Veteran Designer Spills Secrets to Finding High Paying Clients and Making More Money

You give me a dollar and I'll give you two back right now. How many of you would take that deal? What if I said, you give me $10 and I'll give you 20? You give me $1,000 and I'll give you $2,000 back? A million dollars for $2 million? There's no such thing as the market. What was the qualifier for my clients? If you had money, you're a good client. Right? That was it. You okay if I provide a reframe on that? I don't think that we need a different kind of client. I think we need a different kind of standard. I think we need to be able to say to ourselves first and then to our clients, we don't work with clients who do not give us access to analytics. That's a tough. It's a tough one. That's the right answer. It's simple. It's really difficult to be able to say. A lot of fear that that brings up. Thanks, everybody, for joining. I don't know about you all, but I'm just about in holiday mode already, so kind of winding down for the year. Hope you all are having good holidays. Good. End of the year, ready to start the new one. This is going to be pretty casual here. And this is going to be a discussion, not really a presentation or anything like that. So this is. Feel free to have your cameras on if you want to. Feel free to have your cameras off if you prefer that too. We will have some time for you all to be able to ask questions. And again, like I said, this is going to be a discussion more than it is a presentation. Is that in particular, this is not like a. I don't have any slides or anything like that. So if anybody, if any of you have questions that you want to, like, unmute yourself, come on video, you know, one, one or both of those things. You're welcome to do that. We'll all have a chance to talk here. It's gonna be a lot of people, I think a lot of people registered here. So we'll. We'll see how it goes. Certainly we're not going to have time for everybody to be able to ask questions, but I imagine that a lot of you will have a few of the same questions and maybe we can cover a few topics at a time, you know, and then. And then have some time for some individual stuff. I also keep an eye on the chat too. You know, we'll see. We'll see what's going on the chat. If you have questions, feel free to Post them in the chat. I'll say this in a minute too. As more people are. Feel free to post them in the chat as a reminder. Please do. If you're not talking, please do keep your microphone, microphone on mute. I will from time to time probably just mute the entire room just to make sure that we're not getting background noise from everybody. Just to keep it, I don't know, constructive, I guess. And then. Yeah, we'll get started here in just a minute. Good to see you all. For those of you who I know and have met, nice to see you all again. For those of you I haven't met, hopefully I get to meet you either today or in some other time as well. Oh, we got an AI companion request. I've never done that before. We'll try this. We'll see how that goes. I don't know. I don't know what that is, but we'll find out. We'll find out together. All right. I am so happy that you all are joining this. Lots of people. I definitely didn't anticipate so much interest. I think we had like, like almost 400 people registered. So we'll see. I had to upgrade my, my Zoom, my Zoom account because my Zoom account could not handle that. I don't know what it's going to be like to have 400 people on a Zoom. I don't. I imagine that not everybody is going to join, but we'll send a recording out of this afterwards too. But you know, we already have 125 people in here. That's amazing. Thank you all for making time today. Hopefully we cover some stuff that is useful to, to you, useful to everybody here so we'll have a chance to talk. Okay, let me, we're at three after the hour. Let me kind of give the lay of the land here. This is a conversation and a discussion about making money. A lot of you are in similar positions. You might be running your own businesses, you might be freelancing, you might be thinking about freelancing. You might have a full time job and want to, to make more money at your full time job, maybe getting a raise or a promotion, maybe a full time job and you're thinking about going out on your own. So we're going to cover a lot of those kinds of topics. I have a couple of prompts up here, but really this is a discussion. This is for all of us to be able to talk together. So for those of you who do have questions, feel free to post it in the chat. For those of you who want to just talk, you know, if you want to unmute yourself and you want to talk, please do use the raise your hand feature of Zoom. If you don't know where that is, at least on my toolbar, there's a. If you look at your toolbar, there's a react button down in the toolbar. And I think if you have the react button. Well, let me see. If you press that, you should see a raise hand button. If anybody isn't seeing that, let me know and I'll make sure you all have the right permissions and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, the Zoom controls, they iterated on it a lot and so lots of things that you might not anticipate of where they are. So if you do have a question, just. You can either put it in the chat or use the raise your hand button and I'll call on people. That way it's not like a bunch of people trying to chime in all at the same time. If this goes well, which I am assuming it will, and you all want to do something further afterwards, we can do something afterwards, too. So I'll send out an email after this with the recording. If you all want to do like a presentation or webinar style similarly to this, we can do that as well. So we'll see how this goes today and kind of go from there. A couple of things that I want to cover, first of all, actually, the only thing I want to cover is because there are so many people here and because not all of us are friends yet, I would like to say that there is a code of conduct. Even even though this is casual, there is a code of conduct for this conversation. The general gist of it is, please be courteous and respectful to everyone in this room as well as yourself. That means a couple of things. One is that there will be absolutely no harassment or disparagement. Don't talk bad about your boss. Don't talk bad about somebody here. Don't talk bad about yourself. I will not tolerate any negative talk either about yourself or about others, because it's my zoom. I will mute you or I will kick you out. You know, if you refuse to to follow those guidelines specifically, please, please, please, no verbal comments or written comments that reinforce social structures of dominance. That includes sex, gender, political ideology, religion, and all sorts of things like that. Keep it clean, keep it nice. We're all here to learn from each other. Again, it's all under my discretion. I'll kick you out if you don't follow those rules. Hopefully nobody will get kicked out. I've never had to anybody out of these things before. I'm hoping to keep up that record. So please don't let this be the thing that makes me break that record. Lots of different people here from different backgrounds. Yes. As we're seeing in the chat. And, and that's great. That's awesome. I want to keep doing these. All right, that's my preamble, that's my preface. Let's talk here about money. I'm going to give us a couple of topics to just talk about and then I'll open the room and see if anybody has any, anything that they want to say, anything that they want to bring up. And again, as a reminder, the topic is making money. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Dan, Dan Mall. I'm just outside of Philadelphia. I live just outside of Philadelphia in the US And I have been freelancing for a long, long time. I started my own agency in 2012. I ran that agency for 10 years until 2022. I am now a freelancer again and a consultant. I used to charge hourly and then weekly and then monthly and then fixed price and then value pricing and then all sorts of stuff. My agency, hundreds of thousand dollars dollars some years, millions of dollars other years. I know how to pitch million dollar projects. I know how to pitch hundred dollar projects. I have lots of tips and things like that to share. So I bet all of you are in very different stages of your career and your business. Probably all of, all of you, all of us are looking to level up somehow. That could be in your income and your revenue. That could be in your skill set. That could be in your, you know, whatever, whatever it is. And so we can talk about all those things. So the prompt to you all is who, who has a, who has a question or a topic that they would just love to hear me and, or everybody else kind of talk about and share experiences with Any, any first brave souls that wants to either raise their hand or put something in the chat. I don't think I've seen any, any questions in the chat yet. Keep an eye on it. I don't think so yet. Okay, cool. Lots of people from around the world. I'm not great at, at all of the accents and all of the, the pronunciations in the world. So please forgive me. I will do my best to pronounce everybody's names correctly. Please do correct me if you'd like to about how to pronounce your name. I'd like to know how to pronounce your name. And I'll just go on the. With the order that's on my screen. The first person that I see is Adebimpe Omolaso. Adebimpe. Do you want to come up and maybe ask a question? Either unmute or turn on your video, whatever you're comfortable with, and. And ask your question. Hey, Dan, sorry, I'm just woken up from bed, so I want to ask a very, very funny question, but I just want to be straightforward again. Once again, thank you so much for setting this up. So I've always had this goal of trying to get to a million dollars, but I don't know, it just feels like a huge barrier. So I, I just want to ask this question, like, how do you.

Create.

A strategy to earning a million dollars as a designer, either as a freelancer or as an agency? Then the follow up question will be, how do you pitch a million dollar idea or design business? Basically? Thank you. Yeah, awesome, Adam, thank you for that question. I bet all of you are in similar stages or relatively similar stages. And I want to broaden the question also to be applicable to everybody. Essentially, it's, you may have some target in your mind that could be a million dollars, $100,000, $100, $1,000, you know, whatever that is. And you might be thinking, like, how do I do that? You know, I'm not at that level right now. How do I do that? And so I'd like to share with you a couple of things that I've learned in whatever that next level is. I remember working on projects that were hundreds of dollars, and I was like, man, how do I, how do I pitch $1,000 project? Right? And then I would learn how to be able to do that. And then, oh, how do I, how do I get a $10,000 project? Right? And then how do I get $100,000 and how do I get a million dollar product? What I've learned is that a lot of the techniques are the same. They're the same to get to the next level. And so I'll share with you what I've learned, and I think they apply to getting a million dollar project and also to getting a $10,000 project or $1,000. I think it's the same lessons. And then I also give a couple of qualifiers for. All right, if you are trying to pitch a million dollar project, what are some things that you might think about? And actually, what are some things that you might think twice about, you know, in doing that? So first of all, I'll say my general principle around pricing. Two things that I want to share. The first thing is I almost never pitch pricing without. I'm sorry, I almost never teach pricing without teaching positioning. The reason for that is because generally people buy from people that they trust or they buy from people that they think they can trust. So if they don't trust you, you can't pitch them any amount of project. A hundred dollar project, a million dollar project, a $1 project. If you pitch someone who doesn't trust you a $1 project, they will likely say no to your pitch. So the first thing is they have to trust you in order for them to trust you. There's a lot of other people probably who do what you do. So the more you are one of one, you're the only person who does what you do. It's easy to trust you the more people see you, right? And we can talk about content creation and things like that as part of the more people see you, the more they trust you, the more they hear from you, the more they trust you. So there's all these things that you can do to earn trust from someone, and then that's the foundation for them buying. So then the first thing is you have to be positioned well to be able for them to trust you in order for you to actually be able to pitch a project to them of any size. Once they trust you, then. Then the next principle that I share, the second principle that I'll share here, is that it has to be a good deal. So this is the exercise that I give to almost everyone that I teach pricing to. Some of you have actually done this exercise with me. I know I've talked to some of you about this as well. So imagine this. And you don't have to answer out loud. This is a bit rhetorical for right now, but if I were to say to you, I'll give you. I'm sorry. If I were to say to you, you give me $1 and I will give you $2 back, no questions asked, no catch. There's no gimmick. There's no, you know, there's no tricks here. It's guaranteed. You give me a dollar and I'll give you two back right now. How many of you would take that deal? You don't have to say anything. You have to raise your hand. But probably a lot of you like, yeah, I'll take that deal. A dollar to get to. Sure. Okay. So if you would take a dollar to get to. If you would give up a Dollar to get to. What if I said I'll give you, you give me $10 and I'll give you 20, would you take that deal? Probably most of you, yeah, sure. What if you give me $100 and I give you $200, would you take that deal? Probably for most of you, yeah, sure. What if you give me $1,000 and I'll give you $2,000 back, would you take that deal for most of you? Yeah, probably, sure. So we can keep going up $10,000 for 20,000? Yes. A hundred thousand dollars for 200,000? Yes. A million dollars for $2 million? Yes. Now, as those dollar amounts get larger, it's just harder for you to get a hold of that cash. So if I said, give me $100,000 right now and I'll give you $200,000, probably all of you would be like, okay, good deal. But like I need to go get a bank loan or I need to like liquidate some assets or I got to talk to some friends and family. Like, it's going to be harder for me to get a hold of that $100,000. It's not going to be as available to me as $10, but I'll, if I can get it, I would do the deal. Right. So that second principle is that it always has to be a good deal. So to the question that was just asked, if you're going to pitch a million dollar project, how do you make a million dollar project a good deal? Well, you have to promise $2 million. That's what makes it a good deal. Then the next thing after that, once it's a good deal, then your client's question is, okay, how hard is it for me to get a hold of a million dollars to spend that on you, for you to get me 2 million back? So I'll stop it right there. I'm sure we'll get into lots of other things related to that, but those are my general principles on how do you pitch a million dollar project. You have to make sure that your client gets two in return. And if they can do that, then the next question becomes logistics. Right. It's no longer an objection. It's now about how quickly can I get my hands on a million dollars to be able to spend it on you for you to give me 2 million. All right, lots of good stuff here in the chat. Lots of questions here. I want to make sure we have time for as many as we can. Christian Almore, you're up next. I see your head next. And then after Christian Then Travis Miller, you're up next. Sort of. I'll start a queue here of what I see. Christian, thanks for raising your hand. What's your question? What are some of the things you want to bring up?

Yeah, thanks Dan. And hi everyone. So, yes, Dan, I have a question regarding tapping into starting freelancing. So I'm someone and I hope that a few people can relate to it. So it's not only a question for me. But yeah, so I'm just starting, I want to tap into freelancing. I've been, I've been on different experiences from working with startups to unicorns to starting my own company, even teaching for a period of time. But now I'm at a period where it makes sense to do some, to have some extra income on the side next to my full time job. So it is a part time thing and I would like to learn a little bit about the entry, the way to enter or to tap into this market. What are some, some, some good ways to do it? Are there some strategies or there are some networks or some, you know, resources that could help doing that?

