charging eight dollars a month for your product and you think that’s going to make you a very healthy lifestyle, just run the numbers. Factor in churn. Factor in cancellations. Factor in support costs and realize that that’s a very difficult way. If you can charge eight, maybe you can make a better product and charge $57 or $97.

[Patrick notes: Or re-target the same product at people who will perceive more value from it.  Bitwise identical codebases support 10x to 100x ranges in pricing all the time.]

Patrick:  Yeah. Here’s an admission against interest, given that I actually help companies decide pricing strategies and therefore should be competent about it:

Even knowing that charging nine dollars is a stupid amount for business, I succumbed to my engineer weakness last time I launched a SaaS company and had a nine dollar personal plan at the bottom. I’ll tell you exactly what my self‑serving justification was for putting that nine dollar a month plan there. I thought that I would get blog articles out of productivity bloggers, if I had something that would appeal to their needs.

A) It was a total failure. I never got one single blog article out of a productivity blogger about it.

B) I refused to admit that I was a failure and kept that plan up there for a year. I had ungodly support headaches. That entire pricing tier made less money than individual other clients on the higher tiers.

Ramit:  [laughs]

Patrick:  You don’t even want to hear about the, “I got called at three AM in the morning Japan time, because the text on the website is gray. I think it would look better black. I emailed you about that 20 minutes ago, but you didn’t respond. So I figured I would call you in Japan at three AM in the morning with customer support issues.”

Yeah, don’t underprice your stuff.

Ramit:  Yeah.

Patrick:  It’s the same with services. You will get the most demanding clients, when you’re under‑pricing or when, God forbid, you are trying to compete with people on Elance or the other freelancer sites. Someone asked me why I’m not on Elance.

“Well, I don’t want to compete with people on Elance and the customers that are really in my wheelhouse and get a lot of value out of working with me would run screaming if they saw me on Elance.”

For the same reason that, sorry, what was that high‑fashion place that is not Target that I’ve never heard about?

Ramit:  Barneys?

Patrick:  Barneys. Barneys, if you were some sort of fashion house that’s trying to make a name for yourself and you go to Barneys and you say, “Look, we can get our scarves made in China, so we can afford to sell them to you for $5 and you can put them on your tables for $10, the buyer for Barneys is going to say, “Oh hell no. We’re not interested in that at all. We don’t care if it’s the reincarnation of some famous designer and some other famous designer who had a love child, someone who understands fashion. Please put in names for me here.” But it just would do so much damage to their brand and to their perceived positioning in the market being available for $10 that it is not even worth picking up that revenue for them.

Price For Dear Or Price For Free But Never Price For Cheap

Patrick: Similarly, you can price it for free or you can price it for dear, but never price it for cheap. You will just have lots of headaches and it makes life difficult both with that customer and with any other customer who will ever discover that relationship.

Ramit:  Wow. OK, so Patrick, you just said something that everybody needs to hear again. This was taught to me by my mentor, Jay Abraham as well. My students were clammering for a low price product. I’ll cover this in the qualification talk, but I don’t allow people with credit card debt to join my flagship or very expensive courses. That decision alone cost me over $1 million a year, but it’s the right thing to do.

So people were saying, “Hey, can you give me something low priced? How about something around $9 or maybe $20?” I asked Jay, “What would you do? The market is begging for this.” He said, “You know what? If I were you, I would actually just create something incredible and I would give it away for free. I would make sure that I tell them why.”

I did something very similar, I actually interviewed another one of my mentors, BJ Fogg. I spend 16 hours preparing for that call. I read my old textbooks and I pulled up my notes and we had a great call about behavior change.

Then I wrote an email to my list and I said, “Guys, this interview is incredible and I’m giving it to you for free. But I want to tell you something. I could charge $1,000 for this interview. I would easily sell it. But instead, I’m investing in you. I want you to take it seriously, treat it like a thousand dollar product. Close your computer. Turn off all your other stuff and really treat it with respect. Treat it like a $1,000 purchase because that’s what it is.” The response was incredible.

The point here is do not try to serve everybody and also decide what market you want to play in. You want to play in the high‑end market? Then just give away your stuff for free at the low end and make sure people know why you’re doing that.

Overall, as Patrick said, your pricing is strategic, your pricing will communicate to the market what type of clients and customers you’re willing to put up with and what kind you want.

Patrick:  Right. I turned down potential client work all the time. My minimum engagement is a week, and I’ve only deviated from that once or twice, this time for good strategic reasons. I just don’t want to deal with the overhead of selling a one‑hour, two‑hour engagement. That immediately prices me out of affordability for many, many people… who would largely not be good fits for getting excellent value from working with me.

I’ll often get emails inquiring around my hourly rates and what it would cost to get me on a phone call for an hour or two. I say, “Look, I’m not available for formal consulting for an hour or two. Because I love the space and because I like helping out bootstrapped entrepreneurs, if there is time available in the schedule, I will be happy to get a Skype chat with you or whatever. We’ll talk. I’ll give you some ideas. Then I’ll point you to the right blog post and then you can go execute on those. But I am not going to be the one in charge of your marketing for what you think an hour would be worth.”

If I quoted them a rate for an hour (by taking my weekly rate and dividing by forty), they’d probably think, “Oh God, that’s an insane amount of money.”

Ramit:  Right.

Patrick:  In addition to there being a karmic benefit here [Patrick notes: I’m using karma here in the loosely metaphorical sense to mean “one should act in the service of others; this will be rewarded / this is its own reward”], there are occasionally knock-on effects for the business.  For example, somebody told that in one context will occasionally mention that they got really, really good results to someone who does have the resources to pay for a week of my time.

I can’t tell you what clients that’s gotten me in the door with, but you know their names.

Ramit:  Love it. So Patrick, Let’s wrap here. Where can people find you? What’s your URL and what will they find there?

Patrick:  I’m at www.kalzumeus.com/blog for my blog [Patrick notes: you’re here!]. It’s mostly about topics of making and selling software. Generally what I’m talking about in any given blog post is whatever I’ve been working on recently. If you want a more structured, deep dive into things, go to training.kalzumeus.com and there will be a video on improving the user experience in the first run of your software.

Ramit:  So anyone who makes software or serves clients or customers would be really well served to check out Patrick’s stuff. It’s very much similar to I Will Teach in a sense that I Will Teach seems like it’s a money blog, but it actually has very little to do with money. It’s about psychology. It’s about understanding people. It’s about improving your communication. So I love reading it. I don’t build software. I build information products, but I love reading your stuff, Patrick, because you really dig into test results, data, and my most favorite of all is you dig into why people behave the way they do. Why do they chronically undercharge even thought they quote “know” that they should charge more? Why do they think that technical skills matter most when in business that’s questionably true? And why do they not trust things that have worked in other industries like marketing for years and years?

So I love the way that you show your own test data, you communicate it beautifully to engineers and it happens to communicate beautifully to me as well. So thanks for putting up your site.

I’ll share my site as well. I put up a special giveaway for people listening here. It’s iwillteachyoutoberich.com/kalzumeus-pricing.  That’s a free mini course on pricing that should help you really change the way you think about pricing and again, how I went from charging $4.95 for one product to $12,000 for a recent product with a dramatic fall in complaints and whiny freeloaders. Hopefully that helps you guys.

Patrick:  Let me give a quick little mini testimonial for Ramit here. We had dinner a couple of years ago. He gave me some advice on pricing my consulting services. For a variety of reasons I never quote my rate publicly, largely because it goes up all the time and I never want to have my own rate quoted against me as evidence that I should cede ground in future negotiations.

That said, it went up hugely as a result of some of the advice he gave, particularly regarding how you position the rates in the context of your discussion with the client. You cannot possibly waste your time listening to him on that subject.

Ramit:  I appreciate it Patrick. All right, we’ll talk soon. Thanks.

Patrick:  All right. Talk to you later, bye bye.

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.

If You Want To Listen To It

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 paying for predictability of outcomes, right?  If I need a video transcripted for a paying client with delivery scheduled for two days from now, I pay for the express service.  If, on the other hand, I have flexibility as to when I publish a podcast, then I can pay for the standard service.  That’s beautiful market segmentation.  You can do very similar things for your software applications (and, yes, consulting gigs) and your clients will thank you for the opportunity to pay more to get guarantees of things which are valuable for them.  In addition to delivery timeframes SLAs are often useful pricing levers in that way — including SLAs which just formalize a guarantee of something which is, in fact, available on a best-effort basis to people without the SLA, too.]

[Patrick notes: I’ve included somewhat extensive commentary in-line with the transcript.  It is all called out like this.]

Patrick McKenzie:  Hideho everybody. My name is Patrick McKenzie, and I might be better known as patio11 on the Internet. I’m a small software entrepreneur who, over the last couple of years, has run a consulting business largely focused on making software companies more money by delighting their users. I’ve invited my friend, Ramit Sethi, here today to talk to us a little bit about how you might be able to supercharge your freelancing and or consulting business. Ramit’s going to do a bit of a self intro now.

Ramit Sethi:  Thanks for having me, Patrick. My name is Ramit Sethi. I run a site called iwillteachyoutoberich.com. It’s a very modestly titled site, and I have a New York Times bestseller by the same name. My background is in psychology and persuasion. I help people use psychology to change their behavior and change other peoples’ behavior, whether it’s with money or with their careers or learning how to negotiate.

The way that I run my business is actually through information products. About 98 percent of my stuff is free, and then, occasionally, I will release a course. Usually, these courses take me a couple of years to develop, and then they tend to be pretty premium prices. If people join them, great. They might use them to earn more money or find a new job or find their first profitable idea.

And so, Patrick and I became friends, especially talking about marketing and pricing and just shaking our heads at some of the stuff we see on the Internet. Hopefully, we can share some of our stories from behind the scenes that we haven’t revealed before, which might help you raise your rates, get more business, and get better clients.

Patrick:  Yeah, and all this sounds very good. I think some people might feel a bit of disconnect in getting advice from us because for some reason, and this surprises me more than anybody. I seem to have fallen into that “Internet famous” thing, where people think that I’m some untouchable celebrity, which is absolutely not the case. And you are…

Ramit:  You are a celebrity to me, Patrick. I had to go through 10 assistants just to get this time with you on the phone.

Patrick:  [laughs] Those were all your assistants. You’re a New York Times bestselling author, but honestly, the techniques we’re going to talk about worked for us when we were much earlier in our careers. They helped get our careers to the point where they’re at right now. They’re generally applicable even to people who might not have an audience or any asset built up yet. (Although there is no time like the present to start building…)

Ramit:  Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. I think one of the biggest psychological barriers people see is they see advice from people, whether it be here or on Mixergy or any other place, and they say oh, well, that might work for him because he has an email list of 100,00 people or whatever it may be, but really, these techniques can be applied, maybe in a smaller setting.

If I say, and I’ll tell you how I collect 100,000 data points for one of my courses. You don’t need that. You can start with 20. It’s, frankly, very effective, and then at a certain point, you’ll be able to get 50 or 500 or 5,000. Patrick, what do you say we start off by actually addressing that main thing, which says, “Hey, sounds great, Patrick, but I’m not an Internet celebrity like you. How do I get my first customer?”  What would you tell them?

Getting Your First Job When You’re The Outsider In The Middle of Nowhere

Patrick:  Before anyone on the Internet knew who I was, before I even started commenting on the forum that I was on before the forum before the Hacker News (that I gained a lot of my audience through), and way before I had a blog, I worked at a technology incubator in central Japan.  I’m in Gifu Prefecture, and I love Gifu Prefecture. Gifu Prefecture’s contribution to the world is a particular type of bird [Patrick notes: ukai (鵜飼) – I had to look it up after the interview, apparently the English is “cormorant”] where you leash the bird, take the bird to the river, and have the bird fish for you… then you make the bird regurgitate the fish.  Gifu is not exactly, like, high tech central. [Patrick notes: This is a slight exaggeration for comedic effect – we might have more iPhone developers per capita in my town than almost any city in the world.  Ask me why some other day – it’s a great story.  In general, though, I generally tend to laugh at suggestions that I enjoy an anomalously privileged access to the IT industry.]

I got my first job in software because I was working at a tech incubator here, and somebody needed 3,000 PowerPoint slides translated about CAD software.  If you’re not familiar with CAD software and PowerPoint slides and technical translation, it’s the most boring job ever.

But I did good work on it. There’s no reason to work on stuff if you’re not going to do a good job on it. When my contract expired for that day job, and I was looking for the next thing for me, I went to the guy who I had over delivered on the 3,000 slide PowerPoint presentation and said, “Hey, I find myself needing a job in the next couple of months. I know you might not be hiring right now, but you know a lot more people in this neck of the woods than I do. If you know anyone who needs a programmer or needs a technical translator, would you mind introducing me to them?”

Ramit:  What happened then?

Patrick:  He took me to a meeting with two of his clients, and the meeting was…It was explained to me that the meeting was like a job interview, and it took me years to figure out what actually happened. But basically, behind the scenes, he went immediately to two of his clients and said, “Look, I have an American. He’s an engineer. He’s done great work for me. He’s got this list of successes behind him at his old company. You’re going to hire him as a favor to me.”

And so, we went to this “job interview,” and I thought I was doing the whole interview dance.  I wondered why they were not asking many questions of me. We got to the end of it, and I said “I’m a little uncertain of where we are in the conversation right now.”  They said “You were hired before you walked in the room. We’re just getting to know you right now.” This surprised me.

When I tell that story to Americans, people say that, “Wow. Those Japanese people, they’re so weird and wacky.” But honestly, man, the truth of the world is that that is how a lot of jobs are allocated in America, too. It’s not based on the whole resume dance and the “Did you meet the 16 bullet points we put in our advertisement. Send in a resume. Maybe if we like you, we’re going to interview you.”

There are lots of jobs passed along on the private communication level where you’re scratching somebody else’s back that’s done something for you. So definitely, if you’re just starting to get into the business, whether you’re looking for a job or you’re looking for a freelancer/contracting/consulting engagement, find the people who have some reason to respect you, to feel a little bit of a social obligation towards you. And just ask them, “Hey, can you help me out on this?”

Ramit:  I love that because I love the part about oh, those crazy Japanese people. Because we always hear these great stories, and then the first thing we naturally psychologically do is create an us versus them. We say that could work, but XYZ. I call that the special snowflake syndrome: “That could work, but I work at a nonprofit.”  Or “…but I work in Kansas.”

You worked in the most remote place I could imagine, and it worked for you. One of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you was I want to expose what happens at high levels of business to everybody. I want to open that veil.  It’s funny, because the way…for example, the way that jobs are gotten is very similar to the way you get clients.

There’s something I always teach my students, which is 85 percent of the work is done before you ever sit down in the room.

Patrick:  Absolutely.

Ramit:  That applies to a negotiation, that applies to getting clients, that applies to getting a job. Many of my students who go through my career course, by the time they sit down for an interview, it’s not an interview. It’s a discussion. By the way, it’s a discussion with someone they’ve already been out to coffee with two or three times.

Think about the caliber of that discussion or the contours. They’re completely different than you genuflecting and saying please, give me a job, please. Instead, it’s like the job is assumed. Now let’s discuss the details. Let’s actually talk about that in terms of clients, Patrick. You’ve done a lot of client work. I’ve done some client work as well, and I’ve taught a lot of people how to get clients.

When it comes to getting your first one, two, or three clients, what are some important things to note, and what are some common mistakes that people make?

Don’t Underbid to Get Early Clients – It Hurts Your Pocketbook And Credibility

Patrick:  The most common mistake I see when I’m talking to other engineers is that people radically undercharge for the first client.  This often comes from a perceived desire that goes like: ”I need to make my bones before I can start charging what I’m worth, so I’ll do this for you for really cheap, 10 bucks an hour or whatever.”

I was similarly overly needy with my first few clients.  I undervalued myself in the first couple of engagements. We’re going to talk about pricing in general later [Patrick notes: upcoming in the second installment of this interview], but you don’t want to ever come off as needy:

• It will hurt your financial situation in a very direct manner.
• It will also compromise your client relationship, because when a customer gets something for $10, they assume it is worth other things which cost $10.

