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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Ah, the seldom used 3rd definition of "Hacked": "To abruptly remove large portions of".

This freelancer seems to have contrived a way to work the equivilant of two billable weeks (spread out over a presumably longer amount of calendar time) at a tiny fraction of his market rate.

Hopefully the marketing effect of articles like this one will result in a significant uptick in his workload. If not, he's not only put in a bunch of work at a terrible bill rate. But he's signaled to the world that the correct price for his work going forward is $76/hour.

Not the best place to be. Here's hoping another hundred-odd people buy time from him so at least the final number looks respectable.

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The point of this isn't to pay his bills, I suspect - it's marketing, and apparently effective: he's made over 100 new business contacts at this point.

Exactly the point. Chances are, these people have long term projects for him and now he has become a trusted consultant. I absolutely love everything about this.

Yeah, I'm surprised he hasn't gone with some sort of exponential or logarithmic scale (eg. hit $10/hr then start increasing by $5 each hour booked).

He might accidentally zip past the optimum price point, but he'll get there a lot quicker.

Technically he should have used a binary search.

$1, $2, $4,...$64, $128. $128 is too much then do a binary search between $64 and $128.

Would be interesting if the price rose by a certain amount for each hour booked, but also fell by a certain amount for each day with no apt booked.

Good point. Of course another interesting way to look at it might be to see if there are multiple maxima. Perhaps if he advertised a very high rate comparatively to the competition, he could find another stable price point. Or perhaps he might just be able to keep going, pushing the limit of what people will pay, while keeping up the high quality work. Bit of an Apple strategy! It does help if the product/service is very good of course.

I think it's too early to say if this is a successful experiment or not. His current rate is up to 107 (average about $53/hr so far). I imagine at least a few people were interesting to work with along the way.

His "market rate" is what people will pay him. Seems like he discovered what his ideal market rate is... $76 an hour.

He's up to $123/hr now...

That's currently $7503, with a current average of $61.

But he has to work 62hr/week to get that? That's not so tempting.

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