Yeah, Christian, thank you for that question. Great, great question. I know a lot of you in some of the earlier surveys that I've done, a lot of you have similar questions like how do I, how do I break in? Like I'm ready to do this, how do I break in? So Christian, thanks for bringing that one up. One of the things, and this is not my idea, I read a lot of books about pricing and sales and stuff. So I'm going to share a lot of resources with you. I want to say a lot of these ideas are not my own, they're my own remix. But I want to also point you all at some of those resources too so that you can learn from them. One of my favorite ones is a book called Oversubscribed by Daniel Priestly. Talks about sales, talks about markets and things like that. And one of the things that he says in that book is that there's no such thing as the market, there's only your market. Right. And I think that's an important thing and relates to the question that we had, we just talked about. In order to break into freelancing full time, for those of you who are like, I have a full time job, I'm trying to go do my own thing. Like what, how do I, how do I do that? You have to find your market. And what a lot of people do to do that is they go, okay, let me, let me post on Instagram or let me post on Twitter and LinkedIn. Let me be a thought leader, let me do content creation. And that's like, that's a way to do it. And essentially what people who are doing that are trying to do, and some people are succeeding at doing that, is they're trying to be in front of people a lot and they're trying to earn trust, right? They're trying to earn trust by sharing good content or thoughtful content and getting people to trust them to go, oh, this person is smart. This person knows what they're talking about. Maybe I'll work with them someday. Maybe I'll do something with them someday. That's fine. There's a quicker way to do it, which is that everyone, I believe this, everyone on the face of the earth has people who trust them. So you don't have to go get strangers to trust you by posting on LinkedIn or Instagram or things like that. You can. That's an additional approach. But the first thing that I always Suggest is email 10 people who trust you already. I'm sure you have people who trust you already and pitch your services to them because you don't have to overcome the obstacle and the hurdle of trust with them. They already trust you. So email 10 people who trust you and say, hey, here's what I could do for you. You know, my friend works at this company, their company does this thing. I know how to build websites. Let me pitch that person building a website that helps their company do this and this and this. Then I'll email the second person. I have another person, a friend who has their own startup or their own business or their own food truck, whatever. Let me pitch them my marketing services to do this thing and that thing, right? So find people who already trust you, because that's one of the biggest hurdles to starting out. And just email them what you can do for them. I'm not talking about a template. I'm not talking about sending everybody the same email. I'm not talking about bcc ing all the people who trust you. I'm talking about sending individual custom emails to the people who trust you. Write them a letter, like, because they are your friends or they are people who trust you and they. And you want them to spend money with you. That's how I started my agency. I made a list of 300 people that. Who trusted me, and I started emailing them one by one, and I got to 30, and then I was fully booked up for the next six months. So that, to me is the. Is the a really good Way to get started. And it's not about breaking into the market. There's no such thing as the market. There's only your market. So if you don't have a market, that's the stuff that you want to work on. If. If no one is following you, but people trust you. That's part of your market. It's the people who trust you, even if they don't follow you on Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn or, you know, wherever. If you don't know 300 people, some good comments in the chat. I don't even know 300 people in total. And that's the. That's the rub, right? That's the good stuff. Is like, 300 people is a lot. It's like, it's like, if I. For those of you. For those of you who went to design school, this is going to be familiar to you. For those of you who didn't, this. This won't be. When I was in design school, one of the assignments was like, draw a telephone 100 ways. I was like, all right. So, like, what I learned was like, I got to 10 or 15 and like, it was easy to draw a telephone 15 ways. And then it's like, after 15, you're like, how do I. How do I do this? And actually, that's where the good stuff happens. Because then you start to go, well, what if I just drew the handle? What if I just drew the speaker? What if I cropped into it? What if I zoomed way into it? What if I zoomed way out and, like, I just put a dot on the page? Well, that's a telephone, too. Like, you start to look at things differently. So, yes, most of us don't know 300 people. Dunbar's number stops at 150 for those of you familiar with that. Right? So most of us don't know 300 people. Once you get to maybe 25, you're going to be like, oh, who else can I email? And then you're going to start to do things that are very creative. You're going to start to go, maybe I will go to that meetup this week because maybe I could meet five more people here and just check, like, add those five people to my list, right? Maybe I. Maybe I'll call my parents and see if my parents know people who would trust me to do stuff. You start to get really creative about how to fill that number. So it's not about the number 300. It's about, how do you do this at volume and at scale? How do you increase the number of people who trust you? Essentially, that's what an influencer is. Right? An influencer has their own market that they are able to talk to people who trust them. So have your own market in that way. Again, we'll get to more of this stuff maybe, but that's the entryway to it. Christian, thank you for that question. Thanks for teeing this up. Appreciate it. All right, Travis, you're up next. And then after Travis, we've got. Oops, my screen changed. We got Vivek Vijaya Chandran. All right, Travis, you're up. What you got? Apologies, I was on mute still. Sorry. The pleasure meeting you at render earlier this year, man. Thank you for the time and thank you for this. A lot of wisdom so far. So I want to jump a little bit ahead in terms of the question because it's more like it's in relation. I've been freelancing for 10 years now, or going on 10 years now. It's been good, it's been successful. Definitely a lot of places where I could improve. But I'm also at that stage where, like, okay, I've built a lot of cool products for clients and I've gained a lot of experience where I could probably piece those things together to make your own product for myself. But even if it isn't a technical product, I know you are very versed into the developing of your workshops. And then you also have the book as well, too. So I guess to kind of frame it in a question, how does one look at supplementary streams of income within the same realm of. Of what you do and how they play a role into, you know, your finances as well, too?

Yeah, totally.

Great question, Travis. Good to see you again. Thanks for that. Great question. So, Mo, a lot of entrepreneurs will make money nowadays and make a lot of money with a portfolio of projects, right? Or a portfolio of income streams. That's a very popular way to think about how to. How to make money, how to grow wealth is. It's hard to grow wealth doing just one thing, because you really got to nail that one thing. So what a lot of people do is they have multiple income streams. They might have a services business, and then they might have. Maybe they write an e book or maybe they have a course, you know, so as content creation is getting more and more popular and also getting easier to do, it's easier for people like us to be able to do that stuff. So as Travis points out, I have a bunch of those things. I have courses through Design System University. I Have books that I've written. I have, you know, some of you make templates that you sell, like all those things, you know, some of you have real estate properties, right? So something not even in the space. Those are all. Those all contribute to your income portfolio. They think about it as a, as a portfolio approach. One of the things that is tough about that approach, and this is one of my favorite quotes, I go back to it often. It's an ancient proverb. I don't know where it originated. Maybe somebody knows you can post in the chat, but it says if you chase two rabbits, you will catch neither. And it's a, it's a, it's a proverb about focus. Right. The more you're splitting your attention among a bunch of different things, oh, I have a real estate property and then I have my services business, and then I have my course, and then I have my book, and then I have this, and then you're not really going to do well at any of those things. And a lot, you know, there's good wisdom in having that portfolio approach because if you look at people who are wealthy, millionaires, billionaires, you know, people who have a lot of money, almost all of them have multiple income streams. But the question is how they got to that place. What they didn't do, most of them is they didn't start seven businesses at the same time and then put 1/7 of their focus into each of those things. What they did was they focused on one or two businesses, grew those to the point where they were fully saturated, either from them or their own market or something like that, and then their excess focus spilled over into the next one. Alex Hormozy, for those of you who follow him, he has a really good illustration, like a short. I think it's a YouTube short and a TikTok short that, that where he shows. He actually literally shows it as cups. And each of those cups, he kind of, you know, you have this pitcher of water and you're pouring into a cup. Well, as one cup overflows, you need another cup to catch the overflow. So basically the way he says it is, you're pouring your focus into those things. And when one thing is full of your focus and there's no more focus to be put into that thing than it spills over into the other cup. So that's one, one vector that I would mention is like the multiple income streams thing is a good idea. It's not good to split your focus across all those things. And so the second thing I'll Say about that back to Daniel Priestley. I'll probably mention him a lot here. One of the things I like about Daniel Priestley is he suggests having two products. One is he calls a product for prospects and the second one is he calls a product for sales. And I'm gonna start with the product for sales. Product for sales, he says, is like, that is your major, major way that you can apply all the offering that you can to, to your ideal customer. It's like, how do you deliver the best of the best that you can muster? That's what you sell. So for some of you that's like, that's consulting one on one with you. For some of you, that's, you know, a service that you provide. Web design or marketing or copywriting or something like that. For some of you it's a course that you offer. It's your premium level course, right? So like what's the thing where you can deliver the full on value of what you do? That's the product that you sell. And then the product for prospects is essentially a tease into that. So a couple of examples. I have my book here. This is my book. It's out of print. It's called Pricing Design. I wrote it a couple years ago. It's about pricing. This is a product for prospects. You know why? Because I'm not going to get rich off this book. This book is 50 pages. I think it was on sale when my publisher was selling it. It was on sale for like 9.99. I'm not going to sell enough of these copies of these books to become a millionaire. But that's not the point of this book. This is a product for prospects. Now what I didn't do well when I released this book was I had no product for sales. So people would buy the book, they'd go, how do I get more of this? And I'd be like, I don't know, and go to somebody else. So in hindsight, what I should have done is had. This is my product for prospects. People who get a little taste of it and go, yeah, I'd like more of this. Some people are going to read it and be like, yeah, right. And they're not going to want or need the product for sales. So they can. And for me, you know, it did take a lot of time to write this book. But my big offering, right? I want people to come through this door first. A lot of you who do that with your email lists or things like that, you know that as a lead magnet. A lead magnet is a Product for prospects and a product for prospects. It could be free, Right. For example, this, this Zoom Call is a product for prospects. You know why? Because later on I'm going to announce my pricing coaching offer. Right, of course. Of course I am. It's a product for prospects. If you join the Zoom Call and you're like, that sucked. I don't want anything more from Dan. Great, now you know it. You didn't spend a dollar. I didn't spend a lot of time. For those of you that are like, I want more of this. Cool. Now my, my product for prospect or product for sales is something that you might be interested in. So, Travis, thanks for teeing that up. I would, I would suggest think of it in two ways. Have two products. A product for prospects where people can like kind of tease out your offering and see if it's right for them. And then if you're a teacher, what's the best teaching you've got? If you're a designer, what's the best design work you can do? If you're an agency, what's the best delivery mechanism that you have? Right. So that dichotomy of product for prospects and product for sales, that really has sunk in really well for me from reading some of Daniel Priestly stuff, knowledge. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks, Travis. All right, Vivek, you're up next. And then Balgin official, you're up next after Vivek.

Thanks for doing this, man. My question to you is, as somebody who just voluntarily moved away from corporate as a designer now trying to get a taste of consulting, fractional, etc. Things are evolving so fast. I am curious to hear your answer on how do you assess somebody like me that if this is my cup of tea. I go back sometimes to your super friendly final blog that you wrote about the whole domain. Why you close that chapter, opened a new chapter. Now there are companies with the super front model, ironically. But as a designer, how do you think we could assess that if consulting or any type of freelancing is our cup of tea or not?

Great question, Vivek. Thanks for that. Just to kind of repeat it and sorry, I should have been doing this for, you know, for everybody's question as well. Just to kind of repeat it. Like how do you assess whether something is your thing, right? How do you know if it's. How do you know if you should do services or make a product or make a course, especially if you came from an in house or a corporate environment or something like that? Is that. Do I have that Right, Yeah. Cool. I wrote this blog post, actually. I'm gonna see if I can pull up a couple of links while we're talking too. I wrote this blog post called Enough to Know. And this is something that I learned from my wife. My wife is really good at this. My wife is really good at doing. Like, she. She's like a serial trier of things. She tries a lot of stuff. And the stuff that she tried, like, one. One. One time in her life, she. She tried bodybuilding. Another time she tried professional soccer. Another time she tried, you know, all sorts of different stuff. Sorry, I'm gonna. Let me make sure I can post this in the chat. Meeting Group chat. There we go.

Okay.

Enough to know. And what. What I like about the model that she has is that generally the timeframe that she gives it is three months, right? 12 weeks. I'm gonna try a thing for 12 weeks. And so in that exercise of like, well, how do you know how long and how do you. What are you looking for? You're just looking for enough to know, enough to get a gut feeling. I'm a big fan of gut feelings. I don't try to make decisions fully on that, but it is, you know, it is a big factor in making decisions. So I would say try a bunch of things. The agency that I ran, Super Friendly, we were known as a design system agency, but a design system. A design system agency. We weren't known as that until six years in. Right. So Super Friendly started in 2012. I opened it in 2012. In 2012, I was taking everything, video production, CMS builds, design work, designing dashboards, building front end, back end, like, things. I had no business doing things. I didn't have any skill, honestly, because I was trying to pay the bills. So anybody, like, what was the qualifier for my clients? If you had money, you are a client, you're a good client. Right? That was it. That was it. And so I took everything partially to just try, like, you know, do I have a specialty? Should we niche on something? Should we, you know, pick a positioning like that? And over the next couple of years, we started getting into projects. And eventually what became known as design system started as component libraries and pattern libraries and style guides and things like that. We were doing those projects, but we were still. We were not publicly positioned as a design system agency until 2018, six years in. So for those six years, we were trying a bunch of stuff. Right? We were still doing video production. We were still doing app builds. We're still doing a bunch of stuff until it was like, okay, we have enough in our market of clients who are like, we want just that. And for us to be able to say we're going to turn down everything else, that's not that. And because the reason is, honestly, it's scary. It's scary to turn down work when you're like, I need to make cash as a freelancer, as an agency, no matter how big or small your scale is, it's scary to be like, I'm going to just shut off a whole arm of business. Clients that are coming in that want app designs, we're going to say no. That's a really scary thing to do. What I've learned is that it's a better way to make money, but it doesn't make it less scary. So I would suggest do it enough to know. I suggest a three month timeframe. So how do you know if consulting is good for you? Try for three months. How do you know if app builds are great for you? Try for three months. Three months is a good amount of time because it's a long enough amount of time that you can really evaluate something. And it's also short enough that it's like, well, I didn't waste my whole year doing that if I hated it. And if you think about it, three months, you get four tries every year. So you do that for three years. You get 12 things that you've tried. Like, that's pretty awesome, you know, and then after three years, you can figure out what your positioning is. So I would suggest kind of like dipping your toe in the water in that way, and then you can start to figure out what you want to do after that. Now, for those of you who are like, I mean, I want to figure out my niche in the next two weeks. Well, it's a long game kind of thing, and I don't know if I have good advice there for you. I think it's worth it, though. I think it's worth the effort. Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, Vivek, thanks for that question. All right. We had someone up. I forget who I had mentioned. Oh, Belgian. Did you still have a question? Did you still want to go? And if not, we'll move to. We'll move to Tyler and then. And then Camilla after that.