$10 is not a meaningful amount of money to any business. [Patrick notes: I hear you, bootstrappers – I started a business with $60.  But after you’re selling something, $10 which buys something additive to revenue is a joke.] If you’re charging Starbucks latte money for your consulting offering, you’re never going to get buy‑in at the CEO level of a software company to get your initiatives adopted. You’re going to be treated like somebody’s kid’s nephew’s brother and only allowed to make copies.

If you actually wanted to make copies, you can get a low skill job anywhere to do that. But we got into this business to be respected for our advice and to be valued and to actually do stuff that matters. Charging 10 bucks an hour is not on the easy, straightforward path to doing stuff that matters. People that do stuff that matters have a ground floor which is higher and then they go up from there. [Patrick notes: I think there’s actually an interesting “social justice” type of point to make here, in that to the extent that there exist durable social classes in America, one quick way you can identify them is whose ground floor starts at minimum wage or menial gruntwork and who never has to do that, even when they’re unskilled labor, due to a combination of credentialing and connections.  That’s neither here nor there, though, and I almost hesitate to mention it because I think “Waily waily, I have neither credentials nor connections, life is unfair.” tends to obscure choices that we can make to better our situations.]

Ramit:  I want to emphasize a couple of things you mentioned. One, if you’re charging 5, 10, 20 bucks an hour, it’s very, very difficult to go from that to charging 200, 300 an hour or 10,000 a week.  It’s very difficult to make that transition. If you do it when you come in, that can happen. But going from one level to another is extremely difficult.

[Patrick notes: This is, if anything, an understatement.  There exist multiple paradigm shifts which separate $20 an hour from $X0k a week, and it is vanishingly unlikely that any client will make that transition with you.  Thumbnail sketch: You can get from $20 to $100 by getting serious as a professional, and you get from $100 to $200 by getting really good as a professional (or working in a high-demand speciality), and then somewhere between say $150 and a weekly rate in the tens of thousands you probably repositioned your offering such that it is no longer directly comparable to what you were doing before.  Concrete example: you can sell Rails programming at $20 an hour (to bad clients, as a newbie freelancer who screams please-take-advantage-of-me), and then you can sell Rails for $100 an hour (baseline clueful Rails programmer in 2012), and then you can sell Rails at $150 an hour (intermediate/senior consultant on a strategically important project, say).  Can you sell Rails at $50k a week?  I’m going to go with “almost certainly yes.”  I think there are probably people who do that, and if you listened to them pitch clients, they would speak a language that holds very little in common with what you hear from a $100 an hour Rails developer.  Want to speak that language?  Keep reading for some thoughts.  (It will also help to get pretty darn good at Rails… though I think most people in my audience probably overestimate how skilled you have to be to move up that ladder.)]

Ramit: I happen to know that because on a product side, the first product I ever sold, the information product, was a $4.95 eBook. One of the last products I sold was a $12,000 course. I’ve gone the entire gamut of information products. When we talk about pricing, I’ll go into more detail on that. But suffice it to say, it’s extremely difficult to climb that ladder.

Never Work For Free As A Software Developer (Asterix)

Ramit: The other thing you mentioned is how many people go in saying, “I’ll just do this first, and I need to make my bones.” And you know what? There is a time and a place to do free work. I do believe in free work occasionally. But I always tell people if you’re going to do free work, make sure you are clear about your messaging.

For example, let’s say that it was my first time out there getting my first client. Let’s say I just want to build a portfolio so at least I have something to point at. Now, I’m generally not a fan of free work, but I can be strategically. This is what I would say to the client. I would say look, my normal consulting rate is $85 an hour, or whatever format of pricing you’re using.

However, I really like what you’re doing, and frankly, I want to build up my portfolio. I would be willing to do this for three weeks for free if, in exchange, you agree that if I do an extraordinary job, then we can discuss working at my normal rate. Well, who’s going to say no to that? If you do an extraordinary job, everyone’s going to want to pay you.

But in this case, yes, you are working for free. But you are explaining why. That is so important. It separates you from, frankly, the people who are new. They’re new, and you can tell that they’re asking to be taken advantage, because they’re like OK, I’ll work for free. It’ll be fine. Somehow, I’ll go from free to $500 an hour. Doesn’t work. Explain your messaging. Explain your positioning, and people will respect you way more for it.

Patrick:  I’ve got to be totally honest with you. I don’t think I would ever work for free as a developer, just because of the way the market is laid out right now. You just don’t need to. Hypothetically, if you’re going in for free, you should have a larger upside than just having a pot-at-the-end-of-rainbow outcome be working at your full rate. You might make it a condition of the free work that the works gets discussed publicly.  This gets you a public case study that you can use for your portfolio and the social proof that you have done this meaningful work for another company in the industry.

[Patrick notes: You will then aggressively leverage this portfolio when attempting to get work at your current billing rates.  I have projects which I did at $X per week which I will use to justify new $5X per week projects at new clients.  If clients ever picked up on the discrepancy – which would require me being stupid like mentioning that somewhere publicly… wait… d’oh – I would say something like “My previous client took a chance on me earlier in my career, when I didn’t have a track record of delivering results to people just like them.  I now have that track record, which is why you are paying the sticker rate.  After I deliver a win for you, if you give me permission to mention it publicly, it will go into a presentation just like this when I tell another person why they have to pay $10X rather than $5X.]

Patrick: In addition to that publicity being a benefit from you, that the public/private distinction there makes a very natural thing to charge around. You mentioned that 98% of your material is free. I do a whole heck of a lot of stuff for free. I’ll speak at conferences for free. My blog posts are free. I do open source software, which is free.

If you want me to do something so competitively sensitive that you don’t want me shouting it from the rooftops to anyone I can get to listen to me, then that always has a price tag attached to it.

Research The Customer To Win The Engagement Before The Interview Starts

Ramit:  That’s right. I want to talk about one of the secret sauces of my business, and it’s something that actually nobody really cares about. People think they care about it, but they don’t care about it. It is the research that I do going into building a product or getting a client. And I know you’ve done this as well.

It’s funny. The other day, I was asking people, “Hey, if I speak at South by Southwest, what would be a good talk?” Somebody wrote back on Twitter saying, “You should talk about your research methodology.” I said that would be great… for the three people who would attend.

Research is what allows me to charge 100 times what my competition charges… but nobody cares. Nobody wants to see [the hard work which goes into] how the sausage is made.  They just want to see the shiny tactic – the A/B test where you tested the color of this button.  [Patrick notes: I have to tweak Ramit’s nose here and mention that he got a 60% increase in sales from A/B testing literally in the week which we recorded this interview.  But hey, I sympathize with his general point that people want to hear quick fixes rather than actually doing the work.  Oh, let me bang my favorite drum – how many of y’all actually run A/B tests?  They’re Ramit’s mental characterization of a magic-bullet no-effort-required diet-pill-of-business-success and I can’t even get people to swallow the freaking pill.]

Ramit: Let’s actually talk for a few minutes about customer development and research going into a product.

I’ll talk about on the product side, and I know you’ve done quite a bit of work on the client side as well. For me, when I build information products, they can be anything from an eBook all the way up to a full‑featured, eight week course with gigabytes and gigabytes of video and thousands of pages of material. So when I start off, for example, with my course on earning more…

I have a course called Earn 1K, and it’s about how to take your skills and turn them into freelancing income by getting multiple clients and earning 1K. Many of my successful students earn 5K or 10K in a month on the side. So, very relevant to the people listening here. When I started off doing this research, I actually didn’t even think of doing an “earn money” product. [Patrick notes: Ramit started in the personal finance space.  Read I Will Teach You To Be Rich, but his wheelhouse would be passive investing, creating systems to move money around, and maybe a bit of optimization about e.g. credit card rewards.]

But when I went on book tour [for IWTYTBR], I went to all these cities around the country and I asked people, “Hey, what do you wish I wrote more about?” Almost to a person, they said, “I love your stuff on automation, but I really want to know how to learn more money.” I was surprised. I was like, really? Isn’t that scammy?

They were like, “I don’t care. I just want to know how to make more money.” And so, I started doing research, and I pulled my team together. The first thing we did was basically just what we call cloud research. We wanted to understand the dynamics of the market.

There’s about five or six ways to earn money.

You can negotiate your salary. You can get passive income, which for most people, never works. You can get freelance income. You can blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  [Patrick notes: Ramit would probably round out this list with 1) buy real estate and rent it to people, 2) invest in the public capital markets, and 3) start an honest-to-goodness business.]

We looked at it, and we’re like, “OK.” We think we’re really good at freelancing, and we think that the market is particularly bad at that. And so we started asking people survey questions.

Now, you can get good survey data with as few as 20 responses.  For all the engineers listening, listen closely: Statistical significance is irrelevant when you’re doing customer research. I don’t give a damn about P values and anything like that. It’s almost all qualitative. That’s what I care about. I want to hear the words they use.  [Patrick notes: Engineer reporting for duty as audience stand-in!  Oof, critical hit, advice totally warranted by actual experience!]

We started off by saying…We didn’t say here’s a key insight as well. When you’re doing customer research, I’ve seen a lot of early surveys. They’ll say something like this. They’ll ask a fake question. They’ll say, “Ramit, if I told you I could solve all your storage needs in five hours for less than 25 picodollars, would that interest you?” [Patrick notes: Ramit is making a reference to Tarsnap, which is a technically jawdropping backup service which has abysmally bad pricing.  Ramit does not know what Tarsnap is or why he’d care about it – he literally only knows it “We should bring up an example of how engineers are terribly bad about connecting prices to business value, like that picodollar bullshit.  Seriously.  They don’t even price gestures to the dinner we are eating potato chips in picodollars.  And you know why?  Because if you went into any restaurant and offered to buy potato chips for a penny apiece – which is, like, a lot of picodollars, right? — they’d throw you out.”]

Ramit: Look, guys, [asking leading questions] is BS. That is the worst type of marketing. Because you don’t really want the answer. You’re trying to sell them. Instead, you should ask open-ended questions like “Tell me about your biggest frustration. Tell me what you’ve done in the last six months to improve your financial situation.

“Have you ever thought about earning money? If so, how have you thought about it? Have you ever tried it? What happened?”

We start to understand the words that they used. We collected approximately 50,000 data points, through everything from chat, email, surveys, one-on-one interviews, phone calls.

Now, you don’t have to do 50,000.  Honestly, 100 gets you farther than most people do. [Patrick notes: I think talking to ten individual people who could actually buy your product prior to writing a line of code puts you ahead of the curve, judging from my inbox.  You’ll learn a million times more from 10 people than you’ll learn from your IDE when coding a product built for nobody.] Now what happens is most people will retreat into a room for six months, they’ll build their product or their service and realize that they got it completely wrong. Just to give you a sense, Patrick, for us, Earn 1K on the side. It took us six months to figure that out that title: “Earn 1K”. Why didn’t we call it “Earn 10K”?

Because most people don’t believe that they can earn 10K, even if they can. On the side, because most people believe if they have to earn more money, they have to quit their job and the start the next Google with venture capital. That’s not true. The research is really what allows you to distinguish yourself from your competition so that when someone comes to your site. They start nodding their head uncontrollably, and they say yes, and price becomes a mere triviality. I’m curious if you’ve had that experience.

How To Parlay Interests And Expertise Into First Consulting Gigs

Patrick:  Absolutely. I told you how I got my particular job in the past, but I didn’t talk about my first consulting client yet. I used to be active on forum for lots of SEOs, search engine optimizers, who often, they have a side business themselves or their main source of income is publishing a particular thing and then getting traffic to it via SEO.

Many of them are less than technical or they have enough skills to, like, hack together a site in WordPress, but they don’t know how to take that to the next level. The natural engineer thing to do in this circumstance is to ask someone OK, what are your technical problems? Oh, you have problems with WordPress sites? I’ve done WordPress sites before. Let’s talk WordPress, WordPress, WordPress.

No SEO wakes up in the morning and thinks, “Damn, I have a WordPress problem.” They wake up in the morning and say, “Damn, I have a business problem.”

[Patrick notes: This is generalizable to any group of business owners.  Even software companies.  Pick a software CEO you admire, I can guarantee you that they don’t wake up with software problems.  Heck, freebie for you: solve identification and sourcing of highly talented programmers and every software CEO I know will write you a check for last month’s gross revenues.  After hiring, the next biggest problem most of them have is selling more of the software they have already written.]

Patrick: The SEO continues: “My business only made however many thousand dollars last month, and if I could get more pages on the website, then I might have more traffic and be able to drive more revenue for it.  But I don’t see a clear way to doing that without me doing all the writing myself. “

After you can talk to them and establish that rapport, that you are actually listening to the problems that they are talking about, you can suggest how to address those problems in ways that you are uniquely capable of doing.

I might tell the SEO, who is a potential client: “You’ve gotten this level of traffic so far with your existing site. You want to double that over the course of the next year. You were saying that the roadblocks that are stopping you are a) you’re on an outdated architecture where you, personally, have to write everything, and b) it’s been impossible to find someone who is a subject matter expert at this who can also make web pages, because that combination of interests just does not exist.”

Ramit:  Yes. I’m nodding my head right now. I’m like yes.

Patrick:  Yeah. “I totally understand that it is impossible to find someone who is both good enough of a journalist in the space to work for a genuine published magazine and also can edit HTML pages. I have an idea for you. I’m going to make a CMS for your website. That’s just a page that they can go into, like WordPress, and they can do their writing like they do so well.  The CMS will ship it over to you, and you figure out which business model that you experimented with will work well with this content. “[Patrick notes: In context, I’m suggesting that the SEO will either have in-house advertising, display advertising, an affiliate/lead-gen relationship with another publisher, or products of their own with which to monetize marginal traffic.]

“You click two buttons to hook it up to that page, and boom. That’s it. It’s live on the Internet, and Google will start sending people to it. Does that sound like it’s something motivational to you?”

By this point, the SEO is going “Hell, yes.” I’m like, great. Now this project, I think I can deliver the minimum version of it in two weeks from now. Two weeks from now, you get the CMS. You can start having your magazine quality writers putting stuff in, which will look beautiful, have pictures on it, and start generating traffic on Google.

By that point, everything else about the engagement is a detail. They want it.

Ramit:  That’s right. They want it. That is the number one thing. Do they want it? Not what does your website look like, not how big is your button, not how optimized did you get your conversion funnel. Most of us could focus more on building something that people want.

That comes with the early research. I love the way you talked about how you communicate with a client, because it shows you really listen.

Actual Experience From Someone Who Pays $X00,000 Yearly For Engineers

Ramit: I want to emphasize something, especially for the engineers listening to the call. I am a client that I work with engineers. I have engineers on staff.

Ramit: I pay them pretty well. I have passed on hiring engineers who may be more technically proficient, but they didn’t understand what I wanted. Honestly, guys, as a business owner, do you think I care if you’re using this technology or that? I just don’t give a damn [about technology]. I really don’t.

What I care about is, is my business going to generate revenue? Am I serving my customers? Is my website going to go down, and I have to be the one who tells you? Or can I go out on a Friday night and not worry about my business?

Those are the things I care about as a client. I’m reminded of a great story that somebody…one entrepreneur told on a Mixergy interview with Andrew Warner, and is it a great story. He was in the relationship market. His buddy actually started an information product in the relationship space, for women. [Patrick notes: No clue what interview this is referencing – feel free to drop me a note if you remember it.  By the way, you should be listening to Mixergy.  It is what the New York Times would produce if the NYT cared about producing value for people in our line of work.  It occurs to me that mentioning the NYT in the same breath with Mixergy is likely the most positive thing I’ll ever say… about the NYT.]

Ramit: The guy was doing very well. I believe he was making either 40k or 400k a month. He was doing very well. This guy got pretty interested, and he said, “Hey, I’ve got to take a look at this market.” He spent about four or five months really doing deep research. Lots of stuff, including ad words, including customer research, including buying all the other products.

