The cost of hustling | Hacker News Reader

The cost of hustling

blog.method.ac

27 pointsduopixel10 comments

I run a small cleaning business that brings me in some passive income, but when i was at the start i had this client that i eventually refused to do work for because he wasn't worth the hassle. The bill for a months cleaning of his office was £500-ish. The guy was part of a family that owned an Oil and Gas equipment company that must turn over hundreds of millions of pounds per year, and that guy REALLY REALLY didnt want to pay his £500 bill for an office clean. He must have spent about 10+ hours going back and forth through emails and phone calls querying 2-3 hours here, the cost of cleaning supplies, complaints about the cleaners i'd sent, just to get his bill down, in the end his bill was down to around £400 and he eventually paid it, but he'd wasted his own time and the same amount of my time.

Now i consider 10+ hours of MY time to be worth WAY more than £500 due to what i can earn doing my usual consulting and also because i dont want to deal with douchebags like him, and what i make per year is insignificant compared to the company that he helps to run, so i never understood why the hell he's kicking up shit over a damned cleaning bill. Infuriated me to no end.

Now i only have clients that pay their automatically issued invoices every month without issue, they're happy and i'm happy, i get my beer money and i can concentrate on my consulting instead of my side business.

Sounds like typical nepotism at work. The guy can haggle with you for 10 hours because he isn't actually responsible for anything. His name/association is his ticket

One interesting thing about hardcore hagglers, they tend to be dumb. They don't actually know what anything is worth, they just want to win. They're more concerned with how much they can claim to have saved than what they're actually paying.

Big companies take maximum advantage of this by setting a hugely inflated "list price" at 2-4x or more of a fair price. This enables them to provide large "discounts" which make the hagglers feel they've won while paying above fair price. This has the additional advantage of setting a discount watermark in the haggler's mind that everyone else will be expected to meet.

It looks to me that the author himself doesn't value his own time enough, yet, since he "conceded and said (he) would fix the bug".

If you are bootstrapping something, it is critical to be able to say no at this point and not follow along, since so many things can eat your time.

I felt a better option for the author would be to quote a price reflecting the high value of his time.

There's a very big difference between "asking" and "refusing to take no for an answer". The first one rarely has negative effects - but the second one often can.

Some level of social skill and empathy is also required for the "asking" portion, too...

This went back and forth four or five times until I then reminded him that I had made it very clear that I was not available, and that he was losing my time and his own by sending these constant emails.

The real problem is that you kept continuing the conversation, even though you said no. That probably gave the individual some sort of hope that they could convince you otherwise.

I let him know that I had set up a filter to route his email address to trash and that he would never hear about me again.

I personally would recommend against doing things like this. Don't tell them you're going to do it, just set and forget. ;)

A good hustler must consider that–if he has nothing to lose by asking–it might be because his self worth is nothing.

That's quite a harsh judgment - I think the hustler is generally aware that they are on the losing end of the power dynamic, and that is what requires the hustle (partly to prove their eagerness/enthusiasm), but their self worth is definitely not zero as this would cause them to just shut up and not bother. I see hustle as an attempt flex muscle by the weaker person in the negotiation.

It doesn't seem like hustlers, at least in the sense of the article, have low self-worth. It's fairly easy to put people with low self-worth off.

Hustlers are, I think, more like those really pushy boyfriends who you go out on one date with and then they try to call you 15 times an hour. Same sort of behaviour -

"ME ME ME, MY WANTS OVER YOUR RIGHT TO BE LEFT ALONE! LISTEN TO ME! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!"

I suppose you could consider that a form of insecurity. But if it is, it's insecurity coupled with incredibly strong selfishness.

I suppose you could consider that a form of insecurity

not really. One of my favorite results from pysch research was that large, physically aggressive men are not in fact covering up insecurity. In general, they tend to have very good self esteem.

Which frankly makes sense. Why? Because few people want to step to a large, physically aggressive guy and tell them they have some stupid ideas. Real life example: any NFL pre-game show. These guys are sling blade level stupid yet they have incredibly high opinions of themselves.

Y?our point helped me identify my problem with this article: the hustler he sets up at the beginning of the article is not the same type of hustler from the one he's annoyed at at the end. At the beginning it's about "people who talk, or work, and at the end it's "people who can't talk well".

I'm afraid therefore that I'd have to conclude it's a poorly-thought out article.

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