No, no, no, no.

I.

Previous members just, you know, ask the questions that I wanted to ask.

Got it. Okay, cool. All right, well, thanks for. Thanks for participating. Yeah. Awesome. All right, Tyler White, over to you. And then Camilla after that. Hey, Dan, thanks for putting us together. My question is, so I'm starting a course just for context. I put up a landing page just to get a set. I know, like an email opt in, just to get a sense of what I should be building. So I've narrowed in on a topic, and then my question is more around pricing. And since this is my first time creating a course, how much content should I be filming versus what's too much, what's too little? Great questions, Tyler. Thanks for asking those. And thanks for being here to ask them. So the question is, like, making a course. How much content should be. Should you be filming? How much content should you be making? How much? How do you price it? Like, how do you do all those? First course, I assume. Very first course. So it's my first time in. Okay, cool. It's hard. It's hard to figure it out the first time, right? Because you don't have any precedent and you don't have any. Like, the most you can do is kind of look to the left and look to the right and go, like, what are courses like mine actually doing? But even that, like, there's so much nuance in that. So I think that's a good. A good place to start. And I think for those of you who are, like, freelancers or agency owners or studio owners, that's also a good way for you to start pricing, too, is look to what your peers are doing, because what you don't want to do is any worse than them. So it's like, all right, at the very. The worst place to start is like, I'm just doing what everybody else is doing. And then you can figure out how to stand out after that. So that's the first place to start. But I want to go back to something that I mentioned earlier. This is part of my worldview, which is the idea that there's no such thing as the market. And again, part of my worldview. Informed by Daniel Priestley. No such thing as the market. It's only your market. So the question to you, Tyler, is what would your customers pay for it? Not what would customers in general pay for it? Because, you know, this happens to me all the time. I'll put a poll out on Twitter or YouTube or whatever. How much would you pay for a course like this? Right? People say, oh, I'd pay $199 or $299. And then I put it out for $199. Nobody pays $199. It's like, well, so what? You know, because people say things that sometimes they mean, but really the only way for you to test is to see who puts down their hard earned cash for it. So I would ask your audience again, I'm going to. I'm like, let me be very transparent here. I am making a group coaching program for people who want help with positioning and pricing. I have no idea how to price that. I've never done that before. So how am I learning that? I'm hosting a webinar. I'm hosting a free discussion on Zoom to see what you all would say about it. Right. I want to ask you because you all are the people who I would want to make the course for. So. So all the stuff that I'm doing on social media or like in my email newsletter, I'm trying to ask the people. And again, the answers are only going to get me so far until I go, okay, who would actually put money. Put money down for this? Who would actually do that? And rest assured that you will get it wrong a bunch of times. I think the, the change should be quick. And that's something that I learned. I wish I had done differently in hindsight. When I opened Design System University, we had one course. It was called Make Design Systems People want to use. And I priced it at $500. And the reason I price it at $500 was that to me it was like, this is all of the stuff that I've used to pitch million dollar clients. And I'm giving it away for 499. Like, giving it away. And so for $499. I think I forget what we sold the first year. I think it was like, maybe like a thousand people bought it. Which is like, that's cool. A thousand people bought it. That's awesome. But I'm like, I mean, you know, a thousand people bought it. Actually, it might have even been less than that. A couple hundred maybe. Like, I forget what the numbers are. And then what I learned was even though I thought of it as valuable, other people didn't because they wanted something else. So what we did this year at Design System University was we made that course free. And then we released a cheaper, better course, Design Systems 101 for $101. And this year, because Make Design System people want. But what I realized was Make Design System people want to use. That should have been the product for prospects and not the product for sales. So I turned it into the product for prospects. And this year we crossed 10,000 students at Design STEM University with a cheaper course and made more money with a cheaper course. I had no idea that that's something that could Happen. And the reason that I learned that was by doing it wrong the first time. I'm lucky. I feel lucky that, like, it took two tries to get it right, maybe two and a half tries to get it right. For some of you, it'll take three tries. It'll take five tries. But I would suggest asking your audience, so whoever you're going to sell to. And again, this is, you know, back to the same advice I gave. When you're starting an agency, like, don't just put it out on Twitter and do a poll, or put it out on LinkedIn and do a poll. Email people one by one. Hey, I'm coming up with the course. I think you're the right person for it. Would you pay for this? How much would you pay for it? You know, and they say, oh, I paid 200 bucks for it. Could I. Would you put $10 down right now for it? And then you'll see for real people. I mean, I don't know. Let's. Let's see when you release it. And. And some people are going to be like, absolutely, yes. Here's my credit card. And you're going to be like, wow. And then those people are going to be, you know What? I put $50 down for it. And you'll be like, whoa, okay, cool. So, like, I would test with the people that you're actually trying to sell to more than, like, this group, right? Because we could say, oh, dude, you should raise your prices, man. Price what you're worth. You know, make it $1,000. But, like, we're not the people who are going to be buying your course, maybe. So I would test it out with them. It's a scary thing to do, but I think you'll get better info that way. Thanks, Dan.

Appreciate it.

Cool. Camille, you're up. And then Rowan after that.

Hey, what's going on, Dan? Nice to see you. Thank you for taking this. My question is kind of a branch off of something that you mentioned earlier around getting new clients. Right. And I love the conversation that you talked about when you talked about gaining trust and. And looking for people that you trust. And so that's essentially what I've done in the most recent time. And I'm realizing, like, there's going to be an end to this, right? There's going to be an end to the point where my network, so to speak, and the people who know me and I know them, that. That I can, like, sort of use that as a. As a leverage to gain new business. But now preemptively and proactively, I want to start to think about tactics and strategies that I can go beyond my comfort zone of my network. And I wanted to kind of hear a little bit about what you had. You know, any thoughts around that, around tactics and strategies, around gaining net new clients, not thinking about cold calls. Right. It's not 1995. We're just going to pick up the phone and call someone. But, like, what are ways that we can continue to grow our businesses beyond our current network? And it's nice to have people that know you and trust you, but obviously we want to go beyond those borders.

Great, great, great question. Camilla, thanks. Good to see you again. Thanks for this question. I think probably a lot of the folks in here are probably like, yes, that resonates. And I, like, that is a challenge that I either face now or I could see myself facing sometime in the future, in the near future. So back to Daniel Priestley again. I should just get like an affiliate fee for Daniel Priestley stuff. I like his stuff very much. I watch it. I've watched it a lot recently. So, you know, hence why I'm. I've talked about his stuff. So he has this principle that he calls 711 4. And I don't have a good link for it, but I have, for. For his original one, I'll put my version of it. Um, and in this article, I talk about 711 for essentially what Daniel Priestley says. Sorry, I linked the wrong post. I think it's this one. Is that right? Ah, okay. Yes, that's right. Okay, so 7114 stands for this idea. If we. He says if we spend seven hours together, you and me, and we had 11 interactions between us and we met in four separate locations, then we would feel a bond. So that's what he's. That's how he defines someone who trusts you and is willing to buy from you. 711 4. We spend seven hours together. We have 11 interactions between us, and we meet up in four separate places. Now, this is the reason that we feel like. Well, some of us feel like we know, we know certain celebrities because we've seen them in seven movies. We've. Right. We've. We've, we've seen, we've. We've had interactions between. Oh, I tweeted at this person. I commented on their LinkedIn post. I commented on their Instagram post. You know, they're a celebrity. They are not commenting back at you. But you're like, no, no, we had these conversations. Right, and you met up in four separate locations. That could be Well, I saw them in that music video and I saw them over here. You feel like you know them, right? You feel like you trust them. You feel like you have a bond. So this 7, 11, 4 idea is, like, that's what it takes to get to feel a bond with someone. Now, what I. What I, like, really appreciate about your question, Camilla, is that I think you're talking about sequence here, which I think is a really important thing. Like, sometimes you can do the right thing in the wrong order and it doesn't work. But if you do it in the right order, it works. And so I think what a lot of people do is they go, okay, I need to get clients. Let me start posting on social media. It's like, no, no, no, wrong order. I need to get clients. Let me go email people I trust. And then what's the social media stuff for? It's for then scaling something that works. Once you email all the people that you trust and all of them say no to your motion graphics service, but all of them are like, but if you did copywriting, though, and you're like, sure, I'll do copywriting for you then. Now you know, copywriting is the thing that people want from you. Okay, cool. That may or may not be the thing that you do. You can decide whether or not that's the thing that you want to do. But if you decide it's a thing that you want to do, now that you know what works, now that you know what resonated, now you scale that. And what's really good for scale. Social media is really good for scale. Like, it is one. It's. It's the most unprecedented time that we have right now in history because we can reach conceivably millions of people organically. We could buy ads that reach millions of people. But what most people do is they try to go that route without knowing what works first, and then they're doing all sorts of stuff. They're not getting engagement, they get discouraged. You know, all that. So once you know what resonates, social media is a really great way to grow that audience, right? And I think the same thing. If you do successful work with someone, ask them for a testimonial and ask them for a referral. Hey, who else do you know that could use this from me, right? And that's a way. That's a. That's a tactic for scale. If you do one product successfully and that person refers you to one other person, you've just scaled 100%, right? That's an awesome amount of scale. I remember the first time I heard I hired somebody, I hired. Sorry, not the first time. One of the first times that I hired someone, I hired a head of business development for Super Friendly. And I remember thinking, like, I have all these problems in business development. And I was like, but what I'm doing is I'm just handing all of my problems to someone else to solve. I'm like, how is that? How is that helpful? And I remember him saying to me, like, dan, that's what scaling is. It's you taking your problems, giving it to someone else, and now you're free to solve different problems. I was like, oh, I never really thought about it like that. And he's like, and ultimately one day my problems are going to get so big that I'm going to have to hire a business development team to give those problems to so that I can actually tackle other problems. You're now three times removed from that. Like, that's how you scale. And it's such a simple explanation, but I never thought about it that way. And so if you take your problem of, like, it's hard for me to get one client, but then that one client gets you two. That's a really, really good way to scale. And so to me, the order of, like, find people who trust you, find what resonates with those people. And then now that you have the messaging down, now that you have the offer down, now that you know what it is, now you can scale that. Now you can go, all right, let me buy ads against that idea. Let me go post more on social media about that idea. And let me talk about the stories that I have now as an expert, as an experienced person in how I solve these problems. Social media is really good for that kind of stuff. I think what a lot of people do is they try to do it first. And I don't think it works as well first as it does second, for sure.

Thank you.

Yep.

Camila, thanks for that question. All right, Ruan, you're up. And then Anna. Anna's next.

Hi, Dan, Big fan. Thanks for doing. This question will take you probably in the Wayback Machine to when you first started. So when you were first consulting, I'm sure you faced the barriers of potential clients going, why do we need you? So I'm in the video game space for ux, generally a marginalized group already, but I'm hoping to start consulting in UX strategy for a bunch of clients that still don't know that they need it. So in addition to. So I think I Have that trust. I've been in Games for 17 years. I have a roster of people that have worked with me and know me, but they're not the ones that sign the checks. So my issue is penetrating that group and making the value prop very clear to them. I can link it to business outcomes, but again, the feed the resistance I'm getting is why do we need you? Or things are fine the way they are, which they're definitely not. So I'm curious how you've been able to penetrate those groups in the past when you first started consulting.

Thank you, Dan. Yeah, great question, Ron. So, so the question is like, essentially your customer, your main customer is actually not your main buyer, right? The people who are, who trust you aren't the people signing the checks, aren't the people to control the purse strings. That's a difficult situation to be in. There are ways to do it. It's a difficult one. And I'll, I'll tell you, I definitely have my own experience with that and I'll share with you what I have found to work. So there's a couple of things that you're touching on. One is, and I don't know where this framework comes from. If somebody knows, you know, please do mention in the chat, there's essentially four stages to customer awareness. And the four stages are problem. And let me get this right, problem unaware, then problem aware, then solution unaware, then solution aware, right? So clients kind of move or prospects move through that funnel. Generally there are some clients, let's say you were a personal trainer, you know, weight loss trainer or something like that. For some of your clients, they're going to be like. Or for some of your prospects, they're going to be like, why do I need to lose weight in the first place? Why do I need to be healthy?

Right?

