I wonder how they measured "need for cognition" in individuals.
137 karma · joined January 28, 2019
If this is a concern, you can do variable pricing based on IP! Though I’d be willing to bet that at this time the creator is more interested in having a profitable business than serving every possible customer. That can come later when cash flow is stable and abundant.
1) Choose a specific skillset that you want to use and only accept jobs in that skillset. For me that should have been React/Node projects (even this is too general, but much better than “web programmer”). People hire consultants for instant productivity, and the type of person that has so little experience working with technologists that they expect instant competence after you tell them “yeah I used Python for a personal project” probably won’t be a great client. Ultimately you’ll want to own a business problem, possibly combined with a technological skillset, but that’s something you can think about after you’ve set up a steady stream of work.
2) Use a “premium” recruiter or agency. Gun.io, Toptal, something like that. They don’t lock you in, you’re still free to find your own work, but they will save you SO much time and they’ll find SO much work that you wouldn’t have been able to find on your own. Use them to find projects in which you can hone the specific skillset you chose and make it more specific.
After a project or two you’ll have a feel for what’s out there and you can start tweaking your rate and how you market yourself. Also, consider reading Developer Hegemony to get a (pretty cynical) feel for the business side of things. Feel free to reach out if you want to chat further (email in profile).
On the one hand, sometimes my girlfriend and I tickle each other and sometimes she gets the better of me. She can be relentless. I'll plead for her to stop, and I really truly want her to stop because I can barely breath, but she won't because she's interpreting my laughter as a "keep going" signal. So I've had to resort to ruthless counterattacks or ruins-the-fun physical defense (grab her wrists and force her to stop), which makes me feel like a jerk. Thus I fully support the "no means no" rule when it comes to tickling.
On the other hand, when your kid giggles and says "no..." but clearly wants to be tickled, you should tickle them! Just keep a careful eye out for signals that the fun is over. What kind of heartless monster trains kids to be as literal as possible all the time? Why not strive to teach them about appropriate context instead?
This post has made me realize that I hold these conflicting opinions simultaneously.
A low effort improvement to the landing page would be to move link to a sample from the bottom to the top. Make it the first thing a visitor sees. Let the product speak for itself.
You shoukd charge more too. $.50 on a for-life value add feels like you’re only capturing a teensy tiny fraction of the value you provide. You’ll probably have to deal with way fewer support requests too if you charged ~$5/article.
Think about it - someone could record the audio themselves which might take ~1 hour all-in? If their hourly rate is $60, your service is still providing ~$45 of value per use if you increase the price to $5. The customers you want won’t care about the increased price and it makes it more likely you can continue to support your users and grow the company far into the future.
Finally, a natural product expansion would be automated distribution to podcast platforms. IMO you should invest in building this out instead of supporting the audio embed. A new distribution channel is a lot more valuable for a blogger than a new feature on their existing channel (think about it: if you were a blogger would you rather embed a video to go along with each post or post an accompanying video to your YouTube channel and link to it/link back to the article from the video?).
Product braindump done. Again, awesome work on the product and good luck growing the business!
I'm not even mad that it's basically a pitch to get readers to give problem/product feedback, I'm just pleasantly surprised this wasn't a total fluffpiece about todo list apps.
My favorite takeaway is the idea of asking users how they would convince their friend NOT to use a product. Excellent way to get users to authentically pinpoint the parts of the product they find the most painful.
Anecdotally, when I make bad decisions on the job it's almost always due to my emotional state. Whether it's the stress of an impending deadline, lack of sleep, feeling of inferiority, etc.
Even when I'm aware of a dangerous emotional state, it's difficult to make good decisions. Proactive prevention (get enough sleep, exercise, meditate if you're into that) has been the only solution for me. I'd be curious to hear more preventions and especially interventions that work for others.