He finally built his own product. Within two or three months, it was making more than his friend’s. It never stopped. I happen to know that that business is now a gigantic business. Why? What separated him from his friends?

His friend called him, frustrated, like “Hey, I don’t understand why your site’s making more than mine.” He said that he had found some very subtle things in the research that his friend had not. I will tell you that we had that same exact thing happen. When I built my Find Your Dream Job course, it took us about three or months to build the first version, and we’re pretty experienced at this.

When we went out to test it with about 20 people: The first person failed. The second person started crying. And the third failed as well.  At first I thought, “They’re just dumb. They don’t know what they’re doing.” No, then five people failed. Then 10. It took us about…I believe it was 15 or 16 versions to get it right. When we looked back, we had skipped over some very subtle things in the research process.

Once we got those right, sales skyrocketed.  [Patrick notes: cough read writeup in Fortune Magazine cough] I’ll just say that it’s very, very important to understand the words that your client or your customer is using and be able to explain how and why you can help them.

Patrick:  I think we don’t pay nearly enough attention to the exact words people use. Maybe we would if we came from a communications background. Nothing motivates people like having their own words repeated right back to them, which is something that you should try to do more often. It’s just an easy conversational hack to sound more persuasive.

[Patrick notes: Engineers take heed: your clients will often make mistakes about engineering reality when talking to you.  You will feel the urge to correct their misconceptions about engineering reality, perhaps by rewording their requests such that they match the way the world actually works.  Don’t do this. You will never delight a client by teaching them what a web service actually is.  You will absolutely delight clients by mentioning that the “web service” (cough iframe cough) which you implemented for them, allowing them to get data from System A onto System B (cough displayed on pages served by System A, they never talk to each other cough), provably increased sales by $200,000 in the last quarter.]

Patrick: But you have to make your prospective clients feel like you understand where they’re coming from. And that starts with both understanding where they’re coming from, and then communicating like you understand where they’re coming from. Even if you’re building a website for someone, it’s not just a website, right?

There is some particular need that they have for that website, whether it’s for their business purposes or because a lot of business owners are very personally invested in their business. You need to communicate to them that you understand that they are personally invested and that you are also capable of treating this website like it’s important, like it’s more than just bits on a server somewhere.

Here’s a hypothetical example for you. I live in Japan. I happen to have lots of Asian friends, so I just know that there is one particular niche market in America, that if I really wanted to stop my business right now and start a totally new market, I could do it. A lot of people who might not be English as first language themselves have a worry that they are going to have children who do not learn how to speak their native language, and as a result, will never be able to communicate with their grandmothers.

And so, there’s this market in America for schools to teach the children the language of their parents, basically. [Patrick notes: The term of art is “heritage language school.”  I think I probably butchered it during the interview… I don’t get much practice speaking my own heritage language out loud these days, what can I say.] If you’re building websites for those schools, you’re not really building websites, so much as you are selling the person who runs that school on getting a website done.  She [Patrick notes: overwhelmingly female and underserved by technology available to her, where have I heard this song before…] is generally exquisitely sensitive to the emotional needs of her clients, who are typically mothers.

Rather than focusing on the technical aspects of the project — it’s going to have pages and an admin system and a this and a that – you sell that you understand the business and the emotions driving the business.  The business purpose here is that success for your business, the school, is primarily dominated by how many new students it can enroll.  [Patrick notes: This is overwhelmingly the case for almost all educational businesses which do not receive direct state subsidy, by the way, from “piano tutor” all the way through “second tier universities.”  First tier universities are anomalies in that they’re actually choosy about who they let in.] I understand that parents enroll students in your school because they feel that there is a connection to a trustworthy source of authentic information about their heritage.

[Patrick notes: This is the money-line for this particular pitch.  I manage to execute on a gets-to-the-heart-of-the-business line that good in only one out of three or so of my pitches.  If I get a line that good into the interview, the engagement is sold.  I can even point to identifiable moments of time when a company has hit me with one of these, and seriously, in the full knowledge that I’m being successfully sold to, if you get me that well I’m in and damn the price.]

Patrick: I might hypothetically continue “Because I do lots of work in this space, I can deliver a website that embodies trust, authenticity, and tradition for you.” If you can present that pitch, you will be 10,000 times better than anybody who might be better at technical infrastructure, better at the design, whatever. If you can empathize with them on where they’re coming from, you’ll be better off.

Patrick:  In the same fashion: you were asking earlier about some problems people have in their first couple of clients. I was a little too overeager for work, and I worked with people whose businesses I understood on an intellectual level but did not understand on the feel it in my bones level. I’ve since gotten a bit more choosy about that.

Almost all my customers run software businesses. But, at one point, I worked with an eCommerce company, which was also a startup, so I thought “close enough.”  They were an eCommerce company in the men’s fashion space. Let’s say they sell dress shirts. Ramit, you’re a pretty nice dressed guy, but I’m wearing a t‑shirt right now with a startup logo on it.  Haute couture is not my strongest skill.

When someone says “OK, you need a fine-cut silk, black shirt,” [Patrick notes: is that even a thing?  Heck if I know.  I’m pretty sure they come in “silk” and “black”, give me a third attribute you can group shirts by.], my eyes just glaze over.  My ignorance was even hurting my ability to execute on parts of the engagement that I actually understood, like say site architecture for SEO purposes. I literally told the client “You’re going to silo some pages around that. like, fine silk shirt, blah, blah, or blah, blah, or blah, blah.”  With the blahs in there.

My client has made this his life’s work. You could literally see him disengaging from the conversation as I was dismissive about the subject. I was kicking myself. So one thing that I did to get better, in terms of that particular client relationship, when I realized that I really didn’t know anything that I was talking about, even when it was material to his business, was to say, “Look, you know me. I’m not going to lie. I’m not exactly a fine dresser. Can you just tell me, a geek who knows nothing about this, what is the one thing I should learn about men’s shirts?  If I only learn 10 minutes of material about dressing myself in my entire life, what would those 10 minutes be?”

Bam, his eyes lit up. His life’s work is men’s shirts. Do you think he likes talking about men’s shirts? Oh, heck yes. He loves to share that knowledge to people. (If I was savvier about it, I would have asked for that at the initial interview.)  [Patrick notes: If a client talks about nothing but themselves for the entire interview, you will get the job. They’ll remember you as being tremendously responsive to their needs, and people care a heck of a lot more about themselves and their businesses than they care about you and your business.  Conversely, if an interview is ever the you-you-you show, you probably will lose that engagement.]

How Startups Fail At Communicating With Customers

Ramit:  It’s amazing how powerful it is when you actually put yourself inside the mind of your prospect. I want to talk about this for a few minutes. You see very similar copy on most startup websites, similarly terrible. Here’s what it says. It says easy, fast, free. Those three words should never, ever, ever be the headlines or sub‑headlines on your page.

Do you know why? They don’t mean anything. Easy? What does that mean? When you say easy to me, to me, that means I don’t have to check my text messages on a Thursday night when I’m out with my friends at a bar. To a 45 year‑old mother of two, it means something very different. I don’t have to learn this weird HTML syntax with these brackets. [Patrick notes: Ramit co-founded PBWiki.]

Easy is not a descriptive word. It’s a word that engineers use or even amateur copywriters because they don’t have anything else to say. Why? Because they’ve been lazy. They haven’t actually figured out the words that people use. People don’t say I was really looking for an easy, fast, and free solution. They say I was looking for a way to earn more money, and I was sick of getting scammed.

Therefore, that’s why if you go to one of my pages, you’ll see the fact that I was on the Today Show or the fact that I’ve written for the New York Times. That’s not just there to feed my very large ego. It’s there because the customer indicated that it was important to them. I’ll give you another story about communicating with your clients.

Doing $80k of Engagements In 8 Weeks In The Super-Lucrative Field Of Violin Tutoring

Ramit: One of my star students is a young woman named Jackie, and she lives in the Midwest, and she’s a violin instructor. Now, she’s quite good at violin, but that wasn’t really what interested me. The fact was she had clients, but she came to me saying, “I want to learn how to grow my business.”

And so, she had a few clients, but it was just like middling, and it wasn’t doing very well. I said, “Who’s your client? Who’s your client?” This is where most people stop dead. They say, “People who are looking for storage solutions.” Oh, really? What type of person? What gender? What age? Other people will say, “I’m building a product on love.” “Oh, really? Who’s your customer?” “Oh women between the ages of 27 to 54.”

A 27 year‑old woman has nothing in common with a 54 year‑old woman when it comes to love, clothes, or virtually anything else. The way they describe love is completely different. Her customers were kids, parents, moms, dads, everybody. I said no, no, no, no, no. I worked with her. This is what happened. I’ll cut to the chase.

In eight weeks, she was able to generate $81,000. How did she do that? She quickly found out who her customer was. Any idea who the customer was, Patrick?

Patrick:  I’ve read this story from the year before, so I have a good idea. But want to spoil it for the rest of the people?

Ramit:  The customer was not the 10 year‑old kid. It was the mother of the 10 year‑old kid. By the way, that mother tended to be ethnic, tended to be Asian. Not a surprise when you think about it. But this isn’t obvious prior to starting to do the research. Now, by the way, what does this Asian mother want? She doesn’t really just want her kid to play like Yo‑Yo Ma.

Why does she want that? Because she wants little Timmy to get into Harvard. And so, when you deeply understand that, then everything about your positioning, your marketing can change. For example, imagine a new testimonial which says: “My son used to be really shy and withdrawn. Now, after going to Jackie’s class, he’s so talkative. He’s made so many friends. I can already see his grades going up because of the new discipline that he’s learned.”

[Patrick notes: I know every engineer in the room just got the willies, because you think that using that testimonial to sell violin tutoring is somehow unethical.  It is perfectly ethical if Little Timmy’s mom actually reported that as her experiences.  This is, in fact, how middle-class parents justify virtually every extracurricular.  You have probably used a variant of this exact sales pitch yourself, except it was probably promoting video games rather than violin.  Video games help teach problem solving and hand-eye coordination, not just that you should Spirit Rush to Charm/Deathfire Grasp the Corki outside of Baron for the easy ace so you can push mid for the gg, right?

(Man, that might be my best double coded joke ever.)

(P.S which somewhat spoils the joke: If you’ve cottoned onto the fact that that is actually a totally comprehensible statement and feel repulsed by it welcome to being every client ever.  Those of you who play League of Legends just went “Dude, what’s wrong with you, was Spirit Fire on cooldown?” and those of you who don’t are zoning out almost as fast as a has-money-but-can’t-program client does when told about Ruby DSLs and test driven development.)

<Sidenote type=”semiPolitical unfortunateReality” forwardLookingPromise=”thisBarelyEverHappensOnThisBlog”>

P.S. To people who might have a Little Timmy in their life: from the perspective of someone who knows how the admissions game is played, Little Timmy should really be looking for ways to sound like anything other than Asian-smart-kid as possible, because Harvard has a declared policy of racial discrimination, and because in addition to racially discriminating against Asians they have a particular narrative stereotype of an Asian who they think they have quite enough of already.  That stereotype gets good grades, plays violin/piano, and has no personality.  I mention this to accurately summarize the preferences of bureaucrats whose professional competency is racial discrimination rather than to agree with them.  “Talkative” helps him – quite a bit!  I would actively avoid mentioning violin at all… unless you can write with humor (and a touch of pique) about how you abominably suck at violin, hate the stereotype, and enjoy subverting things, because humor and subversion play much better in admissions essays, and because humor/subversion are good mental hooks to make you stand out against the other Asian applicants you’re explicitly judged against whereas “smart, good grades, violin player” do not provide hooks.

Even if you haven’t won genetic lottery that Harvard optimizes for, it is still within your power to market your existing product offering (and/or tweak it to make it more marketable) such that you can improve your chances of passing their (biased) decisionmaking process.  I think that is largely a more productive use of a single student’s time than lamenting that Harvard’s admission department is unfair (which it is, no question, but if you really want to go to Harvard I’d suggest betting your chips on making you more acceptable to Harvard than making Harvard stop systematized racial discrimination in admissions in time to benefit yourself).

</Sidenote>

But that’s neither here nor there, from the perspective of selling Little Timmy’s mother on the value of violin lessons.  She wants to buy violin lessons.  OK.  Customers wants do not always align with their needs — often, selling them successfully involves a) understanding their wants, b) getting to the root issues behind them, and c) proposing to deliver solutions to those root issues by — wham, switcheroo — giving them what they actually need.

Some of my most successful projects were exactly not what the client first thought of engaging me to do.]

Ramit: Wow! That speaks directly to the heart of what her clients want. By the way, it’s not a lie. It’s completely accurate. This is marketing at its best, where you are actually listening to the customer and then delivering value on what they want, totally ethically.

So, for all of us, when we’re writing worthless copy like easy, fast, free, stop. You’re being lazy. Go out and talk to your customers and figure out their real pain points and write you don’t have to check your pager every Friday and Saturday night. That is a very, very powerful message.

Or “silk shirts that don’t wrinkle when you’re getting off the subway.” That is very powerful to the businessman in Manhattan. All right? So that’s all I’ve got to say about copy when it comes to relating to your customer.

Patrick:  I totally agree with that. Also, something that people don’t realize is that this is particularly easy for engineers to do. They think I am trivially capable of doing this, or I am trivially capable of using from free open source solution for doing for their…Therefore, no one else in the world wants it.

My original claim to quote, unquote fame on the Internet is a little program called Bingo Card Creator. It makes Bingo cards for elementary school teachers.

To this day, despite the fact that I’ve been publishing about this for six years with a constantly updated stats graph that shows, like, $200,000 plus of Bingo cards getting sold, people ask me: how could anyone possibly need that? You can do it in Microsoft Excel in, like, five minutes. All you need to do is know how to use Microsoft Excel, like someone that has an engineering degree.

People with engineering degrees don’t teach elementary English. That’s just a fact of life. The reason I know that teachers really genuinely need that is because I’ve talked to literally thousands of teachers by this point, and I know that they have a very particular need for getting ready for class tomorrow.

It isn’t bingo card software. They have a particular need to teach a particular lesson plan that they already have laid out about, say, the American presidents, and they want an easy to use activity that they can just slide into that. And, at no point, do they start thinking of OK, I can open up Microsoft Excel and start scripting up some quick macros, and only two hours from now, I will have something that works for my kids.

They want something that they can go to their local Google, type “American presidents”, pause for a second and remember back to their class about incorporating more fun activities in the classroom, type in “bingo”, hit enter, and get something on the first page that works. And that’s fundamentally why that business works.

Ramit:  Love it. What you said when you said like, I can just open up Excel with my extremely simple knowledge of macros betrays a complete lack of understanding about the customer. In fact, this is what I want…I’d like to talk about stepping out of your own comfort zone and understanding the other people, the people that you’re trying to serve.

Most people are not builders. Engineers, understand that. Most people do not talk or think like builders. They do not want to sit around and build a bunch of stuff. I’m talking about myself. I hate building stuff, except the stuff that I’m really good at, building courses and stuff like that. Do you think if you put a bunch of LEGOs in front of me…I’m going to pick that box up and throw it straight in the trash.

I just don’t care. I don’t like it. I don’t want to build a macro. I don’t want to do all that stuff. The second thing is I have a limited amount of time, and if your customer, for example, has a family, they have extremely limited amounts of time. So for them, paying 5, 10, 20, 100 dollars is nothing. Because to them, they get…especially if you’ve segmented your customer to people who have income and are willing to spend it, as opposed to people who have no income and have unlimited time and unlimited technical skills…

Hint to anyone building stuff for other engineers, who haven’t segmented out their pricing or positioning, that’s bad. I like to talk about this. I was just reading something on Hacker News. There was a comment about email newsletters, and the funny comment to me was who still uses email newsletters? It just made me smile, because it’s a classic, classic mistake we make of thinking that our world is everyone’s world. Just to give you a sense, I make over 98 percent of my revenues through email.