That, that defines problem unaware. They don't even know that they have a problem. Well, if you're not healthy, you may be at risk for heart disease, or if you're not healthy, you may die earlier than you would have if you were healthier. So like, there are all these. And for some people, they're like, wow, I didn't know that. And, and so they're in that problem unaware camp, right? Then there's some people that are like, yes, I know, I know that I need to lose weight, or I know that I need to be stronger, but they don't know how to do it right. So they are problem aware, but solution unaware. Then there are some people who are like, I know I need to lose Weight. And I know that I need a personal trainer. Right? And so those people are problem aware and solution aware. People who are solution aware, they know that they have the problem and they know what the solution is. Those are the easiest people to sell to. Right? Because you don't have to do as much education. Education is where selling is the most difficult because it's the longest and the most expensive. It just takes up more of your time. That's why you want to. And we'll talk about this later. That's why you want people to, to be educated by your content, not by you. Right. If you are getting on the phone with your prospect and you're using that time to educate them, it's a waste of your time. You want your brochure to educate them. You want your social media content, you want your reels to educate them. You want your YouTube videos to educate them so you don't have to spend your time one to one with them on that. Education is one of the hardest parts of it. Okay, so when I, when I ran Super Friendly and we were specializing in design systems, design system customers, there's not one, there's three. And especially because design system budgets are large, usually because they're organizationally scaled, the customer is the combination of the head of design and the head of engineering and the head of product. The three of them have to come together to make a decision and generally contribute a third of each of their budget to this thing. Right. Those are also generally not the people who are contacting us. So the people who are contacting us are the designers and the engineers who work for those people, you know, so they'll contact us. They want us to come in and essentially help advocate for them because they've been trying to unsuccessfully. They need some help. So essentially we had at any given time three customers at the least, five customers at the most. All of them have different things. The reason that that was so difficult is because it just takes a lot of time. So what I would suggest is if you could simplify your offering, and then I have a couple of tips on that. It's easier because you're simplifying your customer, who your customer is. If you don't simplify your customer. And this is the way that we went through it, and I wish we had learned faster, but the way that we went through it was we had to create material for everyone knowing that the VP of design was our buyer. But the VP of design was never the one contacting us. The design director was the one contacting us. We had to make sure we attracted the design director. And then we had material to convince your boss guide that we could give to that design director to then give to their VP of design. We had a process laid out that says, okay, here's what's going to happen. You brought us in. We need this meeting with this person and this meeting with this person and this meeting with this person. So the best we could do for them is say, we'll do all the work for you. You just introduce us to these people. Because they don't know who to introduce us to. So we had to prepare different sets of material for them. It's just more complicated. So what we started doing is. And I'll stock numbers here. We haven't talked numbers here. We should talk numbers here. So, like, for a lot of our design system work, design systems, we were pitching for anywhere from half a million dollars to $1 million and more. And a design director does not have a half a million dollar budget at most enterprise organizations. They cannot activate half a million dollars. What? So, so we were, we had the wrong offer for that person who we were attracting. So we started to realize was, what if we had a $15,000, $20,000 diagnostic product that that person could buy that generated a report that they could give to their boss that was custom to their organization. So that's what I mean about having the wrong offer. We had the big, you know, the big offer for their boss. And so they were essentially just a middle person. So that was a, it was a waste of a conversation. The conversation with them was basically, yes, I'll pass you along. So what we did was we created an offer for that person who was our buyer, I'm sorry, that person who was our customer, to make them our buyer and then to have the output of what they bought be the thing that they could pass along. And then, you know, what you get there is the benefit of once you have your foot in the door, it's a lot easier to sell the next thing. It's a lot harder to sell the first thing. So what I would suggest to you. That's a long way, Ron, of saying what I would suggest to you is maybe if you could create a, an offer for the particular person who comes into you, maybe they, there's something that they could buy for you for 100 bucks, maybe it's a book, maybe it's an ebook that they could buy for $5, you know, and that's a product that they could buy, that's a product for prospects that then turns into Another product for prospects, but you at least got paid for it and you have your foot in the door of doing something, some consulting or something like that. So I would. I would try that, you know, see if that works. And likely if you try that, even if that's not the right solution, it might uncover some solutions from there.

That's magic, Dan. Thank you.

Yeah. Hope that helps. Cool. All right, Anna, you're up next. And before you go, and after Anna, then Massimo, before you go. We're at 10, 10 to the hour. I scheduled this for the hour, but we've got a lot of questions here for those of you who want to hang out longer and you can, you know, it's a Monday, we're in holiday season. I'm going to hang out for the next half hour. Even though, you know, even though we have. We only schedule this for an hour, we'll do 90 minutes here, you know, and just see if we can get to more questions. So if that helps any of you, feel free to stick around. We're also also post a recording to all of you, too, so if you have to bail, if you had to do something else, you'll get the recording afterwards.

Your program real quick for folks.

Sorry, Camille, say one more time, the.

Program you mentioned, would you. Are you going to talk about that at the end?

I'll talk about it right now because I don't have much to say about it, which is that I'm launching a program next year in, in 2025. 2025? Yeah, that's the year in 2025. I'm launching a program to help a group coaching program for people who are like, I really want to dive deep in, like, starting my agency, starting my freelance business. Help me with positioning, help me with pricing. I don't know how to price that. I don't know how to, how to, like, what the right price is, what the right time frame is on all that stuff. So what I'm gonna launch is a beta program. So if any of you are like, I would like to be in on that beta, I'll try to find some way to let you. Let me know. As of right now, I have all of your emails and I'll send. Send this to all of you because you've registered for the event. So I'll send emails to all of you. If, in addition to that, you want to get in touch with me and say, like, I really want to be in on that, let me know. I'm on all the places. LinkedIn, message me, Instagram, message me Twitter, message me, email me on my website, like any of those things if you're like, I really want in on this, you know, please let me, please let me in on this. I'm shaping that right now, so I could use some help with that. I could definitely use some info, you know, to make sure that's the right thing for you. So I want to launch a little bit of a beta first before I, before I announce a big thing. So thank you, Camilla, for the reminder on that for people who do have to go, you know, have to go before, before I talk about that, but that's something I'll send you all more information about. All right, Anna, sorry to cut you short there, cut you off there, but please go.

No problem. Well, I want to ask, kind of building upon something you said earlier when you mentioned that some people already trust you, so you can start with them. That's great. But I was wondering, how do you go to the next step? If you want to. The context here is what if the people that you know and the people that trust you are people that don't really have high budgets, maybe because of where you live or just the kind of network that you have and you want to keep moving upwards in terms of how much you charge and the kind of work that you do.

Great question. Yeah, thank you for that. And I might ask you a couple of follow up questions in terms of, let's qualify what going into the next couple means. Can you give me some examples of. All right, so I'm working with people at this budget level now. How do I get to, to whatever the next budget level is? Can you give some details about that?

So, yeah, I'm not going to make it specific for me, but it would apply, of course, to a lot of different people and services. So I started making websites and clients that I know might be people mostly like former colleagues or people that they know. A budget for a website might be up to €1,000. Okay. And I live in Greece, by the way, so, you know, budgets are different. And first of all, I'm kind of moving away from doing just websites to designing UIs for products. Because where I work full time, I got a lot of experience doing just that, designing platforms. But now the people that I personally know, because I don't have clients for that kind of thing in my network, people that know me. So it would have to be people that don't know me directly right now.

Yes, I get what you're saying. Are you open to doing a little bit of role playing here?

Yeah, sure.

Okay, cool. This is going to be live, so I won't be mean or anything.

Okay.

Okay.

What do your websites do for your clients?

Well, depending on the client, but usually they want to build awareness for their kind of product and build some sort of. Communicate some sort of prestige or experience or that, you know, we're a serious company.

Cool. Think of one client in particular. Just. Just so you can have a specific answer. Like, don't worry about the aggregate. Like, think of one. One client in particular. You don't have to say who they are or anything like that. But, like, what. How. How specific can you be about a result that you got for them? Like, if they want to build awareness, like, how much awareness? If they wanted to make more money, how much more money? Like, how specific can you be if you think about one of your specific clients?

Not very specific, especially for websites, because I have done other projects as well. It's usually someone who knows me and they say, I want this website, and then I just make the website and there's not really an update.

Makes no sense. Okay, so I'll stop the role playing there. This is something that happens to all of us is that we are not able or willing or sometimes some combination of both to be more specific than that for our clients, but we want them to be more specific for us. Right. That's that part. There's a part that we can do as service providers that we can take our work to the next level and our level of professionalism to the next level to then earn and deserve the next level of clients for us.

Right.

So what I mean by that is some people say, like, yeah, I build awareness for my clients and I go, cool, how much? How much more? You know what the really good ones say? 16.8% more on average, and you're like, oh, dang. Like, that's.

Yeah, what about cut you short? But that also kind of requires a different kind of client because, like, if your client is like, you know, we need a website because it's kind of like a prerequisite to be taken seriously. It's. That's not the kind of client who's going to have statistics on their leads, for example.

I get you. You okay if. If I provide a reframe on that.

Yeah, of course.

I don't think that we need a different kind of client. I think we need a different kind of standard. I think we need to be able to say to ourselves first and then to our clients, we don't work with clients who do not give us access to Analytics. That's a tough one. That's the right answer. That's a tough one. I get the simplicity and the, you know, it's simple. It's really difficult to be able to say because a lot of fear that that brings up. It's a mindset thing for us to go. We don't work with clients who do that. We don't work with clients who aren't satisfied with having no analytics. You know what? Before we even do a project, what I'll do for you for free is I'll set up analytics and we should watch it for three months and then I'll do the project.

Right, like, good one.

So, like, that's. That's us taking our mindset and taking our professionalism to the next level and going, those clients are not the clients that deserve to work with us. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I mean that in a positively uplifting way to say, this is what we do for our clients. In order for us for to do this, we have to be able to do that, you know, So I remember we were pitching one of the. At super friendly. We were pitching one of the biggest nonprofits around that I've ever heard of. Really exciting nonprofit, really exciting work. And I remember getting. There was RFP process because they had to. I remember getting on that call and I remember asking them, so what is it that you want to do with this new website redesign? And they said, well, we want to gain more donations. We want to, like, really broaden our. Our donor base. Right. As most nonprofits do. I said, cool. What level of donations do you get now? Annually on average? And they said, well, we don't see how that's any of your business. I said, well, you'd like us to make a better website for you, right? So we have to qualify what better means? And they said, no, we're just hiring you to make the website. Like, we don't really need to reveal those numbers to you. And we walked away. You know, we said, well, we can't do business with people who do not let us into their business because that's what we do for you. And they basically said, you're not the right fit for us. And you're like. I was like, you're totally right.

Right.

What's cool?

Really relevant. Yeah, sorry. Really relevant thing is, like, where I work because I like, freelance on the side. And I was thinking, you know, maybe eventually I'll freelance full time or maybe make a small studio. Who knows, if I meet, like, the Right person. But at the company where I work as an employee, they don't really share those things either. Even internally, you know, they, you know, how many sales do we get? Did my design like, increase the sales, you know, the checkouts, whatever. It's like, that's not on your business. We're not going to tell you. Then how do you expect me to, you know, even internally, like, if you don't tell your employee who has signed an NDA and it's kind of a dead end there because I cannot, I cannot qualify what I'm building. Even though I'm asking, they have told me. We're not going to tell you.

The, the toughest part about, about that is acknowledging as quickly as possible that they are not a good client for you. Not that they're, they're a bad client. So this, this is the, the, to me, this is the theme that I want to bring up here, is that to me, there's no such thing as a good client or a bad client. There's no such thing as a high level client and a low level client. Right? Because part of it is what you're able to pitch to them. There is a such thing as misalignment, right? There are some clients, you're just misaligned with, clients who are like, we don't even have that information. We don't, we don't, we can't share that information because we don't even share it internally. You're like, well, it's a culture clash then. Because if we are the kind of people who need the openness of that work, then we're gonna suck to work together. It's a culture clash. It's not because you're bad and I'm good, or we're better than you or, you know, anything like that. It's like, we just don't gel. You should work with a, you should work with a service provider who is able to work with those constraints. I'm not able to, you know, and sometimes to walk away from it. You could just throw yourself under the bus. I've done that a bunch of times. I don't think that we're good enough to work with the, you know, a mystery of information that you have. I don't, I mean, we suck at it, you know, sorry, we're not service provider for you, you know, to walk away, then walk away from that. I think that a lot of the answers to some clients who, they don't share that information, like, and you asked, I think rhetorically, like, what do they Expect me to do. And the answer is magic. That's what they expect.

Right?

Yeah. And so the earlier you acknowledge that, the easier it is to walk away from that project. It sucks to realize that six weeks into the project because then you're like, oh, because now contracts are signed, deposits.

Are six months into the job.

The worst. So I think the skill that we have to have is the skill of standards and. Right. We have to raise our level of professionalism to be able to identify that as early as possible, ideally before we start the job, not, not somewhere in the middle of it, not somewhere later. And again, easier said than done to walk away from any client with money. Hard to walk away from. Right. Especially in different seasons of life. But the better we get at that, the more leverage we build for ourselves elsewhere, I think the easier it is to walk away from that.

Right.

Thanks for that question.

I have another question which might be something that someone else might want to ask as well. Since this was about pricing anyway, it's about hourly or weekly time based or fixed pricing. Because early in my, let's say, career I saw the futures content, at least at the time. I don't know, things have changed. They were big about fixed pricing and the idea of like, with fixed pricing, our incentives are aligned because the faster I do the job, like the more I get paid and you get the work faster as well. But in the projects, at least that I have taken on, I know there's no like. Right approach. Like it depends on the kind of people that you work with. With the kind of people that I work with, the scope changes throughout. It's like, oh, good idea, let's do that as well. And then it's kind of upward to say, well, yeah, let's do that. I agree it's great, but it's going to be more expensive because.

Yep, good topic. Cool. Let's go through. So let's hold that one. I'm sure other people have questions about pricing as well. I'm going to go through the people that have their hands raised and then we'll get. And then we'll get to pricing if we've got time.

Sure.

Thanks, Anna. All right, Massimo, you're up. And then Josh Lowe, you're up next.

Hey, Dan, thank you for putting this together. And I guess my question is about lead magnet. And I wanted to ask you more specifically. This is a little bit connected to the trust issue basically because a lot of people say that in order for you to get clients, or you can start with a lead magnet, for example, and A lot of people say a good magnet for a designer can be an audit. What I realized is though, that if you don't have enough trust, like giving like for example, a free audit, audit, even if it's free, people don't really know you don't know how you work and maybe say, okay, there's this guy, they offer a free audit, but we don't really know this. This guy. And so my question I want to understand for you maybe what, what do you think that might be effective lead magnet that kind of like put the eyes on you when you have like, maybe you are not just starting, but I consider myself right now as a middle designer, not, not senior, but not even junior. So what could be an effective lead magnet to attract clients that is not an audit that probably requires to have more trust. I don't know if the question is clear.

I think it's very clear. I think the. And Massimo, thanks for that question. So as I, as I understand it, you're like, you know, what lead magnet can you create that will attract people to actually not be skeptical of it, but be like, oh yeah, that sounds cool, I'll do that thing. Is that right? Do I have to add that? Right?

Yeah. If I can add just one more thing specifically, maybe will be like, for me, for example, I mostly work with the tech startups, software companies, so maybe I don't know. If you have an example that it's even more specific to those type of companies will be great. Thank you very much.

