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Comment by redsymbol | Hacker News Reader

If you are getting more job requests than you can handle, have you considered just raising your rates? Increase it by 10% every few weeks, for example, until you are not having to turn away good jobs. You can always decrease again if you overshoot.

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Good point! Yes, we have increased our rates but not kept them very high. I guess that's one of the reason potential clients continue to approach us. I think we are at a point where it makes sense to grow our team, but there are these constraints about wages etc as I mentioned in my description. We want to be as thoughtful and smart about hiring as possible. We are currently growing but we want to make sure whatever we do is sustainable in the long term. One option is to partner with other freelancers and sub-contract some stuff and we have done in few instances, but there's additional risk to that approach and probably not very beneficial in the long term

You might be surprised at how many clients continue to approach you even as your rates increase. In fact, there have been many examples in which people in your situation got MORE offers for work as they increased their rates - apparently it can make you appear higher quality ("they must be great if they charge this much!")

That may or may not happen in your case, but it is worth testing - especially because that higher income will make it MUCH MUCH easier to grow your team.

Best of luck!

Thank you. that is a great insight.

You'll probably make more money by outsourcing the work you can't handle, or hire more people. If you want to grow the business I mean.

While that's definitely a valid approach, it does have the downside of making you more of a manager. I've done both, but eventually stuck with raising my rates (for now) because I much prefer working on some interesting projects myself over managing others. And because I tend to do full-stack stuff (including server management and often even UI/UX and some degree of product development), it's varied enough.

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