Patrick:  I facepalmed quite a bit when I heard that line, too.  [Patrick notes: I’ve sold a couple hundred thousand dollars of software with email campaigns.  I will – hopefully by the end of September – have a product offering to help software companies do this without having to bring me in for consulting.  If you want to hear more, give me your email address.]

Ramit:  Yeah, you almost cannot pay me money on my site. My conversion funnels are pretty sophisticated, and we’ve built them and tested them for many, many, many years. Email works very well. However, in this day and age, when people talk about oh, you’ve got to get on social, got to get on Facebook, get a Twitter account, my suggestion for people trying to get your first three clients, forget everything that will not immediately get you three clients.

So, if you’re putting up a Twitter feed, ask yourself how is this going to get me clients? And then you’re going to start realizing that you’re giving yourself BS answers, like, I’m getting into the conversation. I need to be at the top of mind. Really? Is that going to help you get three clients or is reaching out to 10 people with custom emails, showing how you already understand their business and suggesting a couple things, is that going to help?

There are the things we talk about in earn 1k, but you can do them anywhere. When I first started off writing copy about four or five years ago, I started studying the really, somewhat dark arts of long copy pages. My sales pages are approximately 40 to 50 pages long.

People say, “Ramit, that doesn’t work.” Really? I have the data. I know for a fact that it does work. In fact, there’s a very sophisticated marketer. His emails are about 20 or 30 pages long. People said [laughs] who reads these emails? Does anyone actually read this? He laughed and said [laughs] only the buyers.

Patrick:  [laughs] I love that line.

Ramit:  It’s really incumbent upon you to stop thinking that your worldview is everyone’s worldview and realize that marketing works for a reason. As one of my professors said…in communication, she said, the value in this material is not in the difficulty of it. It’s in the usefulness of it. It’s not important how hard it is, what you’re doing. It’s important how useful it is to your customer.

Patrick:  This ties back into how…really understanding who, exactly, can afford to buy your product or service offering is, and how important that is. For example, I’ve slagged on social media quite a bit, and I have not slagged on it nearly enough. The person who has the authority to buy your offering at, say, a company which…

By the way, guys, for all the engineers in the audience, you sell engineering services to for profit companies because they are the only people who can pay actual professional engineer rates. There are vanishingly few private individuals and or non-profits who will actually pay engineers the going rate.

Anyhow, so who at the company has the authority to make the decision to bring you on? It’s probably not someone who has a Twitter feed. People look at my business, and they might naively think that I get lots and lots of leads off the blog or on Hacker News, but if I’m getting brought in by, like, the CEO level, or the head of product or the head of marketing at a company, they’re probably, well, a little bit older and have…They would tell you in so many words, I’ve got better things to do with my time than to stay on Hacker News.

I don’t, apparently. But [laughs] I don’t meet those type of people typically off Hacker News. I’ll often meet them at something like a conference that’s organized for the explicit purpose of generating more sales for software companies, which by the way, people who pay $2,000 to go for a conference whose tag line is “Sell More Software” are often interested in paying money to sell more software.  [Patrick notes: I was thinking, in particular, of the Business of Software conference, but I’ll bet you there are a dozen of these in any industry you care to name.  If your prospective clients go to those conferences, you should probably try to go, too.]

They’re meeting people for conversations in between the…the lectures at that place is a great use of my time, I have found. “Who still uses email and newsletters?”  Gahhhh… multi‑billion dollar industries are multi‑billion dollar industries for a reason. You need to have an appropriate level of business awarenesss to back up your technology skills [and if you had that level of awareness, you would not be skeptical about email.]

I would not have a business but for being technologically good at what I do. I would not have a business if I was not able to actually deliver on the things that I offer to my customers. But there’s a huge business knowledge that needs to be present to also successfully run a business.

That starts with knowing the market outside of your narrow specialty. If you don’t already know what businesses are likely to have websites that drive huge amounts of their total business value, then you’re not going to be successful at selling people on engagement to improve their website such that their business gets more revenue.

You need to know, like, what the transactional model for the business looks like. Take two industries which look similar to each other, say insurance or retail finance. Thank God I don’t actually have to do work with either of these.  But play along for a second [Patrick notes: I don’t endorse the following conclusions about this, just making an example]: if you want to sell engagements to these guys, you should understand e.g. that an insurance company might have a very, very direct path to revenue via the use of their website.

They can actually take leads on the website and start converting those directly into transactions and or into applications for their high-margin insurance products with very little work on top of that.  The core business at say, a bank might be more relationship based, where they have longer sales cycles, and they’re only capturing the lead generation on the website or only doing low margin services like checking accounts or whatnot.

[Patrick notes: Checking accounts are loss-leaders with godawful terrible margins, used mostly to get people in the door for credit cards and home loans.  Ironically, the only checking accounts which make appreciable amounts of money are the ones used by the bank’s “worst” customers, who get eaten alive by fees and penalties.  Ask Ramit about that stuff, though, he’s the finance expert.]

Patrick: If you were looking at two similarly situation businesses, you would go with the one that you could provide more value to. So you need to know that about the business. If you can’t sketch someone’s business model on a napkin, I don’t think you can ever sell them anything worthwhile.

Learning Long Copy And Other Unexpected Sources Of Business Value

Ramit:  It reminds me of something I call going from D to C. And that means going from Disparagement to Curiosity, and when you see a comment that says who still uses email newsletters. That’s disparagement. You’re basically saying I’m smarter than this company. Who would ever use email newsletters, which is ironic, because this person happens to be exactly wrong.

And it, therefore, makes them look far more foolish because they’re disparaging something they simply do not understand. I would, instead, rather have people say, “Wow, these guys are using an email newsletter.” They seem to be doing pretty well. They get a lot of press. They seem to have a lot of customer testimonials. What do they know that I don’t?

From D to C. Stop the disparagement and start the curiosity. Like I said, when I started studying the dark arts of long copy, I first looked at these long copy pages, infomercials, and I said these things are scams. I started off with a disparagement model. But as I started getting deeper and deeper into it and learning what works, what doesn’t, what is ethical and what is not, I learned that there are very, very good reasons that direct response marketers have been using long copy for over 100 years.

What do they know that I don’t know? The answer is they know a lot. They know a lot more than I could ever hope to learn, and it’s all encompassed in this knowledge in direct marketing. So instead of disparaging things that we don’t understand, let’s actually try to say, hey, for 15 minutes, I’m going to try to understand that maybe these guys know something I don’t.

When you can do that, why…for example, of the reasons I moved to New York was all my Silicon Valley friends said it’s all about direct ROI. Those companies are so stupid that pay for ads in Times Square. I looked at them like that’s interesting, because those companies have been around for 50 years. Why does Louis Vuitton have billboards that they spend $200,000 a month on or 500,000?

What do they know that I don’t? As I moved here, the answer is they know a lot. They know a lot more, in terms of brand, and not everything is directly measurable. It’s important to be able to say, “Look, I may not know everything. Let me try to at least understand the basics of it.” When you do, you’ll see entire worlds open up. Like for me, I saw entire worlds of pricing, monetization, long copy, upsells, cross sells, AOV.

I saw all these things open up that I had never, never, never had an idea of. It was all because I first was disparaging them, and then I said all right. I better learn what these guys are doing. And that changed everything for me.

Patrick:  I’ve had similar experiences myself. Something that I often see in our industry is people have a fascination for the new. So anything that smacks of the old way of business or that technology is so last year or that thing tends to turn people off. Here’s a heuristic for everybody: it is entirely possible that you are the smartest person in a particular industry… but I would heavily bet against that.

If everyone in an industry does something in a particular way, like if every enterprise software company doesn’t put their prices on the website, and you think “That’s so stupid.  I would never buy anything without the price being on the website”, consider the somewhat radical notion that every enterprise software company since ever is not simultaneously making the exact same mistake and that maybe there’s something about that model you don’t know yet.

Ramit:  God, that is the best example ever. Because I see it all the time. Oh, whenever I see a site where they don’t give me the price, I just close the page. And then you say to yourself OK, that’s great. What is your budget, by the way? Oh, I don’t have a budget. I’m just looking around. I could just build this on my own. You’re not the customer. You’re not the customer. The customer…

Patrick:  “How many millions of dollars in software purchases have you authorized in the last quarter?” [laughs]

Ramit:  Exactly. Like, are you kidding me? I’ll give you an example of a purchase I made just this week. I have been looking at some retention issues and improving some retention flows in my funnels, and I happened to be on some newsletter that I signed up for years ago, which by the way, I read once in a while.

They happened to release a new eBook on retention. It has 75 pages of charts and retentions and strategies and this and that. The email came. I read…It was, I would say, about a four page email. I read the first 15 percent, clicked the link, looked a couple pictures, saw a couple of keywords in the bullet points, like how XYZ company plugged their retention problems. I sent it to my assistant.

I didn’t even buy it myself. I sent it to my assistant. I said buy and add to cal, which means add to my calendar for me to review it later. That was it. The purchase was about $199. It took me less than 15 seconds to make that purchase decision. But why? Because I was the right customer at the right time. I had a burning pain point, and I had the budget.

So no matter what their website looked like and all that, yeah, that may have mattered a little bit. The most important thing was they understood their customer, they understood the code words and the problems I have, and it was already sold before I even looked at it. It was already a sold thing for me.

Patrick:  I’ll give you an amusing anecdote about that. So there are tools I use in my own business, right? One that I use a lot for designing mockups of user experiences is called Balsamiq Mockups, and I think their entry level pricing is, like, 80 bucks or something. A lot of my engineering friends say “Wow, 80 bucks is a lot for something that’s like Microsoft Paint++”.  [Patrick notes: The sarcasm drips from my voice here.]

Anyhow, so I frequently sit down with consulting clients looking at three pages of mockups that I’ve prepared that the engagement. The story that I’m trying to sell them on is “OK, if we do it like this, our revenues for the next quarter are going to go up by 20 percent.”

I got a question from someone who is similar to me at the company. Techy guy, young 20s, et cetera. He said, “That looks cool. What’d you make it in?” I said, “Oh, Balsamiq Mockups. It’s this thing that a company puts out which lets you mockup pages very quickly.”  “What, you paid money for that?” And the CEO says…by the way, notable and quotable… “Get one for everybody. Put it on the company card. You were talking about the plus 20 percent in revenue, Patrick?”

It’s two totally different mindsets looking at the same artifact, right? The CEO only sees it in the “This is the tool that someone I trust is doing something incredibly valuable with me on. It is cheap at any reasonable price.” Whereas the person who could potentially have, given the next two years of his life, actually implemented that tool, is valuing it at nothing…because clearly, he didn’t have anything planned for the next two years.

Ramit:  Cost versus value. This is something that we’ll talk more about in pricing. But if your first inclination when you look at something is how much does it cost, chances are you’re not the customer. And chances are you would be a terrible customer. In fact, I did this just yesterday. I did a web cast where I actually opened up a new course.

I was testing it. People when I start talking about the course, there will be some people on these webcasts. There’s usually hundreds of people there. They’ll say what’s the price? What’s the price? How much does it cost? What’s the price? I quickly tell them if your first question is about price, this course is not for you.

Because if all you’re concerned about is price, then you haven’t even factored in the calculus of value. If my course can teach you how to negotiate a $10,000 raise, then does it even matter what it costs? It could 100. It could be 500. It could be 5,000. If you believe in the material, and there’s a guarantee, then cost should be one of the last things.

Now, here’s the key. Certain people think like that. Businesses think in terms of value. Generally, individuals do not. And so, that is when you start choosing who are the customers I want to go after? Are they people who have no money or people who complain about money all the time or people who have no time to actually use this?

Or are they people who look at a…an information product or an engineering project and say, you know what? This might cost me $10,000, but I’m going to make back far more. Maybe I’m going to make back more money. Maybe I’m going to get peace of mind. That is value versus cost.

Patrick:  Amen. And that’s, by the way, a good heuristic when you’re looking at customers. So you’re going to be selling them on a relationship which is going to, at the end of the day, there will be an invoice delivered, and that invoice is going to have a bunch of zeroes in it. So you are probably not going to be the first professional relationship someone has ever had.

In fact, if you are, that’s a bad sign, because they have no idea how to work with you. They are not going to have a maximally happy result no matter how well you execute on that relationship. So look at how they comport their business in other ways. If someone has an accountant that they’re paying $300 an hour for, they understand that an accountant is generating some value for the business that is worth $300 an hour.

If someone doesn’t have an accountant, and if you ask them “Just curious, why don’t you have an accountant?” And they say something like “Heck if I’m going to pay $300 an hour when I could do it for myself in QuickBooks”, that’s a leading indicator that this person is not going to value your time as a professional either.

Ramit:  Exactly.

Patrick:  Now, conversely, if someone says that they pay their accountant $300 an hour because accountants provably make the business money but that the riff‑raff techie guys are just crazy for demanding 40 bucks an hour, then also, again, leading indicator. Have a nice, firm handshake and try to get introduced to someone else, hopefully someone a little more sane. But you’re not going to have a successful commercial relationship with them.

Ramit:  That’s right. Focus on taking your B+ customers/prospects to be A customers. Don’t focus on the D people, trying to turn them into A customers. It will never happen.

Patrick:  Never happen.

Ramit:  It will never happen. I will talk to you and Patrick will talk to you more about this. Patrick, I love how many times in your life you’ve used the word pathological customers online. I, myself, have many of those as well. And, in fact, I will talk about how I turned down over one million dollars in revenue per year to avoid the type of customers I do not want.

We’re going to talk about that in our next call, which will be on pricing. But for now, let’s leave our URLs so people can find us. Patrick, do you want to go ahead and start? Where should people find you?

Patrick:  Sure. My blog is at http://www.kalzumeus.com/blog [Patrick notes: You found it!]

Ramit:  What can they find when they go there?

Patrick:  I largely talk about the business of making and selling software. If you want the specific deep dive into that, as in whatever I happen to be thinking about at any given day, that would be at https://training.kalzumeus.com.  [Patrick notes: Ramit and I touched on the topic of how email makes serious money for businesses earlier.  If that subject interests you, or you would like to learn more about how you can use engineering to improve the marketing of your software business, I strongly suggest trading me your email address.  I promise not to waste your time.]

Ramit:  I love Patrick’s blog because not only does he talk about selling software, but I sell information products. I don’t sell software. But I find so much relevance in what you talk about, and I love how you delve into the psychology of being able to turn your worldview around and deliver value to people, and then charge accordingly.

I’ll share my URL as well. I actually put up a special page for anyone listening to this, to give away some free stuff for you. It’s http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/earn1k/kalzumeus-start/. That’s a mouthful. You’re going to get some stuff there on how to find your first few clients, including a free video and a free mini course that I put together for you. So take a look. I hope you guys enjoy it. We’ll talk to you on the next call.

Patrick:  All right. Let me give just a quick mini testimonial for Ramit. We met for the first time a couple of years ago in New York and had dinner together, and some of the advice that he gave me at that dinner was extraordinarily valuable. It took me off of one trajectory that I was on with my consulting business and put me on a much better trajectory.

I’ve always known him to say really, really valuable things when I’ve talked to other engineers about some of the advice and, like, salary negotiation that he’s given me.

I have a stack of emails in Gmail, like I think it’s somewhere 20 something, and the running total is 200 and X thousand dollars of extra money that that’s made my readers. I really trust Ramit. There is no BS here. You can’t possibly waste your time on it.  [Patrick notes: Usual disclaimer: no money exchanged hands for that recommendation.]

Ramit:  Appreciate that. All right, Patrick, we’ll talk soon.

Patrick:  Talk soon. Bye bye.

Ramit:  Thanks.

Keith and I recorded the second podcast, this time with special guest Amy Hoy. (If you missed the first podcast, see here.) We’re still searching for a format which really works for us, so this is a work in progress. Please share your thoughts with us on what you like/don’t like about it.

This podcast was recorded two months ago, largely because Keith and I got too busy to do the editing and post it. We’ll outsource more of that in the future. Of particular note: the 30×500 class that Amy talks about is already started, so if you’re interested in it, sign up for her email announcement (link waaay down on that page) for when it opens the next time.