Cool. Yeah, you got it. Okay, so I think I'm going to answer the question in a slightly different and maybe annoying way, which is to answer a different question than, than you asked. I actually think that the quality of the lead magnet is less important than who the lag the lead magnet is designed to attract. And in general, what I think most people do, and I think it's, it makes sense, it's logical, is they use a lead magnet to attract strangers. And the problem with doing that is that it's hard to attract strangers because strangers don't trust you. Right. So like, so it's hard to go from zero trust to complete trust to do something as invasive oftentimes as an audit.

Right?

An audit can be very invasive, especially if you're doing a good one. You know, a lot of the audits are invasive, you know, and so there's this, there's like weird dichotomy of those things. And also generally strangers are skeptical about people offering them free stuff because it sounds like, do you want this candy and then there's a razor blade in the candy, right? Because, like. Because people don't know you and they don't trust you. So I think that the lead. The quality of the lead magnet might actually be fine. I think it's just you might be using it to attract strangers. What I would suggest is use the lead magnet to attract your friends first. Because what you get if you do that is you get testimonials. And I think that's. And, you know, we can talk about this a little bit if anybody's interested, but I'm a big believer in doing work for free. I know there's a big conversation in our industry about, you know, that that's a bad thing or that's a good thing. I have my own opinions about it. Probably you all do as well. I don't believe in working for free. I do believe in working for testimonials as compensation. So I think all work should be compensated. But not all work needs to be compensated with cash all the time. So some work can be compensated with a testimonial. If you have an audit that you have done with your friends or with people who trust you already and you have testimonials and recommendations from that, that oftentimes that might change the fact that then strangers are like, oh, that person that looks like me or works at a place like me did that audit, and they had a testimonial that now might be good for me too. You might not have to change at all anything about the lead magnet itself. It's just that you might not have enough trust built into it to be able to do that. A lot of people will do things like affiliates for their lead magnets, right? Well, they'll say, you know, if you refer this. If you do this with me, I'll give you a kickback on referring this service to someone else. And that way, it doesn't even need to be a free lead magnet. It could be a paid lead magnet. It could be back to that product for prospects thing again. So I think the mistake that a lot of people make, myself included, I do this all the time, I have to remind myself of this, is that we often use lead magnets to attract strangers. And it's really hard to attract a stranger. And in fact, a lot of times there's a lot of danger in attracting. That's why they call it stranger danger. Right? It's like you're the stranger to them and they're the stranger to you. Like, there's a. There's a lot of Stuff that can go wrong there. I think it's better to attract a friend, someone who trusts you, and use your lead magnet there first. A lot of people don't use their lead magnet there first. They use it for. They go, oh, I have an idea for a PDF, I'll just release it. And they have, they have like, no, nobody that already trusts them to give them feedback on it, to write a testimonial about it, to write anything like that. So I would start there first. I wouldn't change the lead magnet itself. I would send the lead magnet to people that, you know. Right. I would use that as the proposal maybe and start there and see if people give you feedback. Like, you know, if they trust you already and especially if you trust them, that's actually a really good conversation to have with them to go, like, I'm gonna. I wanna send you this thing. I would like you to give me some honest feedback as to whether this helped you. Because some people would be like, yeah, man, cool PDF. But like, I didn't even read it, it just looked too dense. Or like some people would be like, it was just a page, like, I expected more, you know. And some people, you'd send your book and you'd be like. And they're like, I don't wanna read a whole book, just send me a page. Right. And that's, that has nothing to do with the quality of the lead magnet. It just has to do with what they are looking for from you. Back to back to. Again, like, there's no the market. That's your market. Your market might want a one page PDF from you and they might want a 50 page book from me. Right. And it has nothing to do with like the market itself and what the market wants. It just has to do with what my audience wants from me and what your audience wants from you. So I would try it with friends first. Don't touch the lead magnet quite yet. Get some feedback on it first from people who trust you and then you, you might find that the lead magnet's doing just fine. It was just attract. It was just trying to attract strangers, which you might not even need to do.

All right, thank you very much.

Thank you.

All right, Josh, you're up. And then Maria, Maria, you're next.

Dan, this is so good. Love it, love it all. Can't get enough. Okay, so I'm going to piggyback off of Anna's example on the websites. Because previously on our podcast we talked about value based pricing and things like that. Now, you know, people don't buy drills, they buy the ability to drill holes. Right. So in terms of selling a website, we want to promote the outcomes. Right? Okay. This is going to generate, you know, 10, 20% leads which you know will generate more future business for your, for your business. So how do you navigate delivering on outcomes? Or don't you? Because you can definitely promise and deliver the deliverable of a website but then you know, the actual outcomes of you know, say 10% leads or X amount of sales for e commerce website, you can't, you can't control that. So how do you navigate around that when you're dealing with clients?

Yeah, great, great questions. I might ask you a couple of follow ups, Josh, on that. You know, just to. So we can be specific. Thanks for that question. Essentially it's like, how do you, how do you navigate selling outcome? Because that's a big tenet of value. Pricing is selling outcomes, not selling deliverables or things like that. So I want to walk the example that you gave because the example or not the example, the mantra that you gave is a common one. People don't buy drills, they want to buy holes in the wall, essentially. And the drill is the means to an end to that. I want to walk that all the way back because even where you stopped is not true. Although that's the thing that people say a lot. People don't buy drills. You know, they don't, they don't want to buy. Nobody wants to buy a drill. They want to buy a hole in the wall to hang a picture. Well, people don't want to buy a hole in the wall. They want to buy like a feeling about their family, the ability to see their family every day in that position. They don't want to buy the ability to see their family on the wall. What they want to buy is the feeling of happiness. That's essential. So if you keep walking it back, usually at the end of it is some feeling. And the reason that's important is that people buy emotionally. So in all transactions, people have to feel good about what they buy. Now a lot of people also want to justify that with some spreadsheet. There's some logic baked in. It's not purely emotional, but at some level almost every purchase is an emotional purchase. So there's usually some emotion. So how do I navigate selling outcomes? First thing is I can't guarantee it because you can't guarantee a feeling. You can't be like, I will make you happy, guaranteed. No you won't. You might be able to do any like those of you who have, who have had toxic friends, you know you can't make your friends happy no matter what you do. You know, those of you who have kids, you realize you can't make your kids happy no matter what. Like, so in any relationship you can't guarantee a feeling you can influence. So how do I navigate selling outcomes? First thing is I can't guarantee it because you can't guarantee a feeling. I can't be like, I will make you happy, guaranteed, right? Like, no, you won't. You might be able to do any. Like those of you who have, who have had toxic friends, you know you can't make your friends happy no matter what you do. You know, those of you who have kids, you realize you can't make your kids happy no matter what. Like there's. So in any relationship you can't guarantee a feeling. You can influence it though, right? That's the most that you can do. So what I generally do with people who are adults that I am selling to, which is all of them, right, I don't sell to kids is the idea that I try to ask them about the feeling that they want to have. And I spend all incident though, right? That's the most that you can do. So what I generally do with people who are adults that I am selling to, which is a lot of time on that in the conversation. Like, yeah, yeah, I know you're coming to me for a website, but like what do you want to all of them, right? Outside of kids is the idea that I try to ask them about the feeling that they want to have and I spend a feel. And some, sometimes that's a really awkward question for some people. They don't know how to answer that. They don't want to answer that. They're like, what does that have to do with what we're talking about? Like, they might have some resistance to the idea, but if you can open that up with a, with a prospect you might get to like, I mean I just, you know, I'm working all day and I'd like to get home earlier some nights. Oh, that's why you want a content management system is because you're doing a lot of manual work. Okay, I get it now. And so, so you like for most contracts you have to promise some sort of deliverable in a service based relationship, but knowing what the outcome is that they want. And it's usually an emotional outcome. And a lot of times, you know, like, like a lot of times in the sales process. For those of you who have done sales Process with, with clients and customers who are like, that was really good. You feel good and they feel good. A lot of times. What do they say? Wow, that was like therapy. And what do you do in therapy? You talk about your feelings, right? So it's like all these things are related. So again, I'm not suggesting, oh, be a therapist to your client. No, therapists are professionals that are trained to do what they do. You are not a therapist. I'm not a therapist. But it's okay to talk about feelings with your clients. It's okay to talk to them about what feeling they want to have from the work that you do. Again, you can't guarantee it, but if you know it, you can optimize for it. You can influence it to the best of your ability. I think a lot of us shy away from talking about feelings with clients because we can't guarantee it because it's not a deliverable. We can put in a contract, but it helps influence the type of deliverable that you make.

Right.

Otherwise we go in going, I'm going to make you a 40 page website. When actually what they want is a website that updates itself. That's the feeling that they want. That's literally not possible. A website that updates itself, that's like, that's nothing. But we could, we could automate something, you know, we could, we could make it feel like that way to them. What's the, what's the quote? I think it's Arthur C. Clarke quote that like any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And a lot of times that's what our clients want to buy from us. They want to buy magic. To Anna's question earlier, right? It's like clients are like, we won't give you any of this data, but we expect something. What do they expect? Magic. They want that stuff from us. It's not enough to just promise that, yeah, yeah, we'll do it, don't worry about it, we'll talk. But it is worth it to talk about your. Talk about it with your prospects and talk about it with your customers. A lot of them want to feel relief. A lot of them want speed. A lot of them want to feel good about their jobs. A lot of them want to get promoted. I want. A lot of them want to look good in front of their bosses. That's why they're hiring you, right? All of these are emotions, you know, all these are or emotionally based. So I think a lot of us tend to shy away from it because we want to stick to the ones and zeros of it because it's more comfortable for us. But the more comfortable we get in having those conversations with our clients, I think the better it is that we can actually address some of those things. So I'm going to paste the same link in the chat that I pasted earlier. I wrote a series about this and this is the start of it attracting five, six and seven figure clients. And really it's about the conversations that you want to have with the client. And actually I'll link directly to a, to a, an article in that series called early conversations are where you shape the work. What most of us do is we have an intake form on our websites or things like that, and then we have a 30 minute max conversation with our client, you know, to, to understand the deliverables and the timelines and the logistics. And we can't even fathom having a more than a 30 minute conversation with our clients. We're like, what do you even ask? What do you talk about in this? I suggest that you should have four or more conversations with your client before you actually close a project. So you're like, what do we talk about? When you talk about all the stuff, right, you're getting to know them, you're starting a relationship, right? Like so, so I think everybody wants to date, wants to marry after the first date. When it comes to prospects, you know, take them out for a while. I'm not suggesting a romantic relationship with your prospects. I want to be clear about that. What I am suggesting is that you have to get to know their scenario to be able to know how you can solve it. So, Josh, let me, let me stop there. Like, does that address part of what you're saying about how do you navigate partially? I want to push back a little.

Bit because, yeah, like, we're basically saying that it is hard to. You can't guarantee these outcomes, especially emotional ones. So I think that's why I want to get back into like at least the analytics. And the reason why is because when we're doing value based pricing, you can only charge so much just for the website itself. So obviously we want to sell the outcome so that we can price higher. So for example, like a client say, okay, this client wants to make half a million dollars in, in revenue and sales, let's say E commerce. So if I charge 10% of that 50,000, I'm like, okay, if I can, yeah, if I can make this website that almost like, you know, quote unquote, guarantee the outcome of making you $500,000, sales. Would you? Yeah. Pay. It's easy. Yes and no. So those are easy to negotiate. And I still think it's hard to, you know, talk about the emotion stuff. So, again, coming back to negotiating and navigating that conversation, how does one do that? Because, so, like, do we not promise outcomes? We just prom. Like, I think it's easy for us to promise that. I still think it's hard to, you know, talk about the. The emotion stuff. So again, coming back to negotiating and navigating that conversation, how does one do that? Because, so, like, do we not promise outcomes? We just prom. Like, I think it's easy for us to promise the deliverable. Right. So again, so hope that makes sense.

Yeah. Want to role play.

Yeah.

Leverable.

Right? So again, so hope that makes sense.

Yeah. Want to role play?

Yeah.

Okay. Can. Can you be. Can you be the clients. Can you be the client who's trying to hire someone to make a website that does something, and you can make up some. Some fictitious scenario like, so you can make it up on the spot if you want. We'll just. We'll just go. You ready?

All right. Put my client hat on. All right, Dan, So I have a product I want to create a. I'm coming to you. I heard you made amazing e commerce websites, and I want to sell it. We're like, my aim for this year is to make.

Okay, can. Can you be. Can you be the clients? Can you be the client who's trying to hire someone to make a website that does $500,000? Cool. Why. Why 500,000?

That's just one of our revenue targets. And if you can. If this website can help us make more, that'd be great. But that. That's just our target for the year.

Cool. Does that come from your boss or your CEO or, like, where. Where's that from? I'm just trying to get a sense of it.

Let's say I'm the boss.

Oh, you're the boss.

Yeah, sure. Yeah.

Okay, so you're trying to make a website that makes $500,000 this year. Is that. That's what you said, correct? Yeah. Okay, cool. What do you make now?

Let's say this is. Okay.

You can pick it up. It's fine.

Water bottle.

Okay.

Hydrogen water bottle. And I think it's. Yeah, it's gonna help people drink something.

And you can make up some. Some fictitious scenario like, so you can make it up on the spot if you want. Now we'll just. We'll just go. Ready? All right.

Put my client hat On.

All right, Dan.

So I have a product I want to create a. I'm coming to you. I have better health.

Cool. My guess is you're doing maybe half of that.

Heard you made amazing e commerce websites and I want to sell it. We're like, my aim for this year is to make $500,000.

Cool. Why, why 500,000?

That's just one of our.

So like, what is that, like double sales that you're trying to make this year or like, what do you do now? 400,000 on the website. 300,000 on the website.

We don't have a website right now and so we're trying to set it up.

Ah, got it. Okay, cool.

So we have a product and we're trying to get it launched online.

Got it.

Okay.

Can I tell you a couple of stories about some other clients that I've done similar work? For?

Sure.

