A story of Survivorship bias - Presented at Ruby Meetup Ljubljana in May 2017

1. Up Your Freelancing
Game
Jure Čuhalev
A story of Survivorship bias

2. All clients are not
created equal

3. Are you just an resource
or do you create value?

4. • Typical clients where you’re a resource:
• (Marketing) Agencies
• Body shops/consultancy companies
• Typical clients where you create business value:
• You are hired to solve a problem
• Where you can have productive discussions
about how your work will make them money

5. Have a value
conversation with
business owner

6. Value conversations
• We can’t enter content directly
• We want to do a lot of contact forms
• We want to look more modern
• Our site doesn’t look good on mobile

7. Think about business
context and don’t burden
client with technology

8. Educate the client on
benefits of your expertise.
Learn about their market
and terminology.

9. Examples
• Content upgrades form
• What is mailchimp
• How does PayPal work
• How do you convert Excel into CSV and a
possibility of custom importers

10. Your project proposal
should highlight
business benefits

11. • Problem: our sales can’t easily show examples on
their tablets/phones. Our competition is all mobile
ready.
• Solution: Rethink how we present content and
ensure that new site works well on mobile
• Bonus benefits: improved SEO by Google, no
need to do a native app

12. Pricing
(Time vs. value)

13. Reduce risk for business by
charging fixed amount per
project instead of hourly

14. value based tiered pricing
Wordpress
Design
Wordpress
Design
Training
Content entry
Wordpress
Design
Training
Content entry
Copywriting
Design
1000 € 2.200 € 5.000 €
https://gumroad.com/resource-center/pricing-your-product

15. document* how you
make their business
money.
* send this document as an attachment to your
monthly invoice

16. • Reports that show that faster code on servers means
more conversions / higher SEO / ..
• Show that new tools that you built decrease the time that
other employees had to spend on a task
• Explain how your work directly tied into business
objectives for that quarter
• I worked at bug #4023 for 20 hours so that we can
now support Stripe in addition to Paypal. We’ve
already seen first 100 transactions with Stripe.

17. Grow your business
testimonials
referrals

18. Jure has been able to develop our ambitious
project. [..]
Jure has been the best travelling companion that we
could choose.[..] Jure has a very professional
organization and great knowledge about the tools.
Also, Jure had always met compliance with
established deadlines.
In short, it has been a pleasure to work with him.
-signed

19. Talk to your colleagues
how they do it and ask
them to review yours

20. Charge more

21. How do I learn more?
• https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/
• http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/
• http://artofvalue.com/