Major topics for this podcast included:

• why businesses are not price sensitive and how to price SaaS directed at them
• how bootstrapping product businesses with a side of consulting worked out
• the psychology of happiness

Download Links

Podcast link (MP3, 23 MB, approximately 80 minutes.)

Subscribe in iTunes &tc: The feed http://www.kalzumeus.com/feed/atom/ technically includes all posts on this blog, but if you put it into iTunes or your iDevice, it will slurp in only the audio posts. (Have a more finnicky client than iTunes? Try http://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed/ instead.)

Transcript

Patrick: Okey-dokey. You guys want to get started on the formal talking to people aside from the three of us thing?

Amy: Yeah.

Keith: Alright. Sounds good. OK, so we do the intro music [mimics intro music]. We don’t have intro music.

Patrick: We don’t have intro music.

[laughter]

Patrick: This is a third-rate podcast.

Keith: Welcome back to the Kalzumeus podcast and…

Patrick: This is episode two with…

Keith: Episode two, well, 2.5, because we actually recorded an episode two and then trashed it because it sucked.

Patrick: Yeah. This is uh…

Keith: Two alpha? Two Beta.

Patrick: Two Beta. It was an MVP of a podcast and then we shot it in the head because it was not accomplishing customer goals or anything.

Keith: Exactly.

Patrick: And we are joined today by special guest Amy Hoy.

Keith: Hello Amy.

Amy: Hello.

Keith: For our people, you want to do the introduction, Patrick?

Patrick: Oh, introduction, yeah. I’m Patrick McKenzie, better known as Pattio11 on the Internet and…

Keith: I’m Keith Perhac, not at all known on the Internet. Joining us today is Amy Hoy, who is the founder of Freckle and the new product 30×500, which seems awesome. We’re going to have Amy talk about that a little more coming up. Amy, do you have anything you want to add?

Amy: There are a couple more products other than those. [laughs]

Keith: Those are the big one’s that I know of, that I’m most familiar with. And, of course, your blog Unicorn Free, which is freaking awesome, by the way.

Amy: Thanks.

Keith: I was actually… I listened to the 5×5 podcast where you talked about where you came up with the name for Unicorn Free, and were explaining all that. Ever since then I’ve really enjoyed that.

Amy: Oh, well thank you. Yeah. I figure like, I was drunk and I wrote a note that I forgot and there was a Narwhal horn involved. It was a pretty good story.

[laughter]

Patrick: Ba dum bum.

Keith: Ba dum bum. Alright.

Patrick: So, let’s see. So, the 30×500 classes opening up in the near future [Patrick notes: We didn’t get this episode out on time, so if you want into 30×500, you’ll have to do it the next time Amy opens up the course.] and I feel it’s probably of interest to some people that are listening to this so why don’t you give us the rundown on that for the folks listening at home who don’t know what it is?

Amy: I’d love to, if I can pronounce my own product’s name. Sidebar, don’t name your product with numbers in it. I never can say 30×500 properly unless I do it like that in slow mo. In 2008 I got absolutely sick and tired of consulting, even though our consulting business was doing really well, mine and my husband’s. I knew that I didn’t want to be a consultant forever, I just fell into it because I had these skills.

I knew the way to make money was product. I had been watching 37 Signals from their rise back when they had zero products and were just designers and then they had products and all this stuff and all these people I knew who were starting businesses and were making money not by the hour but by the product.

I pushed my husband to help me make a software service, which is Freckle, which is nearly three years old now. We also wrote, after that, an e-book on JavaScript performance and from there on we built our product empire and weaned away from consulting entirely. During this process I felt entirely alone. There was almost no discussion about this stuff.

I knew what I knew by reading business books, which were not tailored to me, a two person company who was starting on the side. They were tailored to larger business but I was able to extrapolate the advice and apply it to myself. I read startup stuff, most of which was totally useless for what I was doing.

I wasn’t trying to get millions of users, I couldn’t spend money to acquire users, I couldn’t use venture capital, I couldn’t hire the best people. My husband and I were pretty great, but it was pretty much us and we were free.

Keith: You were pretty much stuck between the two worlds, weren’t you? What you wanted was a standard business model, but there weren’t any real books or information on standard business models in the Internet age and what information there was, was for startups and startups generally assume venture capital, which of course you weren’t going for, which is a great role to go down.

Just because you’re a startup does not mean you need venture capital and does not mean you need to do the seven billion users in two months for a free medium app, whatever.

Amy: But the hockey stick. The hockey stick. How do you survive without the hockey stick? I don’t know. In fact, I was anti-venture capital, for me. I feel like a lot of venture capital is quite deceptive, but I don’t begrudge anyone for taking it if that’s what they want to do. I’m like go after the dealers, not the users. I really didn’t want anyone else in-between me and my customers and my success.

I didn’t want anyone fiddling with my stuff. Until 2008, I had not been able to ship a project I worked on for years because management kept screwing with it, whether it was Behr Sterns, well they went out of business, or Limewire, where my CEO was a 12-year-old multimillionaire boy scout on crack. I never did anything for years and I was dying. I was like no more intermediation. No more between me and them. I was like no venture capital.

You’re right, there was nothing really to rely on other than old school business books and what I had detected by working around and following 37 Signals and Mail Chimp and these other businesses. I observed them over the years, lurked. They weren’t writing about it at that time. Even 37 Signals was not writing about their Bootstraps and Proud series. That was not in 2008, that was a lot later. So it was really lonely.

Patrick: Yeah. I start Bingo Card Creator in 2006 and, man, the state of the art back then. I was literally unsure it was legal to actually just setup a shingle on the Internet and start selling software. I tried to get advice from people in our community, which has some issues about things like that. They’re like no, God man. What if someone does a refund? You can get sued. You should never, ever, ever try to get away from the day job and, besides, they own your soul.

Keith: Going back to that a little, as much as we are three people on the Internet giving advice, you should never listen to people giving advice on the Internet.

[laughter]

Amy: Yeah, just us.

Keith: Yeah, just the three of us. I think that’s a very safe assumption. I would preface the “don’t take advice from people” with “random people on the Internet.” Find people who are successful and who are practicing what they preach, essentially.

Patrick: I think that’s life advice as to hanging around with the kind of people you want to be with rather than anybody else.

Keith: Rather than people who scream the loudest, yeah.

Patrick: This goes to picking your community, both in real life and in the Internet. If you routinely hang around people who run businesses, your perception of the world is going to get influenced by people who run businesses, and if you’re routinely hanging around people who will perpetually have a business some day you have a risk of that warping your perspective on things.

Amy: Absolutely. My rule of thumb is also that even if someone has what you want and people ask, “What’s the secret of your success?” and they say, “Hard work,” stop listening. Let’s face it, it’s a lot more than that and if they don’t have the insight or the willingness to share beyond the phrase “hard work” then there’s nothing you can learn from them from what they explicitly try to teach you. You can observe and be the learner and analyze.

Yeah, it really sucked and there were a lot of naysayers. Not maybe quite as serious as Patrick: did because we’re a couple of years later. Honestly, I really don’t listen to people.

Keith: Very good advice. Probably the best advice we’ll get out of this podcast is don’t listen to people.

Amy: Don’t listen to people. [laughs] People are like no, no, no, no, no. I’m like whatever. We started making a product business and it sort of was harder than I thought. A lot of it was easier than I thought, but it was all hard because we were alone. We were doing this on the side with consulting and we had these short bursts with super intense consulting contracts, mostly for Fortune 500 companies or Fortune 50 companies.

Thomas did a lot of JavaScript security and JavaScript performance. We did a lot of these media art installations based around Twitter and other APIs, Foursquare and stuff, for like Pepsi, who was awesome, and all the other people we worked for who weren’t awesome. So these intense projects that paid a lot but they demanded a lot of us.

So we were doing that and trying to build this product (Freckle) and then ship this product and then support the product after we shipped it and add new features and stuff. And it was really chaotic for about a year and a half.

And at the end of 2009, I knew that I could not do that anymore. That’d been nearly a year and a half, 18 months, 24 months almost, of doing this. And I was like, “I cannot consult and do this other stuff anymore. The product’s suffering. I’m suffering. I have to quit. I’m going to quit now.”

We just got this big check from this two-week project that turned into two months of hell. Then I quit, and I thought, “What can I do to help shore up this income?” And I thought, “I know. I can help people who are like me two years ago.” I wasn’t sure if people were into it or not, so I did a three-hour teleconference and invited some people. (Patrick notes: This idea is genius. It’s the MVP of a more involved product.) They paid me, not a lot.

And the number-one feedback was “more,” which I wrote down in my notebook as “M-O-A-R-R-R…” I counted the R’s the other day. I was like, wow. [laughs]

Keith: Just love writing those R’s, huh? [laughs]

Amy: I did. Everyone was like, “I want more.” That was the number-one feedback. So I was really excited, I guess, so I put extra R’s.

And that slowly turned into this three-and-a-half-month-long class that it is today, 30×500. I built the first one with my friend Alex Hillman, who’s awesome, who’s bootstrapped a community and a physical office space, for co-working and a whole bunch of other stuff, in Philadelphia. He’s amazing. He’s been a business consultant as well as stuff, and he helped me with the first version, and then he couldn’t do it anymore, time-wise.

And I flipped all the stuff around and created a community to go along with the class. I say, “created a community.” I basically meant open the mailing list and invited people to talk on it. The students have really created the community.

And so now I have this three-and-a-half-long mentorship program, which includes a lot of kind of mind-bending lessons an exercises that will help somebody get away from what I call “idea quicksand,” where you have a fantastic idea and then you either see someone else already did it or you get depressed.

You’re like, “There’s competitors. Is the market saturated? Can I validate this idea? What if I can’t validate this idea? What if I can’t build the whole thing and it won’t be like I thought it was?” Basically, everyone goes… [makes bomb-dropping sound] It ends in death, and never shipping anything, or shipping things no one wants. And so the very first thing we do in 30×500 is turn that around. I say, “No ideas,” [laughs] for the first month almost.

It’s all about learning about business, about how to come up with an infinite number of ideas, valid ideas which are pre-validated. You don’t have to have the idea then validate it. It’s all about turning the process on its head, coming up with as many potential profitable products as possible, learning to do market research, learning to really sell those ideas to people before you build it, and all sorts of good stuff: marketing, productivity, how to trim it down to a tiny thing you can ship, all that stuff.

The class is all about that, and it’s pretty intense. But we’ve had an amazing wave of launches lately, and I’m so happy.

Patrick: Yeah. People will not be surprised, based on my karma score, but I get most of my news through Hacker News and saw multiple of them on the front page in the last couple of days. Let’s see, there was, oh, shoot, projector, the one that does designer stuff and client stuff. (Patrick notes: I was thinking of PlanScope). I’m sorry, I can never…

Amy: It’s like project management and budget and scope management for freelancers and agencies to use with their clients. The client sees where their money is going, which is a huge problem, as you may know.

Patrick: Right. Yeah. I think you’ve mentioned this before, but there’s… so, a piece of received wisdom in the community, which, I will be totally honest, I have said this many times, is, “Don’t make things for people who are like you, because developers/designers, et cetera, don’t pay for software.”

I think you have an opinion on this as somebody who successfully sells time-tracking management and who just had multiple customers, or multiple, I guess, students from the program launch straight into the designer community and totally kill it. But what’s your opinion on that?

Amy: It’s not true.

[popping sound]

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: My water bottle. That was dramatic! That was my water bottle going, “Pop!”

[laughter]

Amy: It’s simply not true, pop, which is a polite way to put it.

[laughter]

Amy: I mean, if you look around at all these companies that are making so much money off the developer and designer audience like, GitHub, linda.com, Basecamp started exclusively with developers and designers. That was their market. They marketed to people like them, the small agencies and the individuals, and it grew out from there. Massively, it did. But they started with that core audience. That’s how I knew about it. I found out about it on an invite-only design community way back in 2005.

I usually have a whole list. PeepCode, look up PeepCode. Jeff’s does very well. Let’s see, Rueben from Bidsketch. It’s a total one-man operation. He just dramatically increased his prices, and he’s doing fantastically. Bidsketch is all about preparing beautiful, templatized proposals for your clients. There’s so much, FreshBooks, Harvest, all these other time trackers which make way more money than I do. There’s a lot. A lot.

And not all of those are exclusively designer/developer anymore, but a lot of them started that way and they branched out as they grew. But there are a lot of developer-only ones as well. Look at all these apps for server monitoring (Patrick notes: use it, love it) or Rails Screencasts from many different people, not just Jeff. There’s just tons, and tons, and tons of stuff.

So, I don’t know where the idea that they don’t buy comes from because there are products everywhere that are successful.

Patrick: I think it’s partly a projection thing, like, “I don’t buy anything and therefore people like me must not buy stuff.” Which, there are many issues with projecting your behavior onto other people.

Keith: And really, I think there’s also a… so, this is not just the Hacker News crowd, this is not just the Slashdot crowd, this is not just the techie crowd, there are a lot of people. I think the naysayers are the people who have more time than money, is honestly what it comes down to.

Because, honestly, if I had a ton of time, if I was working a nine-to-five job, had a set number of hours a day I worked at a fixed income, at that, and I needed time-tracking software, I would probably write my own on the weekend because I have more time than I have money at that point.

For someone who’s trying to run or start their own business, they suddenly have more money than they have time. Not that they’re making tons of money but because their time is much more valuable because there are so many other things they could be doing.

Patrick: and I have actually talked about this because I need to write my own invoicing software and stuff like that. I finally did not because I thought I could set up an MVP in about a week and take another week to fix any bugs so that’s two weeks of my time that it would take to build just my invoicing software. Or I could pay $20 to $50 a month for someone else’s invoicing software. That’s a no-brainer. Two weeks worth of billable work versus $50 a month. No-brainer at all.

Amy: Absolutely, but how long did you think about buying the podcasting equipment?

Keith: Actually, we just kind of fell into that.

Amy: A lot of people say they don’t buy stuff. They actually buy stuff left and right, they just weren’t paying attention. Not that you bought it mindlessly while you were sleep walking or anything. When you think back in your memory you think when did I buy things? It just doesn’t pop up.

Keith: I’m gradually getting better about it. The podcasting equipment, I was like we need podcasting equipment. OK, done. A couple years ago I started Bingo Card Creator on a $60 budget and when you only have 60 in the budget you get very creative about not spending money, but these days the budget is much more than $60 and I have to sometimes slap myself and say no, implementing this myself is absolutely not the right call.

I was talking to a buddy of mine and asked, “Is there any way I can optimize Redis such that it will use 15 megabytes less of RAM on the server? Then I won’t have to upgrade to the next higher tier of VPS.” He said, “What’s the next higher tier of VPS?” “$20.” “Do we need to have the rest of this conversation?” “OK, OK. I get it, I get it.” Gradually, very gradually I’m starting to get it.

Amy: It takes time. Most people aren’t like you, even developers. That’s fairly unusual. Most of us, especially Americans, we just tend to throw money at stuff.

Keith: I think we’re very much conditioned by living in Japan. It’s weird. Once you get to certain price points, like low price points for some reason people hee and haw over much more than they would decide over something of a large price point. If you’re spending $1,000 it’s easy to spend another $100. If you’re spending $10 or $15 people seem to think about it a lot more.

Amy: It’s true.

Keith: The old president of my company, multi, multi-millionaire (Patrick notes: he is credited with bringing the Internet to Japan, you do the math), he does a lot of donations and stuff to colleges and stuff and he had done this multi-million dollar donation to a college and he had just finished signing the contract and he’s leaving and he goes to a convenience store and picks up a bottle of water and he just goes, “I can’t believe water at a convenience store is 135 yen. That’s just so expensive.”

I’m like you just contributed millions of dollars and you’re complaining about $1.35.

Amy: I think we all fall prey to that one. The other day I was in a convenience store and I realized I needed a toothbrush and I bought a toothbrush and I was like why is this toothbrush $1.75? I’ve been paying like 3.50 each. I caught myself thinking I’m going to buy my toothbrushes there from now on. I was like wait a minute.