Okay, so I'm going to make up some stuff here. This is not actually true. I'm assuming that the part. And let me break character for a minute. I'm assuming the part of the reason that you're even having this conversation with me is that I run a company or I'm a freelancer who's. Who does a bunch of e commerce stuff. Right. So you're telling you're coming to me because you're like, I want. I have trust in you before, before we even set up this conversation, you have had to have some trust in me at least to book a call with me. Right.

You've had a good reputation.

So I've had a good. Okay, so now it allows me to then talk about some of the stuff that goes, okay, you don't have a website now and you want to do half a million.

That's revenue targets. And if you can, if this website can help us make more, that'd be great. But that, that's just our target.

So basically a fictitious goal because it's not based on anything. It's not some increase in revenue. It's. It's basically going for the year. Does that come from your boss or your CEO or like, where, where's that from? I'm just trying to get a sense from zero to something. So now I'm. What I'm going to do is I'm going to tell you some stories about all the clients that I've gone from zero to nothing. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and dissuade you from. From having that as a goal. Right. So imagine that I just Said to you a short version of like, okay, so I worked with a client last year. They had kind of in a similar scenario, they. They had a brand new project they were going to launch.

Their goal was this thing, let's say I'm the boss.

Oh, you're. You're the boss.

Yeah, sure. Yeah.

Okay. So you're trying to make almost $500,000 similar to yours. What they ended up finding out was actually they only sold a hundred thousand and they actually pivoted to doing a Kickstarter first because they thought that that was a better way to gauge interest on it. Have you ever talked about a website that makes $500,000 this year? Is that. That's what you said, correct?

Yeah.

Okay, cool. What do you make now, like a Kickstarter or, like, thought about that internally?

No, we've had a early beta sales and there was some positive. Yeah, positive interest in the product. So we're at a point now where we want to scale to the next level.

What'd you do in the beta sales? Like, how did. How did you do those? Like, do an email list or like, did you put up a landing page or something?

Sure, yeah, yeah, we had. Let's say this is. Okay, you can make it up. It's a water bottle at the landing page.

It was. We.

We just reached out to internal networks.

Small.

Yeah, small networks. And we sold a thousand units and water bottle. Okay, see? Hydrogen water bottle. And I think it's. Yeah, it's going to help people drink. It's making up numbers.

That's fine. That's fine. Keep going. You are. Yeah, I know. We're just making them and.

Yeah, 50,000.

Okay, cool. I mean, it sounds like that's a successful strategy for you. Like what, what do you think you need the website itself for? Because I think. Can't you just keep doing that? Maybe hire one or two more people for your sales team and, like, just increase by doing it that way? Like what, what wouldn't you. What would you be missing out on if you didn't have a website but just kept doing it like that?

That scenario. We were just reaching out, have better health.

Cool. My guess is you're doing maybe half of that mouth.

And we didn't have like a proper scale. So those are contacting people we knew. And so now we want to create a website where we can scale it to people we don't know and, you know, have a whole sales sales funnel around that.

Cool.

All right, let's stop the role play here because I want to, like, this is a good point. There's something. There's a word that you said that's like, what, what is that, like double sales that you're trying to make this year? Or. Or like, well, what do you do now? 400,000 on the web. To me, I would dig in on and I would. This is what the rest of the conversation would be about. You said proper. We wouldn't have a proper website. And I'm like, oh, you might, you might. I don't. I don't know this for sure, but you might need to have things proper. That's the. That's the emotion. It's like, we're not doing it right. We need to be. We need to be validated or affirmed in something. So it's a. To me, that's a vanity project. And I'm like, okay, if you. And the common wisdom around vanity projects is don't do them, I'm like, you know, you can slide 300,000 on the website.

We don't have a website right now. And so we're trying to set it up.

Ah, got it. Okay, cool.

So we have a product and we're trying to get it launched online.

Got it. Okay. Can I tell you a couple of stories about some other could do a vanity project as long as you acknowledge it's a vanity project. So you said we, like, we don't have a proper website. But I'm like, I'm essentially, you're about to spend 50,000 or $100,000 on me or something like that. Right. Trying to save you a hundred thousand dollars. Like, sometimes the best thing we can do for clients is save them the money that they would have spent on us. Don't spend $50,000 on me. $100,000 on me. Building a website that may or may not do the thing that you wanted to do. In fact, like, you know what I'll do? Let me recommend you to my friend clients that I've done similar work for.

Sure.

Okay, so I'm going to make up some stuff here. This is not actually true. Who does Kickstarter stuff? Like specialize in that. He has a $2,500 consulting fee. Just go work with him. I think you should launch a kick, like, do a proper Kickstarter campaign. And I would keep using the word proper back at you. Do a proper email. I'm assuming that the part. And let me break character for a minute. I'm assuming the part of the reason that you're even having this conversation with me. A funnel. Do a proper crowdfunding. Campaign. Do a proper right, like, because it's feeding that need for you to have something proper. Now, I could be making a mountain of a molehill there, but that I zeroed in on that word that you said. You said proper, which is like, which is an unusual word for this conversation that I know because I've had this conversation many, many times before. No one says proper unless they think they're doing something wrong. And so why do you want the website? Because you want to think that you're doing it right? That's the emotion. Like what, whatever emotion is that I run a company or I'm a freelancer who's. Who does a bunch of e commerce stuff. Right? So you're telling, you're coming to me because you're like, I want, I have trust in you before we, before we even set up this conversation. I don't know, like, you want, you want to do that thing. That's what the website is for. It's not about $500,000 of revenue. You, you can, you've already proven you can get 500,000. That's just a scale problem for you because you already got, you already made 300, whatever, you know, in doing your friends and family thing. So, so the website is. So this is the thing. Like, before we jump to the solution, we have to even uncover. You have had to have some trust in me at least to book a call with me, right?

You've had a good reputation, I've had a good rep.

Okay, so now it allows me to then talk about some of the stuff that goes, okay, you don't have a website now and you want to do half a million. That's for what the problem is. And in this situation, like, similar to what we talked about before, I think that you as a pro, and I know we're role playing some fictitious scenario, but I think you as a prospect was problem unaware. So I'm spending time now educating myself and you, we're uncovering together what the problem is. The problem is you don't feel like you're doing it right. You don't feel like you're a real business yet.

Right. And I'm like getting to that level.

So what you want is legitimacy. I think like, so that, that's the, that's the outcome that you want. Legitimacy. And you know, again, this is, this is a theory because you just said one word and I'm making, you know, I'm making a thing of it. But let's say we got there. Let's. What I would do for you, for legitimacy is I would say, actually what I think we should do is a brand campaign. I don't know if you need a website. I think we should, we should work on your branding. Because if you feel like you're doing it legitimately, the website might not be the right solution for it. It might be having a really strong and solid brand or identity might make you feel like, yeah, this is like, we're doing it. We're doing it right. We're doing it the way that the big dogs are. And that might be the actual problem to solve. That might be the outcome to deliver. That might be the outcome that at the end of it, when you're wearing your polo shirt with the monogram logo right here, you're like, yes, yes, look at that. We got polo shirts. Polo shirt. Might be this basically a fictitious goal, right? Because it's not based on anything. It's not some increase in revenue. It's. It's basically going from zero to something. So now I'm, what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell you some stories about all the clients that I've gone from zero to nothing. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and dissuade you from, from having that solution to this project. So those are the things that I like to try and uncover. Right. But we have to spend a lot of time to do that.

Got it.

Okay. You know, in that conversation, and one thing that I wanted, the last thing I want to say about that is, and you know, this is like, this is a shorthand version, you know, for sure. But one thing that I want to say about that is I think, Josh, a goal, right? So imagine that I just said to you a short version of like, okay, so I worked with a client last year, you. And this is probably true of probably, you know, everybody here. Like, we all fall into the trap sometimes of being like, well, value based pricing means, like, you do this and this is the formula and they charge 10%. It's like, it's not about that. It's about making things that really serve your clients. Like don't, don't, like, don't overcomplicate the methodology and the formula and all this stuff. Do something really good for your client, deliver the best service you can and be well compensated for it. They had kind of in a similar scenario, they had a brand new project they were going to launch. Their goal was this thing. They don't be greedy on that. I think a lot of people Mistake. Value based pricing is like, you take all the money that's on the table, you can't leave any. No, it's not about that. It's about doing something really good for your client. If my. If you walked away from this and you're like, I feel really good about our product. I, like, now. Now I'm glad to be the head of this company. Like, great, that sounds. That sounds like a good outcome. Right? Like, and then. And then, you know, what are you willing to give me for that? For helping you make, you know, feel good about the company? You know, if you're like, yeah, I give up. I'd give up, you know, 10 grand for that. Almost $500,000 similar to yours. What they ended up finding out was actually they only sold 100,000 and they actually pivoted to doing a Kickstarter first because they thought that that was a better way to gauge interest on it. Have you ever talked about, like, cool, I could do that for you in four days. We could do a quick branding sprint. I could outsource the work to all these brand Sprint companies to do five days of brand sprints. I'd make a margin on it. And we only. We only had to work on it for four days.

Right.

The solution might be completely different than what you came in thinking about, like a Kickstarter or, like, thought about that internally.

No, we've had a.

But it allows me as a service provider to be very creative, to be, well, competent. Because if you gave me ten grand for four days, I'm living large, man. Like, that's great. That's amazing. You know that to me, that's sometimes better than making $100,000 over six months.

Right.

Because it's just more work, it's harder. It might. It might be more profitable on paper, but it's like, well, dang, I gave up six months to do that, you know, with. For you. I made you happy in 4 days early beta sales.

And there was some positive. Yeah.

And again, the goal is not to make your clients happy, but it is to provide a good service to your clients. Right. And that might be the version of the good service that I could provide here.

That's the nugget right there. Just to be of real service and helping them out. That's good.

Thanks. The money should be the byproduct of the good service.

Right.

Okay. All right. Good stuff. Josh. Questions? But I know you do. All right, cool. Thanks for that question, Josh. Maria, you're up. And then. And then Dimitri. Okay.

Hayden. Hey.

Every positive Interest in the product. So, so we're at a point now where we want to scale to the next level.

What'd you do in the beta sales? Like how did, how did you do those? Like through an email list or like did you put up a landing page or something?

Sure, yeah. Yeah.

Everyone. John, thank you so much for staying a bit longer with us. I really, really appreciate. So there is very famous quote that most of all of us know is you're not the user.

The landing page.

It was, we, we just reached out.

To internal networks small.

So for me product designer is the user. You are the users for me because I've been working as product illustrator all my career and currently I transitioned to product design but I'm still interested in continue this area as illustrator because I really like. I've been working in design ops and I did a lot of guidelines documentation, all the structure. So I love about it.

Yes, small networks and we sold a.

Thousand units and, and you mentioned, you said about product for prospect and product for sales and if you don't mind I would like to continue this discussion and move into, into the topic of my digital products of passive income. Because for me it's really interesting but.

I mean just making up numbers.

That's fine, that's fine, keep going. Yeah, no, we're just making them and.

God, yeah. 50,000.

Okay, cool. I mean it sounds like that's a successful strategy for you. Like what, what do you think you need? The website itself.

I'm a bit worried of them, of the value before because I think can't.

You just keep doing that? Maybe hire one or two more people for your sales team and like just increase.

Because there are so many open source libraries and I mean the same AI and some other bunch of stuff. So if you have any tips, any ideas how to where to sell and how to approach system at least by.

Doing it that way. Like what, what wouldn't you, what would you be missing out on if you didn't have a website but just action.

That would be really, really amazing.

Yeah. Cool. Yeah, thanks for that question Maria. And let me ask you a couple of questions about that. What do you do now? Do you do anything now around those ideas like do you have like a lead magnet or do you have some small product or anything like that that you do now? Or is it like. No, I'm trying to come up with that right now.

So currently I'm preparing. I almost preferred illustration sets so handmade illustrations and I was thinking to about a price but also I'm thinking About to make it as a.

Kept doing it like that, that scenario. We were just reaching out word of mouth and we didn't have like a proper scale. So those are contacting people we knew. And so now we want to create product for prospect.

So probably it will be free. And I almost done it, so.

Yeah.

Yep, got it. So one. One place that I found it, I find it helpful to think from is not thinking from the product for prospects to start is thinking about the product to sales the product for sales to start, and then the product for prospects becomes a subset of that. So as an example, or actually not an example, a question for you is like, what is your way of delivering the most value that you can for any of your customers? Whether that's, you know, that could be your. Your boss that hires you or that could be a client. Do you work in house somewhere or do you work as a. As a freelancer and work kind of for hire?

I mean, it depends.

A website where we can scale it to people we don't know and, you know, have a whole sales. Sales funnel around that.

Cool. All right, let's stop the role play here because I want to. Like, this is a. Is a good point. There's something. There's a word that you said that.

So I had. I work in house. So currently I'm a product designer. But before I was. Yeah, sometimes freelancing, sometimes working in startups, sometimes in huge organizations like.

Got it.

50K people.

Okay, so let's take the. Let's take the freelancer part of that. Let's just, let's just adopt it. To me, I would dig in on and I would. This is what the rest of the conversation would be about. You said proper. We wouldn't have a proper website. And I'm like, oh, you might, you might. I don't. I don't know this. To your freelance practice, what is the. What is the most amount of value that you can deliver to your perfect customer? Is that for them to hire you for a custom illustration project or is.

That something different that custom illustrations, guidelines, ability to scale, to create storytelling for products to have? Like, I'm very picky in terms of documentation, all the structure, all these operations ts, all the workflows to prepare in presentation. So I'm thinking more in wide perspective. And here I'm lost a bit.

