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Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

And yet, nobody answered question #2 (What was your defining moment when you realized you were worth more than what you were charging) like so:

"I read a blog post or a book on how to charge more."

This is not to say that a post like this doesn't have any value - or a book like Brennan Dunn's book. But sometimes, when I read stuff like that, I wonder how much is actually survivorship bias and how much one can REALLY learn from a post like this.

It's a bit like Amazon reviews of books: Half of them are for people who have read the book and start to discuss things retrospectively.

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Before I quit my job to start consulting, I read all of (every... single... one) Patrick McKenzie's blog posts and podcasts. That gave me the knowledge that there is a market for results-oriented, bullshit-free consultants, and that clients in that market are willing to pay for results.

So when I quit and self-declared myself a consultant, I went straight to charging premium weekly and monthly rates, as Patrick and others have recommended.

It wasn't $30k/week, and it still took many months to stop feeling like a fraud, but two years later I'm earning a living by working with extremely interesting and successful clients. I altogether skipped the dreaded "cheap freelancer living week-to-week" stage, and I give a lot of credit to Patrick's articles for that.

I am that person. Read Brennan's book in 2012 and im making 3-4x as much net today as I was then. Is it entirely due to that book? No, of course not, but it did shift my thinking and start me down a road of continually pushing the boundaries to charge more. Which I often feel I'm pretty terrible at, but at least I'm trying.

The set of freelancers working right at the rate they should be is orders of magnitude smaller than those who are far undervaluing their work because they've never even really tried to dramatically increase their rates.

For me, reading blog posts helped build my confidence to be able to ask for higher rates—seeing that lots of other people charge over $100/hr can really help to convince yourself that you're worth that.

You are right though, that reading blog posts is not going to create that change—for me it really came the first time I said what I thought was a high rate ($135/hr), and there was no pushback at all from the client. I was kind of amazed at first that they thought I was worth it, but with one success in the bag, it gave me the confidence to move forward.

I agree. I constantly see advice of the form, "You just need to insist on being paid what you're worth", as if a furrowed brow and a firm handshake can make just anyone able to charge enormous amounts.

To be sure, for some freelancers, timidity in asking for more is holding them back, but it has to be combined with an honest self-assessment of how much you could reasonably ask for.

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