Keith: You actually consider should I go to a different store to get the cheaper toothbrush?

Amy: It only passed a moment, I have to say, to my credit, but it occurred to me. I was like come on, Amy. I’ve occasionally thought I should have kept the exact amount, 20 percent or whatever, and I’m like come on, really? Am I even wasting a cycle of my brain on 50 cents?

I’m not like that with buying software tools for business at all, so I think what you said earlier about selling to businesses is totally true, but I think there’s a lot more people who are just not commenting on things who just quietly buy the things they want or need whether or not they have a business.

Keith: This might not be a new thing for the 30×500, but you’re starting to focus more on building apps and things for businesses than for B2C stuff which, as somebody who knows and loves many B2C customers for his Bingo product, is totally the right way to go.

Amy: I like how you used love in a negative way. [laughs]

Patrick: I do love my customers.

Amy: I understand.

Patrick: I love them even when they write I can’t access your product from the blue Googles, only from the green Googles, can you please help me out? That’s still from a place of love.

It’s just from a place of I can do my math on what my hourly is on that versus an appointment reminder where I get to charge a car dealership every month. I’ve had car dealerships say is it 200 a day or 200 a month? I’m like it’s 200 a month and they’re like “Whatever. Either would have worked.”

Amy: That’s nice.

Patrick: In other news, I’m re-pricing.

Keith: The correct response to that is not $200 a month. If they ask is it 200 a day or 200 a month you say a day. If they say that’s too expensive you say then a week. [laughs] Start with the expensive one first.

Amy: You’ve got to capture that customer surplus. You want that.

Patrick: We were thinking about talking about pricing grids. One of the things that you can actually learn if you spend too much time hanging out on the Internet and talking to people about this is that a lot of SaaS companies use the four column pricing grid strategy typically.

I’ve talked to a lot of folks about this one. The one that really prints the cash, usually about 50% of sales, is the one to the extreme right that’s priced at businesses at prices that people think no one can will pay. Say, $250 a month for Wufoo.

It’s just that people who are spending essentially other people’s money, it just comes out of a budget so it doesn’t matter to them whether it’s 200 or 250 or 500. As long as it still only requires one signature or zero signatures it’s whatever it is.

Amy: Yeah. I hear the amount per signatures for an employee generating expenses in a large company is usually around $500. I think under $500 it does not require a signature.

Patrick: That’s consistent with my experience. Anybody who’s doing a SaaS pricing grid where the top price tops out at $20 or $30 should really…

Keith: Rethink what they’re doing.

Patrick: …put anything you need to just get an enterprise level, even if you don’t necessarily call it the enterprise level, and price it at $250 or $500. This is free money. And, oh, goodness…

Keith: So, not even looking at this as a huge business. When people think of business, they think of huge corporations. But even for small companies that are making a good amount of money, let’s say that a company has maybe six people working there that are contractors.

And a good contractor will run you about 100 to 200 an hour, depending on what they’re doing. If a product on the Internet costs you the same as one hour of that person’s time and saves them over an hour a month, then it’s a no-brainer to get that, right?

Amy: And that is exactly why, actually… Patrick, you asked this earlier. I’ve always told people, in 30×500 and “Year of Hustle”: do not sell to consumers. And some people will say, “But I have this idea.” I’m like, “No. You can do it, but I’m not going to support you because you’re going exactly against what I told you to do.” For that reason. For that reason.

You can sell on value to businesspeople. You can say, “You spend $80 an hour on this freelancer. I can save you 45 minutes of their time and charge you $60, and that is a win.” It’s certainly not a loss. I think I did the math wrong; I think that’s exactly $60. But let’s say half an hour of their time for 50 bucks or whatever. No, that’s still wrong. [laughs]

Patrick: We get the general idea.

Amy: You know what I’m saying. [laughs]

Keith: So there is really two places that you can really provide enumerable benefits to your customers. One is saving time. Because a consultant takes time. The amount of money that you save is directly related to how much you can charge, right? The other one is anything that increases sales.

Amy: Totally.

Keith: For example, Visual Website Optimizer prints money for customers. Anyone who is using Visual Website Optimizer is literally printing money with every single test that they do.

Patrick: This is the A-B testing software we often recommend to clients.

Keith: It is so amazing. So their largest for enterprise is “call us.” That’s fine. Their second-largest is $250 a month. OK? $250 a month for increases of sales starting at two percent, five percent, 10 percent, 50 percent. As good as your test can be, that’s how much money you are making with their $250-a-month service. It’s amazing.

Amy: It is amazing. They could probably charge more for that.

Keith: They could.

Amy: Ruben Gomez, who does Bidsketch, I mentioned earlier, he tweeted repeatedly and told me personally how much more money he was making when he drastically increased his prices. And I’ve been nagging him to write a blog post. So I’m going to keep nagging him until it happens, but his story is pretty incredible.

I’m not going to release the numbers because he hasn’t done it yet. You would think that he’s looking at private bids instead of people, the freelancers and consultants. And it worked out so well for him, so well. It’s such a big deal.

Patrick: I think he’s coming to MicroConf. We’re going to lock him in a hotel room in Las Vegas and not let him out until the blog post is written. (Patrick notes: Did not actually happen at MicroConf.)

Amy: Yes. Yes!

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: I vote yes. Let’s do that. [laughs] He’s a cool guy. I like him a lot. So yeah, you were saying more sales, or saving time. And I also think of, people usually go for cost reduction, I think, when they talk about monetary value. But I don’t see nearly as many products being successful for reducing costs, unless it’s extreme, because penny-pinchers aren’t people who spend money.

Patrick: One thing that’s great for software is if you can tell a story. Ultimately, all sales is about telling stories and painting the right picture in peoples’ minds, but tell a story where it reduces the amount of employee labor required to do something, particularly if that either allows them to switch them to tasks that actually generate money or, I hate sounding like a business, but “decreasing headcount.”

If you can successfully pitch to a business that you are going to “decrease headcount,” that is a total win in 99.95 percent of cases. So, Appointment Reminder, my software that does phone calls to the clients of professional-services businesses. I often say that if you have an office manager who costs you $4,000 month, who half of her time is literally talking to people’s voicemail to attempt to get them into the office at the proper time, then spend $200 a month and save $2,000 on salary costs.

One of my more successful clients is saying that, basically, I saved him enough on that to put his daughter through Harvard.

Amy: So you need to raise your prices. There’s that customer surplus.

Patrick: I need to raise my prices. Yeah, I so do. I did something very stupid when I launched Appointment Reminder, and I’ll just tell it to everybody to have you avoid doing it. I launched with the four-tier pricing structure, like usual, and the bottom plan was $9 for a, quote-unquote, “personal plan.”

So my idea was, “I don’t really care about the $9. I just want people using this.” I should’ve wanted people using it at 30 bucks a month for the cheap plan, because the people who pay $9 are, my word is “pathological customer,” for people who are penny-pinching, and they have every kind of support issue that you could possibly imagine, like, “How do I record telephone calls if I don’t have a telephone? Can I log into the website from my Kindle, which doesn’t really have a web browser in it?” Yadda-yadda-dee-da-da.

And they expect turnaround times of two minutes or less to customer-support issues arising at 3:00 AM in the morning.

Keith: I would really like to see someone. I don’t know if anyone has done a blog post about this, about a breakdown of the number of support calls and support messages you have, broken down by which plan they’re in.

Patrick: I will totally bet that it is the cheap-o Charlies who contribute a vastly, vastly disproportionate…

Keith: Like 80 percent…

Amy: Me too. Heard that over and over again from everybody. Also, this is something that you could absolutely do with our upcoming software-as-a-service product, Charm, which is a customer-support and true customer-relationship management tool. Everyone says CRM, they mean lead tracker, which I find to be terribly dishonest. [laughs] It’s like, one, they’re not customers yet, they’re leads.

And then after they are customers, doesn’t help you at all. The only exception I’ve seen is Intercom, which is pretty neat. But they don’t call themselves a CRM, I don’t think. But Charm will let you filter requests by plans or price points.

And so you’ll be able to profile feature requests and issues, specific ones, like, “Please add invoicing feature,” that kind of thing, by which plan or how much your customers are paying you. But also, you will be able to see how many incidents you get from which type of customer. But everyone I’ve…

Patrick: That would be great blog-post fodder if you can get anonymized data for that. Well, it’s not a great idea, but yeah.

Keith: No. I mean, that’s easy to get anonymized data from. You say, “My support numbers are X, and they belong to the lowest tier.” You can use even general numbers for that, I would think.

Amy: Do you mean if you blog about it, Patrick, anonymized?

Patrick: Well. So, I’ve already retracted this idea, but the idea I have now retracted was, oh, you could aggregate across all Charm customers, whether it was the cheap-o plan or whatever that generated the most customer support inquiries. I’m like, “No, that’s a wee bit aggressive.” [laughs]

Amy: Do you think that’s like a cats.jpg moment? Because I don’t really think so. I don’t think it’s a cats.jpg moment.

Patrick: The rational part of me thinks that it’s not a cats.jpg moment, but I think that loud people will perceive it as a cats.jpg moment. Really, this is inside baseball here, so let me tell everyone what a cats.jpg is.

Keith: First of all, yeah, I have no idea… [laughs]

Amy: Sorry. [laughs]

Patrick: So, 37signals said, “Oh, the 100 millionth file has just been uploaded to Basecamp, and it was called cats.jpg.” And they tweeted that out or put it in a blog post or something. And the folks who were worried about the Facebookization of all services were like, “Oh my God! 37signals can view all this data that we’re uploading to their servers, and they’re not treating it in a privacy-conscious manner! Brar!”

Amy: [laughs]

Patrick: So, OK, yes, A, it is totally technically possible for people to view data that you upload to your servers. That’s kind of how it works. And if you don’t trust them on that, you definitely should not be using Basecamp. But it was kind of a tempest-in-a-teapot kind of thing about whether it’s OK to publish that even if it’s a trivial amount of customer data. No one’s business is going to collapse over the words “cats.jpg” getting out, where if it was “letter of intent to dismiss Mary Smith for sexual misconduct.doc…”

Amy: [laughs]

Keith: They might’ve anonymized that. [laughs]

Patrick: Right.

Amy: I don’t think they would’ve put that up there. I think people were more upset over the idea that they were looking at individuals’ accounts. But there’s a lot of apps out there which say how many bookmarks or how many dollars have been invoiced or how many hours have been tracked. I’ve never seen anyone ever complain.

Keith: Complain about that, right.

Amy: I think FreshBooks and Hunch, they all do these infographic-style breakdowns of the data. But it’s totally anonymized, like you said, so it’s totally in aggregate. I can’t imagine. Well, you know what? I’m going to do it with Freckle anyway, so we’ll find out. [laughs]

Keith: The noisy people, the people who are complaining, I think, about the cats.jpg, I mean, aggre-data… [sputters] Aggregate data.

Amy: Aggre-data.

Keith: Aggre-data. There we go, aggre-data.

Amy: That’s great.

Keith: Aggre-data is brought from individual data, right? So if you have source to create the aggregate data, you have the original source data. So there’s really no difference in the privacy, right? It’s not like they purposely were looking at anyone’s single Basecamp to find cats.jpg. They just did, “Query, item number one million. What is name of that item?” Right? I don’t know, like Patrick said, tempest in a teapot.

Amy: How different would it feel if I wrote a blog post on Freckle, which is a time-tracking productivity tool, that said that 30 percent of all hours logged yesterday were overhead hours that are non-billable, versus I said the 100 millionth hour was logged to a project called “Cat.” You know what I’m saying? I don’t think people would care.

Keith: They didn’t even mention the project name, right?

Amy: No…

Keith: See, I think it would be different if you said that. But if you said, “The millionth task that was logged was overhead,” I don’t know how interesting that is. [laughs] See, me personally, that’s perfectly fine.

Patrick: See, this is the reason why it’s a tempest in a teapot. The only reason that anecdote was put into the post anyhow is because it’s harmless and silly and trivial.

Amy: Hilarious. [laughs]

Patrick: And if the 100 millionth item had been a business document, it just wouldn’t have been mentioned, because, A, privacy issues, but B, it isn’t funny. But because it’s stupid cat photos, it’s funny. And, brar, tempest in teapot. I avoided commenting on those threads because I thought commenting would make me dumber.

Amy: [laughs]

Keith: [laughing] We’re doing a whole podcast about it.

Amy: It’s true. I’m sorry I brought it up. [laughs]

Patrick: I feel myself getting more stupid with every sentence that comes out of my mouth.

Amy: Oh, no! I killed Patrick: McKenzie’s brain cells.

Patrick: What were our value-creating topics we were going to talk about…?

Keith: OK, so value-creating topics. Number one was the cat picture that Basecamp…

Patrick: No, that was not on the list.

Keith: Oh, that was not on the list. OK. [laughs]

Patrick: We were going to talk about…so, Amy, your business trajectory has been from one where you were consulting and not really loving it, to put it mildly. Now you’re 100 percent on the products. I started with the product/day job and got quit of the day job as of two years ago this week, which was the second-best decision ever.

Amy: Happy anniversary!

Patrick: Thank you.

Keith: Oh yeah, that’s right.

Patrick: But I kind of got sucked into consulting, starting about the same time I quit the day job, because people threw motivation on my company at me. And it was just hard to say no to the checks. And they generally come from people who are not Fortune 500 companies and have a little less BS associated with it, like the minimum BS that you can possibly have while still taking money from other people, I think.

So I’m pretty happy with that. But in the future, I would love to transition back into 100 percent product. And Keith is kind of at the end of the totem pole. Keith also quit. Like we talked about on the podcast last time, he quit his crazy Japanese day job and now works for consulting clients who are much better. But he also nurses dreams of having a…

Keith: A product and actually creating something of my own, right?

Amy: Yeah. That’s an awesome feeling.

Keith: It is.

Amy: I can tell you, from over here, it’s great.

[laughter]

Amy: Why didn’t I do this three years earlier? Keep at it. It’s worth it.

Patrick: So people have told me that they’re actually interested in how the lifestyle works out. Everyone grows up knowing lots of examples of people who work day jobs, and everyone kind of knows, “OK, you work for about 40 hours a week. You go commute to an office.” You know what the packaged lifestyle deal of working for a day job is, whereas they don’t know what it is to run a product. So, can we just spill the beans and say it’s F’ing awesome all the time?

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: Yeah. [laughs]

Keith: Except for customer support.

Patrick: Even for customer support…

Amy: Whenever I have to touch any other institution, like government or healthcare or banking, I kind of want to kill myself.

Patrick: Yeah, that’s true.

Amy: But it’s no worse than working with marketing people, [laughs] which is what I was doing as a consultant.

Patrick: And we never have to talk to an HR department, which is worth its weight in gold.

Amy: I haven’t worked at company big enough to do that, so I’ve avoided a special kind of hell. I feel very lucky for that.

Keith: [laughs]

Patrick: One of the things that I’m really appreciating this year is I’m getting married in June — yay — and pretty much taking off. I just told my consulting clients that, basically, either get themselves in by the end of May or it’s not happening till September, and just took off the entire stretch in there and will just not be working.

Amy: That’s awesome.

Patrick: I get a lot of people asking me, “How can you do that? The servers are going to burn down in a fiery badness.”

Amy: [laughs]

Patrick: Just verify for me that I’m not insane here. That’s not really how things work, right? These businesses…

Amy: Of course it’s how it works. The moment you turn your head, everything explodes in a fireball, then Godzilla comes out of the ocean. [laughs] Come on.

Keith: This is half-true, especially with Patrick’s track record.

Patrick: That’s not actually true.

Keith: OK, let me put it this way. [laughs]

Amy: Uh-oh. Is there dirt here? Is there dirt to dish? Do we get to dish dirt? [laughs]

Keith: No, no, there’s no dirt. He’s actually blogged about this. Whenever he is fully available, he generally has no support costs on his products, right? I think like, what, an hour of support a day or something like that?