Oh, that's great. So, like, I think that it helps to think about like the. For sure. But you might need to have things proper. That's the, that's the emotion is like, we're not doing it right. We need to be, we need to be validated or affirmed in something. So it's a, to me, that's a vanity project, biggest vision that you have for what you could deliver to your perfect client. So if it's all of that stuff, it's like custom illustration project. But really the documentation of it, the way that you deliver it sounds like, is the thing that is really important and distinguishing about you and the work that you do. So for me, if that's the case from, if it was me, I would think about your product for prospects being some subset of that. So as an example, like, and let me say it differently, some way for people to, to tease that or to get a glimpse of that without fully working with you first, right? So what's an example of that? It could be. Can you give. And I'm like, okay, if you. And the, the common wisdom around vanity projects is don't do them. I'm like, you know, you give away your documentation, rituals or operating procedures or you know, a sample of that, like, that could be something that gives people a taste of working with you. You could do a vanity project as long as you acknowledge it's a vanity project. So you said, we like, would you write an ebook about, about how you document an illustration project? Could you make a short YouTube video about how you do an illustration project? Because that'll give people a sense of working with you. And I think one of the things that a lot of people are scared of is like, yeah, but if I do that, then I give away the whole thing. And rest assured, almost never do you give away the whole thing, right? So as an example, if you walk through a case study and you made like a YouTube video or a loom video even of like, here's what I did. I did this, I illustrated this, I worked on it this way. I asked the client this way. If you just did a case study, documentation like end to end, you don't have a proper website. But I'm like, essentially you're about to spend 50,000 or $100,000 on me or something like that, right? Trying to save you $100,000. Like sometimes the best thing we can do for clients is save. Here's what I documented, here's the PDF, here's what the deliverable would be. Here's an open source figma file. You know, that shows you that, you know that in practice you, you can build your own. I guarantee you. Well, I all but guarantee you that somebody will see that and be like, yeah, but what does that look like for me? Right? Because that's, that's the, that's how you hook a customer is when a customer sees your work and they're like, but what does that look like for me? Right? How. What does that look like for my business or for my, the money that they would have spent on us. Don't spend 50, $50,000 on me, $100,000 on me building my practice. Like so I think that's, that's the place that I would start if I were you is how can you give people a taste of what it's like to work with you? So that by the end of getting that they're just like, I need more of this website that may or may not do the thing that you want it to do. In fact, like, you know what I'll do? Let me recommend you to my friends. Like I, I want to know what it's like for me. I want to know what it's like when applied to my brand or my products. Like that's the way that I would think about approaching your product for prospects. Is a taste of what or a small sliver or an mvp, you know, or whatever terminology you want around it. The smallest piece of what it's like to work with you in full.

Cool.

Hope that helps.

If you don't mind one more a bit question to this. So I mean this super cool direction and I really appreciate it. What if it is not like personalized?

Who does Kickstarter stuff like specialized in that he has a $2,500 consulting fee. Just go work with him. I think you should launch a kick like do a proper Kickstarter campaign. And I would keep using the word proper back at you. Do a proper email illustrations.

But more I'm offering my own style, my own brand.

So yeah, a funnel. Do a proper crowdfunding campaign.

Like for example, if I can take an example by Pablo Stanley. So we all know that he has created humans design system. So I mean he has his own style but he's not making personal for, for the clients. So how about this?

It's because Pablo's so the, the. For those of you who don't know the reference, Pablo Stanley is an entrepreneur and an illustrator and a designer and also and he has this open source library. Right like because it's, it's feeding that need for you to have something proper. Now I could be making a mountain of a molehill there but library called humans that you can do all these cool configurations and figma. It's awesome. The difference is that Pablo's product for sales is not a service. Pablo's product for sales is one of his products, right? So he has made software companies. So he's not trying to get people to hire him to do customized illustrations or personalized illustrations. There are examples of a lot of people out there who do that. I forget the name of the person, but there's a person out there, I think, on Twitter, who does, like, this kind of line art, profile, pictures, things. I zeroed in on that word that you said. You said proper, which is like, this is an unusual word for this conversation that I know, because I've had this conversation many, many times before. No one says proper unless they think they're doing something wrong. And so why do you want the website? Because you want to think that you're doing it right. That's the emotion. Like, what. Whatever emotion. I don't know, like, you want. You want to do that thing. That's what the website is for. It's not about $500,000. And if I. If I'm not mistaken, his product for sales is like, hire me to do a set of illustrations for you. It's a service. So he's giving people a taste of it, and the taste of it is a limited subset. Like, yeah, I'll draw you, you know, in this style, in this way very quickly. But if you're like, yeah, but I want you to draw it in color and I want you to draw it this way. It's like, great, hire me to do that. So it's a taste of what. It's. Yeah, tiny pfp. Thank you. Thank you for that, John. Like, tiny pfp. Darius, you know, it's like he's giving you a taste of that, and that taste is a taste of the product for sales. Like, the bigger version of that thing with Pablo, the bigger version of the thing is not. He doesn't want you to hire him to do that. He does. He does different stuff. He wants you to buy stock illustrations and photos from the company that he's the AI company. He's created. He wants you to like to. To do something else. So he directs you in a different direction, you know, because his product for Prospect is not to get you to do that. It's revenue. You. You can. You've already proven you can get 500,000. That's just a scale problem for you because you already got. You already made 300, whatever, you know, in doing your friends and family thing. So. So the website is. It's basically like a. It's more of a lead magnet than it is a product for process. It gets you in to go like, what else is this Pablo guy done? You know, that just introduces you to his ecosystem of stuff. So I think the custom illustrations is really good. I think that's a good approach. You know, doing something that's not custom for people allows them, it kind of instigates that. Like, but what if it was custom for me? Like, what if it was in color? What if it was this style? So I think that's a good. So this is the thing like before we jump to the solution, we have to even uncover what the problem is. And in this situation, like similar to what we talked about before, I think that you as a pro and I know we're direction to employ. One last tip that I would give you is, you know, as we've talked about before, I would then not try to do that to attract strangers. I would first try to do that product for prospects in a way that actually attracts the people who already trust you. And then you can get testimonials and recommendations and things like that from there. Okay, got it.

Thank you so much.

Cool. All right. I know we're over half. Half the hour, but I'm happy to go until. Until the top of the hour. I do have to go to the top of the hour here though. But happy to go if you all are hanging out and want to, want to keep doing this. Demetra, do you want to go next and then, and then Josh Byers after that?

Yeah. Hayden, you're superhuman. Thanks for giving back to the community. By the way, a little context.

I've been in this role playing subject to the scenario. But I think you as a prospect was problem unaware. So I'm spending time now educating myself and you. We're uncovering together what the problem is. The problem is you don't feel like.

For over 17 years now most of the time in house. But I had some freelance experience early on and yeah, I changed fields since then and moved to countries. But I see some opportunities now, I see some needs now as well and also know a couple of designers in my new market where like three years here. But they are focused on different areas. They basically graphic designers with some extent. My question, what is easier starting solo.

And you're doing it right. You don't feel like you're a real business yet.

Right. And I'm like getting to that level.

Scaling to a team later or launching as a team and growing together right away because basically I can offer to expand their existing sort of Freelance.

So what you want is legitimacy. I think, like, so that, that's the, that's the outcome that you want.

Legitimacy and business with my product expertise and with my digital UI and UX purities.

Yeah, good. Good question, Dimitri. Thanks for that. So the question is, is it easier to start as kind of a solo practitioner and then expand from there or better to kind of like launch the thing now and then learn together, kind of iterate together? Definitely. Pros and cons to each one. I think both are viable. I have a personal preference in it. It's generally my slight recommendation, although I think it's, you know, it kind of depends on what your skills are. For me, my personal preference, my also experience. You know, again, this is, this is a theory because you just said one word and I'm making, you know, I'm making a thing of it. But let's say we got there. Let's. What I would do for you for legitimacy is. I would say actually what I think we should do is a brand campaign is it's easier for me to start. It was easier for me to start as one person and then slowly add people than it was to like launch out of the gate with that. I've been part of both versions of that. The reason that I picked the, the solo version is number one. Ironically, for those of you who know me for design systems and design system work, I'm not a person who is good at scaling. So. So like I'm actually not good at that part, which is why it's easier for me to start with kind of the solo part. The second thing is in general, what I've seen with work, I don't know if you need a website. I think we should, we should work on your branding because if you feel like you're doing it legit with a lot of teams as they're trying to figure out scale is. I think it's easier to figure out what works in a small scenario first and then scale what works then, then in a big scenario. So I would suggest that you start as a solo practitioner first. Find out what works and what resonates with your clients. Because other intimately the website might not be the right solution for it. It might be having a really strong and solid brand or identity wise. I think you'll be pulling in, pilling a bunch of people into your. There's a word that I want to use for this. Your. And I say this not, not negatively, but neutrally, your ignorance in what your clients wants. Right? Because like you don't know what they want yet. So you're going to be experimenting, experimenting with a bunch of stuff. And a lot of people who join you as not a founding partner, things like might make you feel like, yeah, this is like, we're doing it, we're doing it right. We're doing it the way that the big dogs are. And that might be the are often uncomfortable with the ambiguity because you're going to be like, oh, we're a video production agent. Actual problem to solve. That might be the outcome to deliver. That might be the outcome that at the end of it, when you're wearing your polo shirt with the. And then the next client you pitch, we're a design system agency and your, your team's going to be like, wait, where what? Like where did that come from? And it's because you're trying stuff, you're experimenting with stuff, but they don't know that. And so you'll have to loop them into that. And it just creates more work for you to loop them into all that stuff. So I would recommend starting small and then scaling from there. I've seen a lot of teams have more success in that than starting, you know, fully. The one exception that I'll make to that is depending on what you're doing small, the smallest version that you can have could be five people on a gram logo right here. You're like, yes, yes, look at that, we got polo shirts. Polo shirt might be this, for example. You can't build a basketball team one person at a time. Like, oh, I'll work as one person and then I'll add a center and then a point guard and then no, you have to launch with five people if you're playing a five on five solution to this project. So those are the things that I like to try and uncover. Right. But we have to spend a lot of time games. So like the minimum that you can do in that, in that instance is five people. I don't know how that's true. I don't think that that's true if you're thinking about an agency, because you can be a solo practitioner first and then scale that. So if you're not a basketball team or a football team, but, but there might be some instance where you're like, maybe you're trying to launch a full service agency and in that case you might need a designer and an engineer, you know, to be able to launch that. So that, that might be the case where it's like you need a founding team to do that.

Got it. Okay.

You know, in that conversation. And one thing that I wanted, the last thing I want to say about that is. And you know, this is like, this is a shorthand version, you know, for sure. But one thing that I want to say about that is I think, Josh, before that, even as I'm talking, I'm sort of walking it back when I. When you think about startups that, that you. And this is probably true of probably, you know, everybody here, like, we all fall into the trap sometimes of being like, go to through places like Y Combinator or something like that. They often suggest, like, I don't know if they, they let single solo founders apply. I think they, you have to have a founding team. So, you know, maybe that, that kind of flies against my recommendation, you know, in that. But in terms of freelancing, in terms of consulting, I think it's easier to figure stuff out by yourself and then scale what works. When I had. Last thing I'll say about it is, well, value based pricing means like you do this and this is the formula, they charge 10%. It's like, it's not about that. It's about making things. When I was running super friendly and we really started to scale up, the, the most frequent question that people were asking, what was what is the super friendly way of doing this? And luckily that was six years in. So I had the answer, but I didn't have it documented. And so because I didn't have it documented, everybody kept coming to me to answer that question over and over and over again until finally it was like, okay, we need to document this in a handbook. And then once we had the hand that really serve your clients, like, don't, don't, like don't overcomplicate the methodology and the formula and all this stuff. Do something really good for your client, deliver the best service you can and be well compensated for it. And book. Then people knew, you know how to do that stuff. But because, because we had scaled before we had the solutions. Right. It just became a little bit frenetic at that point. So I suggest the small version before you go.

Right. Thanks.

Yep. To meet you. Thanks for, for that question. Josh, you're up. And then Uday Kumar first.

Is your design. Is the group coaching program only going to be for design agencies? Have you thought about that?

I'm still thinking about that. I think it will be for freelancers. I think it'll be a combination of freelancers, small studio owners and agency owners. Because I think that all of them have something to learn from each other. So having them in A group I think will benefit all of them, even if they're in slightly different scenarios. So I think it'll be for all three. I reserve the right to change my mind. Don't be greedy on that. I think a lot of people mistake value based pricing as like, you know, take all the money that's on the table. You can't leave any. No, it's not about that. It's about doing something really good for your client. If my, if you walked away from this and you're like, I feel really about that, but that, that's kind of where my head's at right now.

Other productized businesses that are adjacent.

Less so. Because I think that the, like, so you're talking about, like, if you sell like courses or, you know, something like that. Less so for that. More, more service based, I think is where I'm starting.

Okay. All right. I got two questions. You can choose which one you want to answer. So I've got a product that I believe with all my heart should be selling.

Better be good about our product. I like now. Now I'm glad to be the head of this company. Like, great, that sounds, that sounds like a good outcome, right? Like, and then, and then, you know, what are you willing to give me for that, for helping you make.

But it's not. What are some things that I can look forward to, diagnose why. And the second one is, can you break down how you value and price branding?

The second one I have, I have less filtered thoughts about the first one, so I'd have to stumble my way through it. So I'll pick the second one if it's all right. Can you give me an example of maybe a prospect that you've had or a conversation that you've had where you're like, and this is where I got stuck in, like valuing that. That work or that, that, that deliveral.

Well, just so you can, you can, you know, do a branding project as simple as just a, you know, basic logo, or you can do an entire design system. So in trying to evaluate, you know.

Feel good about the company, you know, if you're like, yeah, I give up, I give up, you know, 10 grand for that. Like, cool, I could do that for you in four days. We could do a quick branding sprint. I could outsource the.

Wait, where is the value here for the specific client, I'll just take a church, for example. That's what I deal with the most. You know, not a lot of big budgets and they don't understand the value of Branding most of the time anyway. And I'm sure a lot of small companies are like that, too. So how do you determine what the value of that brand is? And then progressively, you know, going up.

From a small work to all these brand sprint companies, to do five days of brand sprints, I'd make a margin on it. And we only. We only had to work on it for four days.