Patrick: Way less than that, dude.

Keith: Way less than that. OK. Maybe 10 minutes…

Patrick: 20 minutes a week.

Keith: 20 minutes a week. OK. Anytime he gets on an airplane, or anything where he has no Internet connectivity, the server goes down. [laughs]

Patrick: This is not actually true. It just happened…

Keith: One out of 10 times. [laughs]

Amy: Just seems like it.

Patrick: It happened when I was doing an intercontinental flight back at Halloween, which is unfortunately the busy season for bingo cards.

Keith: You had another one when you were moving. You were moving and didn’t have phone access for one day, and the server crashed.

Patrick: Oh, God. [laughs] So this is two events in six years.

Keith: [laughs]

Patrick: The key that we were trying to emphasize to impressionable youngsters who are listening to this podcast is that you can step away from the business and it will not consume your life.

Keith: You can.

Amy: Absolutely.

Patrick: People will happily pay you money, even if you’re not working on the product every day, because people don’t care if you’re working on the product every day, they only care what they’re getting out of it.

Keith: The point I’m trying to make is, and what you say is true. 20 hours a week, you can go off and do what you want. People don’t care if you are working eight hours a day on your product, and you really shouldn’t be after you’ve launched to any certain degree. But keep your phone on. [laughs]

Amy: I’m sorry, I couldn’t parse that sentence. You can only not work 20 hours a week and people don’t care? I’m confused. [laughs]

Keith: Sorry, sorry. Did I really say that?

Amy: Yes.

Patrick: The English…

Keith: English? OK. So, as I’m sure everyone knows, we’ve been in Japan way, way, way too long.

Amy: OK.

Keith: So your customers do not care that you’re only working 20 minutes a week, or they don’t expect you to be working eight hours a day, because as long as the service works, they don’t care.

Amy: That’s right.

Keith: And you should not be working that much once your product is launched. However, you should always have your cell phone or some sort of Internet connection on in case things do explode, or someone to watch it for you.

Amy: So, we just took a month off in New Zealand. And then we came back for a week and a half. We’re doing city hopping in the US, San Francisco and Atlanta. And I actually did do email every two to four days, because I wanted to keep up with my class. We had somebody handling front-line support for the two apps.

We did have a server problem with Charm, but we haven’t launched that product publicly yet because we’re still ironing out those infrastructure kinks, right? And so I think my husband actually worked like two hours the entire trip, because he doesn’t have his class that he’s running. And nothing bad happened.

So here’s the thing, right? When you have a lot of customers, something bad can happen, and you can lose a few and you can be like, “You know what? I lost $200 a month of business and I took a month off. Who cares? Who cares?” And you can just gain those back. You come back, you’re like, “I’ll get new customers.” It’s not a big deal.

Someone will always cancel for some reason. It doesn’t really matter. In Freckle, we’ve gone down quite a few times. But it’s a product where you’re not in it all day, and something goes down once in a while. People don’t even get mad as long as you try to get back on and apologize. If it happens in the middle of the night, so be it. I’m not getting up in the middle of the night. No way.

Keith: And this is one thing. I think a lot of people on the Internet think that there is a limit to the number of customers you can have. They always talk about market shares and stuff like that. And talking about market shares when you’re going after big companies or products that need millions and millions of users is one thing.

So Bingo Card Creator is a very good one, because people always say, “How much of a market is there for teachers that need bingo cards?” Right? And there’s, compared to the number of programmers in the world, probably not many. But there are a f-ton, right?

Patrick: “More than I could ever hope to get to my website” is the short version.

Keith: If you were to even get one percent, you would never have to work again.

Patrick: I hate the one-percent math…

Amy: Oh, me too.

Patrick: Just as a comparable for folks, Bingo Card Creator, which is almost like the canonical example of, “Oh, God, that was a poor choice in niche selection, Patrick. Why did you do that?” has over 200,000 users and 6,000 paying customers. So if you think your thing for programmers is going to be more niche than that, you probably need to recalibrate expectations.

Amy: You’re probably wrong, also.

Patrick: And if I only had recurring revenue. That’s another thing.

Keith: [laughs]

Patrick: Recurring revenue, man, that’s the best kind of revenue, isn’t it?

Amy: It is crack, in a good way. It’s crack that doesn’t make you sick. [laughs]

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: And it’s legal and stuff. And you don’t have to inject it. I don’t know. How do you take crack? Stop me now… [laughs]

Keith: [laughs] Our street cred is going down the toilet right now. [laughs]

Patrick: So, definitely, if you have the opportunity to make a SaaS business, do the monthly charge thing that all the cool kids are doing, because it does wonderful, wonderful things for your cash flow. It helps you absorb advertising costs better. It will allows you to have high customer lifetime values without your customers perceiving the service as being expensive at all.

Amy: It’s true, that is a very good point! Recurring revenue is the Holy Grail and I love it. And back to your market share comment, recently, I mean it seems recently but it was like six or eight weeks ago, people were like…someone on Hacker News like, ‘Do people still pay for porn or these other things?’

And you were trying to be like, ‘I don’t know about that but I know people pay for a lot of these other tools, among which what you deem time tracking.’ And then the same or different person, very skeptical is like, ‘People don’t pay for time tracking!’

Keith: All people pay for time tracking! [laughs]

Amy: That’s how I read Hacker News, by the way. And then mentioned me and that’s just one example. In any industry there can be one example which makes money and I had to try them and then go, ‘You know what? There’s at least six to eight companies which make geometrically more money than I do!’ [laughs]

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: And then it went silent, surprisingly. [laughs]

Keith: [laughs] Always does!

Amy: I think a lot of people don’t, they don’t have any clue but they think that they do, about market share. What I hear a lot is, ‘Oh, but that market is saturated.’ You don’t even know what that means. That’s not what you think it means. Saturated means people don’t buy stuff anymore but they do.

If you have a pool that is very popular, has a lot of customers, there’s got to be a significant portion of those customers who are being ill served by that product.

Keith: Right, right.

Amy: It cannot be all things to all people. So someone like us who just needs a few thousand customers to live like a king, can swoop in and serve a segment of those customers, which were created for you by…

Keith: By someone else.

Amy: …this competitor which is allegedly saturating the market.

Patrick: That’s something I’ve been telling people for a while, it’s that competitors are a wonderful thing because it’s an engraved invitation from God that tells you that there’s money to be made in a particular place.

Amy: Yeah.

Keith: And there are always going to be people using your competitor’s products that are not happy with them that might want to go somewhere else. If you have a feature that other places don’t have, and even if you have a combination of features, so everyone else in this space might have the exact same features but they don’t have them in the same combination, you then have a niche of an already proven market share that want the features that you’re offering.

Patrick: We shouldn’t be the engineers here, either . We start talking about feature, feature, feature but we can honestly take something which is feature equivalent or even at less than the feature parity and just market it in such a way that, you know, it actually worked for people who it isn’t working for right now.

And that would itself justify a different business. Like, you know, there must be 500,000 big freaking enterprise project management/time tracking/Sa* , yada-yada things. Freckle doesn’t have to compete with them because you’re addressing just a different market than the kind of folks who want to buy consulting ware from IBM. So even with just a fraction of the “feature set,” you can just say, “Look, it will do what you need to do and get you back to charging your customers money.” Then that makes it a viable option for them, whereas the IBM consultingware wouldn’t be. Who would you consider to be Freckle’s big competitors?

Amy: Harvest.

Keith: Harvest.

Amy: “No Tool At All” I think is our biggest competitor.

Patrick: That is a big one.

Keith: That is a big one, that is a big one.

Amy: It’s huge! [laughs]

Patrick: Folks ask me how I convince people to stop using whatever their business’ scheduling software is and start using Appointment Reminder because you have to have the appointment schedule to send out the appointments reminders at the right time. And the easiest answer to that is, all you have to do is out-compete paper. It’s not very hard.

Keith: Moves people, especially techies, think that there is a solution out there already that people are using in the space that they don’t understand. And one of the things that I’ve seen with my clients especially is, they don’t have a solution other than Excel and a piece of paper.

Amy: Oh, it’s so true.

Keith: If you can beat down Excel you’re winning.

Patrick: Yeah.

Keith: The sad thing is how many don’t beat out Excel, right? [laughs]

Amy: Be careful about that because a lot of… so, I teach my students a lot of different things, one of which is a list of failure archetypes. Type one failures, failures that cannot be resuscitated by more work and marketing and repositioning and all that stuff.

And one of them is a “Cure for Religion:” trying to solve something that people don’t see as a problem.

Keith: Don’t want to see, right.

Amy: Lots of people love Excel and you will never pry it from their cold, dead fingers. Because they friggin love it. So you can be better than Excel and they’ll be like, ‘I don’t care, I’m not interested. I love Excel.’ And a lot of people cannot be reformed by software! [laughs]

Keith: It’s actually funny. My old company, they were having, not cash flow issues but reporting issues on their invoices and monies received and everything. It was taking so long because they were doing it over seven or eight Excel files and nothing was tied together and the sales guys were not reporting right.

So they commissioned me as an employee to spend a month or two creating an invoicing system that would tie back to all their sales and everything and just make it really easy to use.

I got all the requirements, made it all. I thought it was probably the easiest thing to use ever. Everyone said, ‘Oh, this is so easy to use.’ No one used it. [laughs] Like what they would do …

Amy: I think that was worth where that was going! [laughs]

Keith: Yeah, actually the sales guys really like it. The sales guys would put it the data, copy it into Excel and send it to the accounting firm. [laughs]

Amy: Yeah!

Keith: I mean, the saddest thing ever, to have your software simply be a copy paste solution for Excel. [laughs]

Amy: Yeah, that sounds really terrible.

Patrick: I don’t know if that’s sad or opportunity because I have definitely created things where for, largely not in publicly accessible parts of the product but if people say “the workflow requires X at the end of it”. If that is the issue that’s preventing you from paying me a motivational amount of money every month then wham! There’s a button on your dashboard now that exports CSV files. Go to town!

Although that’s an issue I think we’ve all talked about before. Customers, the things they tell you are they reasons they’re not buying the software are generally not the reasons they’re actually not buying the software!

Amy: They’re usually, yes. I find it is a mistake to listen to people. Not just in like, I don’t take their advice, this is different. I watch they do, so the whole ‘programmers don’t buy things’, I see people saying that, meanwhile they pay for like Apple products and GitHub and PeepCode.

And they say it with a straight face when they say it, “I would sign up for your service if XYZ.” And I’m like, “What would that look like? Why do you need that?” And they come up with something that’s so bizarre. I’m like, “Why don’t you do it this way?” And they’re like, “Oh…”

Because when people ask for features, like a client, most of us who are experienced consultants know that you can’t take anything they say at face value. You’ll be like, “What is your purpose?” They’re like, “I need this animated Flash widget, blah blah blah.”

And then you find out they need something really simple, and they just came up with that because it looked likely and they like to sound like they know what they’re doing. But they don’t. [laughs] It’s our job to figure that out and look at what they actually do.

Keith: Customers, businesses, clients, all of them together, most of them have really no idea how their business runs, I think. Patrick: always says that there’s a key number to any business that directly influences the bottom line of sales. And the number of companies that actually know that key number are few and far between, I think.

Amy: What kind of number are we talking about?

Keith: I did a recent re-jiggering of an online registration service (Patrick notes: more natural English might be “a hotel booking website”), and I did some consulting for them, and they were under the impression that 90 percent of their reservations came from the website instead of phone or walk-ins. And they were under the impression that they were having about a 60-percent, or a really high, conversion rate from people who came into the system.

And once we brought out the actual numbers, they saw that there was only 20 percent actually using the website. And of those 20 percent, only, I think, like nine percent actually completed a reservation on the website. And so it’s not that those numbers were necessarily bad, but they had a completely opposite view of the reality of their business, right?

And they had been doing that for five, six years. If they had noticed that five, six years earlier, they could’ve completely changed their strategy, but instead they were poking along because they were under a misconception.

Amy: Right. That’s a pretty big misconception.

Keith: That’s a pretty big [laughs] misconception, I know.

Patrick: That happens over and over again in my consulting career. I’m lucky I get to work with savvy, intelligent people. I mean, hey, they pay me.

Keith: [laughs]

Patrick: They’re all good companies run by smart people, and yet many of them don’t have the infrastructure in place to tell them material facts about the business that you can’t get just by looking at a screen in Google Analytics. That directly influences decision-making about those material facts.

Amy: Right. We tend not to notice what isn’t there. We just work on whatever’s in front of us. We don’t look for the thing that’s missing.

Patrick: That’s an interesting topic. As one business operator to another, what kind of things do you track for your business?

Amy: So, since we last talked, it hasn’t really changed that much. [laughs] We have a lot more… Actually, that’s not true. We set up KISSmetrics, since we track a lot of things now. But we do not have a very good sales funnel tracking, and that’s because we plan to redo the sales page completely. This is my white whale, perhaps, or some other thing that will never get finished…

[laughter]

Amy: …and I should give up on before I become a horrible novel, or something. Because that’s going to happen. But we track a lot of revenue, we track churn rate, we track feature adoption now. But, I’ll be honest, I haven’t looked at it lately. And by lately, I mean the last three months.

We’ve been totally occupied with other stuff. In fact, we haven’t developed, or even deployed finished features, for Freckle for months because of the international move, all the other drama we had in our personal lives, travel, and Thomas getting his immigration stuff sorted out. It’s kind of like your three month vacation, only we weren’t really having fun but for one month of it.

[laughter]

Patrick: Back to a previous topic, because you charge customers monthly, the revenue went up every month anyhow.

Amy: Yes. It did. It did. It went up no matter what. What’s really awesome is that I, a few years ago, got sick with mono for the second time.

Keith: Oh my God.

Amy: I developed chronic fatigue syndrome, which kind of blew. For a while I was so sick I couldn’t do anything. The best thing I could do in the day was to get up out of bed and go to the sofa and watch stupid TV. I couldn’t even watch smart TV because it felt like I was having an agoraphobic attack in a crowd with all the facts.

Literally, I was averse to facts. I couldn’t cope. It turns out that was low cortisol, believe it or not. I couldn’t make any decisions or do anything at all for three months, work wise. Zip. Thomas manned the support, he talked to the one developer who was doing work for us, and it was fine.

Our business grew even when I was on practically bed rest, and that was a really transformative moment for me. I knew we could take these vacations. I knew we could do this stuff. But that was like a, “Holy shit!” moment. Am I allowed to say that? [laughs]

Keith: Yeah.

Amy: Awesome. It was. I was just like, “Oh my…”

Keith: [laughs] We’ve been cursing like sailors the whole time, so…

Amy: Oh, OK. [laughs]

Patrick: You have, I haven’t.

Keith: Patrick: doesn’t.

Patrick: My half of the podcast is PG, his is PG-13.

Amy: Once I felt better and actually had the cortisol to think about it…

[laughter]

Amy: …it was like a sky has opened up, ray of light, choir of angels singing and throwing cash.

[laughter]

Patrick: I love that image.

Amy: It was the best. I was like, “You know what? I can’t be fired. I cannot be laid off. I do not have to worry about unpaid sick leave. I have it made.” I think that’s one of the big reasons that I’m such a tireless promoter of what I call Bacon Business. Products that bring home the bacon, that make money that you sell directly to people who buy them. Not advertising, not marketplaces, not venture backed, because they can change lives.

To get all philosophical for a moment, it’s epic to be able to live this kind of lifestyle. Isn’t it? It’s amazing. I think not enough people promote it in a way that isn’t like, “Oh, well, they’re just super successful. That’s not standard and I could never live like that.” The examples out there are just too lofty. And then there are people like us.

Patrick: Yeah. I know, so I’ve been hanging around with the small software developer crowd for a while and there’s a lot of businesses that might be like Bingo Card Creator in terms of scope, but maybe up to an order of magnitude and more in terms of revenue, just by doing things that you wouldn’t expect that people could do as a full time thing that they’re doing as a full time thing. They get all the benefits of the lifestyle.

It’s like being a rock star minus the groupies. You never have to show up anywhere at any time. Money just appears magically in the bank account. Seriously, guys. For any of you who are on the fence try it. It’s awesome.

Amy: It is.

Patrick: I’ve got a lot of respect for the Silicon Valley startup types and I’ve kicked around doing that myself a couple of times and have been offered motivational amounts of money to do that. “This is awesome!” is something that you will not hear from lots of the folks over there.

Amy: I wonder why.

Patrick: It’s like being a lawyer or consulting like management consulting. There are people the lifestyle works for and there’s people that the lifestyle just does not work for. I don’t know if I could think of anyone off the top of my head who has started their own software business and went full time at it and was like “no.”

Keith: “I want to go back to my nine to five.”

Patrick: “I really want more challenges in life.” That’s something I hear from a lot of people. “Don’t you feel bored like you don’t have enough challenges?” No, I can spin up challenges any time I want.

Amy: No one has ever said that to me. I think most people assume it’s way harder and more stressful than it is, and I understand why. I actually had a short Twitter conversation with Jason Cohen who I absolutely adore. He writes a fantastic blog, A Smart Bear. Before I say this, I want to say that I just think he’s great. I wanted him to speak at Schnitzelconf, but it was just too far for him to go.

He tweeted why do startup founders beat themselves up? It’s like why do hamsters eat their young? They just have to. I was like no. For starters, I didn’t say this in the Twitter conversation, but I used to breed gerbils and none of them ever ate their young because I took good care of them so I feel like I’m sort of an expert on both parts of this equation. I was like that’s not true.

My gist was that people do it to themselves. He said it was easier to be lenient after you’ve had objective success. I said I wouldn’t call it lenient, I call it self-respect. The truth is it doesn’t get easier after you’ve had objective success. I think a lot of people, they actually are worse to themselves after they’ve had objective success because they feel like they have something important to lose.

I know a few people who run businesses like ours, they may be more involved, some less involved, and they feel like they can’t go on vacation, they feel like they have to answer email in the middle of the night, and they do it to themselves. It’s not external. It’s all internal and I don’t think Jason believes me. [laughs]

Patrick: I’m constrained at how much I can say because he’s one of my wonderful, lovely clients, but I’ve heard that feedback from other people who, again, much like Jason I respect.

It is a psychological thing that this is a meme we really need to kill, but I think there’s a deep seeded… zeitgeist. Is that the right word? People are afraid to allow themselves to be happy and believe that success must require a certain quantum of suffering and if you’re not suffering you’re clearly not on the successful route.

Even people who are clearly by any objective measurement successful. It’s kind of a personality thing, too. Jason is a very hard-charging, type A kind of guy. He’s got a ridiculously successful company right now, he’s sold one successful company previously. If you want to look at somebody who’s got it made, Jason has it made.

There’s no external feature that would necessarily need to make Jason feel the need to beat himself up. Actually, something you said to me was very profound, that if there’s ever an issue between you and another person it’s not about you, it’s about them.

Amy: Absolutely. So true.

Patrick: I think that recompiled part of my source code when I heard it because it was just so f’ing true. I find myself quoting that to people a lot.

People have asked me, “You didn’t answer my email. Was it something I said?” I’m like, “Nope. Just an FYI, any time someone does something it’s probably because something that was just going on in their life because they’re in their life 24 hours a day and they’re in their relationship with you for like 36 seconds a day. Just don’t worry about it.”

Similarly, don’t worry about what other people are thinking of you because they’re probably thinking of you a lot less than you think they’re thinking of you. They’ve got better things to do by their perspective. Same with software, by the way. We see our own software eight+ hours a day. We know where all the skeletons are buried. We see every little imperfection. Customers, by and large, don’t care about the little things.

Amy: They don’t.

Patrick: If it makes their life better, great. You’ll have complainers who largely won’t buy it anyhow.

Keith: Especially on the backend.

Patrick: 90 percent of the customers if it accomplishes the big 48 point font promise that’s on the front page of the website they’re good. If it gets better over time, that’s great, but fundamentally they’re good. If it has a bug, no problem. Computers eat things all the time. Whatever. They will say “I’ve got better things to do than worry about it.”

Amy: All those things come from the same route, if you ask me. What Terry Pratchett called being trapped in the dark behind the eyes. It’s just that we go through our lives 100 percent privy to everything that goes on inside us, even if we don’t understand it, which most of us don’t. This has been proven by research.

When we make a mistake or we choose something we have an elaborate reason why. When someone else does the same thing we get really glib and superficial like well, I did this because I made a mistake but he did that because he’s a jerk. It all comes from being self-involved, which is the default nature of humanity.

I think you were saying it’s like a zeitgeist. That was the right word. I think it’s just human. I think a lot of us, especially in Western cultures, we tend to self-flagellate for no good reason. People call it the Puritan work ethic or whatever.

Keith: Well, it’s not just Western. I was going to say…

Patrick: Japan could teach everybody about self-flagellation. (Patrick notes: If I were not talking in real time I’d say “I could have a very long discussion on the degree to which Japan counts as ‘non-Western’ here if you wanted me to.” Side effect of getting a degree regarding that subject.)

Amy: [laughs] Fair enough.

Keith: Looking at it from the Japanese perspective, I wonder how much of it is almost like an arms race. So one of the things that happens in Japanese companies…

Patrick: Oh, God, yes. Oh.

Keith: So, going back to the startup, where people have to suffer. So they have to work the 20 hours a day kind of thing, only four hours of sleep, constantly working, not taking care of their health and stuff like that. There are people out there who only need eight hours of sleep, who enjoy working 15, 18, 20 hours a day.

I’m actually close to that. I love working. And I work much more than I probably should, because I enjoy it. It’s my hobby to be creating things. And I think people see, especially people like that who have become successful and think, “Oh, this person is successful because he only sleeps four hours a day. In order for myself to be successful, I have to only sleep four hours a day as well.” And I think it becomes an arms race for trying to be successful.

And in Japan, there’s a very similar thing with the amount of hours people work. So people think that people in Japan work long hours and they are productive for all those hours. That is the furthest thing from the truth on the planet. They sleep. They clean their ears. I had my coworker assemble a bicycle in his cubicle [laughs] during work hours, for no apparent reason whatsoever.

It’s assumed that, just like in the startup business, there are people who work long hours because they are really good and they are successful. There are people who work long hours because they are idiots and not successful, and it takes them time to do everything. But the longer the people are there, if everyone is there, it’s so much harder for you to go home, right?

Amy: Right.

Keith: If successful guy number one is working 12, 14 hours a day, you think, “Oh, I have to be there as long as he’s there. Otherwise I’m not going to be seen as being as productive as him.” So what it comes down to is a bunch of people sitting in an office for 14, 16 hours a day, only doing about four to five hours of actual work.

Amy: So it’s cargo-culting mixed with social contagion. (Patrick notes:Great line!)

Keith: Exactly.

Amy: Right.

Patrick: And like a massive game of chicken…

Amy: Yeah. [laughs]

Patrick: Chicken or prisoner’s dilemma, I guess, one of them. The first person to decide to go home gets the evil eye. I think that’s part of the startup culture, too, in that, “Oh, you quit after only 10 hours today. You must not want success enough.” We construct our own cultural pathologies, because people don’t have enough exemplars of folks in companies that said, “We worked four, six, eight hours today, and we go home to the kids, and things are fine.” The cultural pathology of overwork ends up getting celebrated.

Keith: We need more Fog Creeks of the world.

Patrick: Fog Creek, the office is a ghost town after five o’clock.

Amy: As well it should be.

Keith: Except on game night.

Patrick: Except on game night. (Patrick notes:Every Thursday. Third-best reason to work there. They’re hiring, go work for them.)

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: So you were saying, Keith, the examples you had were the guy who works 12 to 14 hours and is successful and then the guy who works, I think you said 12 to 14 hours and was not successful.

Keith: Yeah.

Amy: I thought you said lower numbers for the second guy. But anyway, when you said that I was thinking that what you don’t have room for in Japan, apparently, but also not in Silicon Valley, is the person who works five hours a day and actually outperforms the person who works 12 hours a day. And that’s not uncommon.

Keith: Right.

Amy: I have a lot of people who use Freckle who’ve written in to me and said, “You know what I discovered, which is really freeing, is that I actually only get two to four hours of work done at my computer done every day. The rest is dicking around. And so I’m going to spend all the rest of the time that I would waste on the computer going out and playing music or walking around or reading, and then I’ll get more work done in the two to four hours I actually work.” And I think that’s true. It’s backed up by a lot of research.

Keith: Oh, definitely, definitely. And going back to the Japanese side of it, the problem is that when everyone is forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day, you then have the problem of, why would I work smarter? Why would I try to automate my process so that I can work more during those 12 to 14 hours instead of dicking around?

So it’s actually, because you’re in a trapped system here, then there’s no reason to better yourself. But using a product like Freckle, and especially for consultants and people who define their own time, it’s the biggest win you can possibly have. If you find out that you are dicking around on the Internet for two, three hours a day while you’re working, and a time-tracking software like Freckle actually makes you realize that, and then you gain two to three hours a day…

Amy: That’s true.

Keith: Because, as soon as you realize that you’re dicking around, you go, OK, I’m just going to leave the computer. I’m going to de-screen. I’m going to go off, play with my child, play with my friends, go out drinking, get slammed, or whatever you want to do, right?

Amy: Absolutely.

Patrick: This is one of the benefits of doing your own thing. You have social pressure coming from yourself, which always happens, but you don’t have social pressure from other people who can tell when you leave the office. The vast majority of days, I have a two to four-hour peak of productivity, and after that I’m pretty much shot. And since I know this about myself now, I just don’t work the rest of it.

Keith: You probably shouldn’t say that. Your financier probably… [laughs]

Patrick: I will tell this to any client. (Patrick notes: Any clients in the audience? You presumably know I have a sense of humor and can judge my pace of working, having sat next to me for a while. Any prospective clients? Productivity for me tends to be bursty, interspersed with periods of introspection, much like your engineers.)

Keith: That you only work two hours a day? [laughs]

Patrick: This is why I have you pay the week rate, guys, because work gets done, but assuming 480 minutes of equally productive time is not a good assumption for working with me, which you will probably notice as I check Hacker News in the middle of the day.

Amy: [laughs]

Patrick: But, no. It’s funny, though. There’s people who I respect enormously who have found out the same thing about themselves. Four hours a day is kind of the productivity limit, and after that it suffers. I know one friend in particular, and I won’t mention his name because he asked me not to mention it publicly, but the point is that he asked me not to mention it publicly.

He thought people would think less of him if they thought that his business, which is wildly successful, was just a part-time gig. Which, that breaks my brain. Half the reason I do the blog and the podcast and whatnot is to give people examples of there being multiple paths to the cheese of success in life.

Amy: Hear, hear.

Patrick: I wish everybody happiness. That’s kind of like a foundational philosophical thing for me, but once you introduce people to other ways to getting to happiness, which can include not working all the time.

Amy: Or much at all. [laughs]

Patrick: Or much at all.

Amy: That was not a slam on you or anything. I was actually thinking about myself when I said that.

Patrick: It’s no problem.

Amy: Not that I thought you would think it was an insult.

Patrick: I’m lazy like a fox.

Keith: He’s very proud of that. He’s very proud of that. He gets on my case all the time for working too much.

Amy: I thought foxes were pretty brown.

Patrick: I’m going to convert Keith.

Keith: You converted me to quitting my day job, so you might be successful yet.

Patrick: I’m only saying I’m going to convert Keith because Keith is my best friend so the less he works the more time I have to play League of Legends with him.

Keith: And the more time he has to exploit me for his own product development and stuff.

Patrick: Keith, in addition to being my best friend, is also the designer, but I can’t get any of his time because it’s been filled up with client work. Anyhow, what was I saying? If other people are sincerely happy working 16 hours a day in the coding salt mines then bully for them.

But I know because I’ve talked to and met a lot of people who are doing the 16 hour days in the coding salt mines because they think either that’s required to be successful or because they are strongly socially pressured by people that that is the behavior you should emulate.

If you are folks out there like that, if it makes you happy, thumbs up, go for it, but if you’re not truly happy by that then start doing something that will make you happy because there are so many ways to succeed in this. In business, in life, in general.

Amy: Absolutely. You’re not talking about runners up, either. We did not quite hit my revenue estimates for 2011, but we did have $550,000 of revenue and in 2008 we had zero.

Keith: Not too shabby, right?

Patrick: High five.

Amy: I’m sorry, what?

Keith: Not too shabby, right?

Amy: Not too shabby, right. Exactly. I was hoping for 600 grand and we didn’t quite make it, but that was with a lot of drama where we didn’t work for a lot of that year. I had surgery, I was really sick. That was the three months. That was last year. I had surgery. I was out of commission for six weeks then. We had this hiring and firing drama. That year was screwed and we made $550,000. I’m basically retired and I don’t want to be this way forever.

I really enjoy working and I enjoy having impact and I enjoy touching people’s lives with my software and my course, and I do spend a lot of time on my course. 30×500, that is. We could sit on our asses and rake in $550,000 a year and really work just a couple hours a day on average and we could really cut our overhead.

Most of our overhead we spend on developing new features and our new app, Charm. We spent a lot of money on that the last year. That’s because I had bigger ambitions, but I’m never going to work a 40 hour work week. I had this near death experience, basically, with chronic fatigue. I had this priority change. I was a workaholic. No, no more. Now I’m a hippy, but you can be a hippy and earn $550,000 a year if you pick the right product and if you keep at it.

The first year and a half kind of really sucked, but we got over that and now we’re making really good money and it’s not that hard. Patrick, I found out about you because you blog about this stuff because you’re trying to be a positive example and I also don’t understand why the person you know refuses to be named because he’s afraid of being shamed and that’s just really sad, I think, that by telling people you make the world a better place.

I understand why he’s afraid, but I would rather put it all out there and be a positive example because there are so few of them.

Patrick: I think that is one reason, too. Going back to a topic we were just talking about, like you said, we’re not runners up here. How do I want to phrase this? I like celebrating other people’s successes. You guys make more money for me, bully for you. 37signals can buy everybody in Chicago a sports car these days, bully for them. It makes me happy to hear that other people are doing well.

Where is this topic going? Just a life tip for everybody listening, if you compare yourself to other people and think you’re not successful unless you’re beating them by some metric you will generally be less happy than you are if you’re comparing yourself against either where you were previously or what your goals are.

Success, for me, is either beating where I was last year or beating where I thought I was going to be this year. That generates happy points for me, whereas I never really cared about comparing with other folks. I think folks like the friend of mine who success is partly defined as being seen as successful, that kind of screws up your priorities a little bit, although I’m not totally immune to that myself.

That was rambling. I’m sorry.

Amy: Not as much as me.

Keith: I think we’re going to have to close this down because we’ve gotten complaints in the past about us talking too much.

Patrick: This one is only an hour and a half or so.

Keith: We also shot the shit for about 15 minutes so after editing it’ll be about an hour. That’s pretty good.

Patrick: OK. Only an hour. Thanks very much, Amy. Let’s give folks the actionable information with the call to action at the end. If they want to sign up for 30×500 how would they do that? (Patrick notes: Again, you can’t, because it took a while to get this posted. Sorry about that.)

Amy: First you actually have to apply. We’ve been creating more and more successes each time I run the class and I want to keep that turned up, so I want to basically help decide with you if 30×500 is right for you at this time. That application is launching on April 13. That’s Friday the 13th. All the information is on my blog at unicornfree.com.

Patrick: Sounds great. Thanks very much for doing the podcast with us, Amy. It was insightful as always.

Amy: Thank you for having me.

Keith: It was great to meet you and looking forward to seeing more about 30×500 and more Freckle stuff, too.

Patrick: For all you folks in the audience, we’ll probably be doing this again in a month or two. See you next time.

Keith: Depending on when we can all get together with the microphone. All right. Thanks for joining us, Amy. You take care.

Amy: Thank you for having me.

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