Right.

The solution might be completely different than what you came in thinking.

Just a, you know, just a generic logo to an entire branding process integration to. With all their products, things like that.

How do you do.

How do you show them the value? And then how do you price that?

Okay, cool. Yep, got it. Thanks for. Thanks for the extra context there. So, Josh, you're a brand guy. I'm gonna ask you some brand questions. And this is what I specifically love talking value pressing with brand designers. Because I think brand designers and identity designers actually have a good hold on feelings and emotions and the words that capture those. Right. Like, more than web designers and UX designers and product designers. So I like using brand stuff as an example and all that. Why does someone buy a brand? And I realize there's a lot of wrong ideas in that question even, right. That you're probably going to be like, let's walk some of that back. But, like, why does any client need or buy a brand? But it allows me as a service provider to be very creative, to be well compensated. Because if you gave me ten grand for four days, I'm living large, man. Like, that's great. That's amazing. You know that to me, that's sometimes better than to.

Man, you're just. You're catching me. To show their value. I mean, that's there. I mean, there's a number of reasons to show their value, to promote, to basically to show who they are. It's their identity.

So, yes.

Who.

Who is who. Who are you?

Yes, totally. So. And like making $100,000 over six months, right, because it's just more work. It's harder. It might. It might be more profitable on paper, but it's like, well, dang, I gave up six months to do that, you know, with. For you. I made you happy in four days. Great answer, Josh. And then also in the chat too, like, good, good response as well. Like, solve a problem, increase recognition, maybe increase sales. So brand in general is about, like, coincidentally to, I think Josh's question earlier. Josh Lowe's question earlier. Like, brand is about feelings. My brand is about gut feelings. And identity is about expressing some of those feelings. So, you know, a brand that wants to appear fresh versus a brand that wants to appear new or futuristic or, or old timey, you know, or whatever. Like a brand is about expressing some of that stuff. And so those are things that have inherent value, but implicit value. It's hard to say what those things are. So our job, as we try to value that and turn that into a price, is to turn it from implicit to explicit. And there's a couple ways to do that. I'll give you an obvious. And again, the goal is not to make your clients happy, but it is to provide a good service to your clients. Right. And that might be the version of the good service that I could provide here.

That's the nugget right there. Just to be example.

And then we'll kind of go to more nebulous examples from there. My brother's a financial, a financial strategist. And one of the things, like he doesn't have a website or anything like that. And so I did some work for him on the brand and we're working on some web stuff too. Now I did it for him for free because he's my brother. But if I were to price him on that and I asked him the same questions as if I was pricing it. So the questions that I asked him were like, why do you even need a website? Because he's got one of those like link tree kind of flow code things. I'm like, that's fine, right? Like your clients are, are you using that? And he's like, no, no, no. I lose a lot of prospects because they don't know that I'm certified real.

Service and helping them out. That's good.

Thanks. The money should be the byproduct of the good service.

Right?

Okay. All right, Good stuff, Josh. Questions. But I know you do. All right, cool. Thanks for that question, Josh. Or they don't know that I'm credible. And so a lot of the questions they have, not in the first meeting with me, but in the second or the third meeting with me, is like, they're like, like, who else have you worked for? Like, are you even licensed in my state? Like all those kinds of things. And having a good website gives him the feeling here or the emotion or the, the outcome, the quality here is credibility. So that's what I'm trying to price. I'm trying to price credibility. And in his particular instance, I'm like, how many, how many prospects do you think you're losing every week or every month because you don't have a website? And because my brother is good at his job, he actually tracks that. And he knows, you know, he knows that. He's like, oh, probably like five to ten a week. I'm like, all right, and if they would have hired you instead and worked with you instead, what would you be making? Like, how much more would you be closing at 5 or 5 to 10? Maria, you're up. And then. And then Dimitri. Okay.

Hey, Dan. Hey, everyone. Then, thank you so much for staying a bit longer with us.

I really, really appreciate more prospects actually close with you. And he, you know, he gave me whatever number that is. I don't remember off top of my head, but he'd be like, it'd probably be another, like, 10 to $15,000 a week of business. Okay, now we have an anchor. So. So if. If we change something and you're closing 10 to $15,000.

So there is.

More a week for business. Was that 60k a month? An additional. Yeah, an additional 40 to 60.

Famous quote that most of all of us know is you're not the user.

$1,000 a month. So it's like, if I work on something that even in the month, I'm making an additional 60k. So of that 60k, what are you willing to give me of that 60k? Well, back to the first question that I asked in this, you know, in this discussion, if I gave you a. Sorry, if you gave me a dollar.

So for me, product designer is the user. You are the users for me. Because I've been working as product illustrator all my career, and currently I gave you two back.

Is that a good deal? And all of you are like, yeah, it is. What if I asked you to give me a dollar and I promise $1.50 back? Probably some of you would still say yes, but some of you would be like, I don't know. I don't even know if it's worth getting a dollar out of my pocket for that. If I said, okay, you give me a dollar and I'll give you a dollar and one back, some of you are like, it's not worth it. No, I'm not going to do that. Even though it's still objectively a good deal. So. So the negotiation when you price something is, all right, my brother John. All right, John, I gave you six 60k this month, additional that you would have. How much of that 60k are you willing to give me back for getting you 60k? And he might be like, I mean, if you got me 60k, I'd give you half. Okay, cool. So 30k would be my cut, 60k to product design.

But I'm still interested in continue this area as illustrator because I really like. I've been working in design ops and would be his.

He'd keep 30, right. 60k would be his revenue. He'd cut another check to me for 30. You know, 30 and 30 is what we get for some of some customers, they're like, I'm not giving you half the bounty. I wouldn't do that, but I'd give you a quarter or I give you 10%. Generally when I'm pricing, I start at 10% because usually 10% is the number that feels small enough for the prospect that they're not giving up a lot, but feels like still lucrative enough for me. Right. So Josh, back to your question. If we can identify some of those outcomes that our clients want, right? And we go, okay, well you're losing leads because of the lack of credibility. What are those leads worth to you? And it could be a subjective number, it could be an objective number, but that gives us the starting point for how to price it. So that's maybe the most clear cut example because that's like literally leading to revenue loss.

And I did a lot of guidelines, documentation, all this structure. So I love a lot. And you mentioned, you said about product.

For prospect, the more nebulous examples are clients or prospects who are like. Or what we're getting. What we're not getting is like we're not capturing enough market share. It's like, okay, you can quantify that. It's a little bit more difficult. Okay, so what is your market share? Well, we're in the beverage industry and the beverage industry is a $60 billion industry. Okay, how much of the market share do you intend to capture? We intend to capture half.

So you intended and product for sales. And if you don't mind, I would like to continue this discussion and move into into the topic of digital products.

Intend to capture a 30. 30 billion of the $60 billion market in beverages. Like for most companies, it's unrealistic. For most of them it's like, well, we need 1% more market share. Okay, well you can quantify that stuff and then you can say, okay, my fee is 10% of that. So the key to pricing and the methodology is value pricing or the style of pricing is value pricing. But really the key to it is you make a bunch of money for your client and your prospect. How much of it are they willing to give you back, you know, for doing that, but in advance? Right. You're not collecting it on the back end, you're collecting it on the front end. So Josh, that's the way that I would do it, you know, that's the way that I have done it with clients and with prospects is as they are, as they're coming in. Usually it's to solve a certain problem, you know, especially on the brand side. It's usually something related to credibility, to sales, to revenue, to of passive income.

Because for me it's really interesting but I'm bit, I'm a bit worried of the observe market share to.

Something related to competition, you know, something in there. And a lot of times you can quantify that. And once you're able to quantify it, right, that's the key is being able to quantify it. So let me stop there. I know we're getting close to time. Josh, if you want to follow up or if anybody else wants to follow up real quick. Like do you have an example off the top of your head that you're like well how do you quantify this?

Because there are so many open source libraries and I mean the same AI and some other bunch of stuff. So if you have any tips.

How do you quantify a nonprofit for example?

Great. That's almost always the follow up question to that is like nonprofit. Because nonprofit literally is the opposite of what I just said. They don't care about revenue at all, right? That's not the thing. So a couple things there is one is they don't care about revenue, but sometimes they care about something that is a close equivalent which is donations. So you can do the same process with donations. A lot of nonprofits are looking for more donations. So you can quantify that. Well, how much more? And again back to I think Anna's question earlier. If your client's like well, I mean just more. Well, you're like well how can I do a good job for you if I don't know how much more? Right? Like I don't know. So if I, if I get you a dollar more donations, will, will that work? And if they say yes, just open up your wallet and give them a dollar. Here you go. Project done. Right. Like that's it. You just raise donations.

Any ideas how to, where to sell and how to approach this directions by.

A dollar because you weren't donating before. So, so there's some level of like they, they need to be, they need to be able to quantify their stuff. If they can't, then maybe you can't. Unless you know about the space more than they do. And that's the value of good positioning. Right? So if you are a nonprofit branding expert, you're like, I know in general what I'm able to do for nonprofits, so you can bring that to the table with super friendly. Almost all of our clients would come in whenever we'd ask them, like, okay, so we build a design system together, and you get what. Like, what is. What's something that you would be hoping to get in, you know, your efficiency or the consistency or anything. And almost every time they'll sort of lean in a little bit and they'll go like. I mean, we were kind of hoping that you would tell us. And it's like, yeah, okay, we can tell you. We can tell you that because we know it. We. We know it a lot of times better than our client because we specialize in that, and that was our niche. So we would tell our client. Well, on average, the clients that we've worked with, they usually see a 10 to 15% bump in this and this and this. Like, we're able to say that because we have the data that they sometimes don't or don't. Can't access or any of that stuff. If you don't have that, you, you know, you can still, for a nonprofit, you know, maybe donations, if they're able to quantify that, maybe you could tell them that maybe in advance you can look up their industry. So maybe they're a nonprofit for homelessness, or maybe they're a nonprofit for education or something like that. You can look up all these, like, ChatGPT. You can use that. You can Google, what are average donations for a homelessness nonprofit? What are average donations for this? And you can start to use that to lead the conversation with the client. Oh, like what. What amount of donations are you actually hoping to get? Oh, we don't know. All right, well, from my research, the average donation is about $25 per person. How many constituents do you have donating every year? About, you know, roughly? Maybe they have those numbers. Maybe they can't tell you the dollar amount, but they could tell you, oh, we have, you know, on average, on our database, we have 10,000 donors. Okay, cool. That's something to start from that allows you to do some math. So it's gotta be quantified. Donations are a close equivalent to revenue. If it's not donations, the other thing that I'll usually go for is oftentimes nonprofits are trying to increase some constituent base. So for a church, that might be membership for a. For some sort of like membership group that might be like the number of registered participants, you know, or something like that. So you can tie your effort to. Okay, well if we run this email campaign, you know what we can do is we can target 100,000 subscribers and our conversion rate on that was hoping to be 1%. So we think that we can raise it by 10,000 subscribers, you know, something like that. And so a lot of times it's a.

That would be really, really amazing.

Yeah. Cool. Yeah, thanks for that question, Maria. And let me ask you a couple of questions about that. What do you do now? Do you do anything now around those ideas like do you have like a lead magnet or do you have some small product or anything like that that you do now? Or is it like. No, I'm trying to come up with that right now.

So currently I'm preparing I almost preferred illustration set. So handmade illustrations. I was thinking to about a price but also I'm thinking about to make.

It as a about you know, pricing for outcome is about an increase or a decrease in something and so product for prospect.

So probably it will be free and I almost done it.

That's the key to quantifying your price and starting there is being able to quantify that that outcome.

So.

Yeah.

Yep, got it. So one, one place that I found it, I find it helpful to think. Last thing, last thing I'll say. So we'll kind of end here. Sorry. For those who, who still had questions, maybe we'll do a part two of this. Anna has a question in the chat. Follow up, what? But if you can't guarantee the outcome, how can you price based on that in advance? So I want two things I want to say about that. One thing is from, is not thinking from the product for prospects to start is thinking about the product to sales. The product for sales to start. You are not guaranteeing it, but you could. And if you can, a guaranteed outcome is a different value than a non guaranteed outcome. Right? This is. So if you're some stranger, if you are somebody that your customer doesn't trust and you say yeah, we think we will increase your subscriber base by 10,000 people or you know, get you $10,000 more revenue I think. But we're not going to guarantee and then the product for prospects becomes a subset of that. So as an example or actually not an example, a question for you is and they don't trust you, you can't sell it, they won't buy it, it's not a good deal. If they do trust you that probably is because they know you and they're like, okay, we think that you're telling the truth and not lying. Or maybe they trust you because you came recommended from someone else and so they might do a reference check on you or they might have seen your work, your prior work, maybe in your portfolio. Some of your cases, like what is your way of delivering the most value that you can for any of your customer studies? Or something like that. So there's all these things that allow them to trust you. That, that, that's the thing that fills the guarantee. That's the thing that takes the place of a guarantee. You don't need a guarantee if you have trust. Now if you don't have trust, a guarantee isn't merged. Whether that's, you know, that could be your, your boss that hires you, that could be a client. Do you work in house somewhere or do you work as an additional option? Or even if you do have trust, a guarantee is an additional option that you can throw in that actually increases your offering.

Right.

So a lot of times, not a lot of times, some as a freelancer and work kind of for hire.

I mean, it depends sometimes.

I've given two offers to a client. I've said to them, I think that we can get, we can increase your subscriber base by 10,000 people. And the price of that's going to be $5,000, let's say a value price. I'm just making up numbers. The price of that's going to be $5,000. If you want me to guarantee that we'll increase your subscriber base by 10,000 people, then the price of that will be $10,000. But it's guaranteed that we'll do it. So guarantee me.

So I had, I work in house, so currently I'm a product designer, but before I was money back.

So I've just doubled the offer based on the guarantee and it gives my client the option. Do you want to spend more for the guaranteed 10,000 or do you want to spend less for. We will try our best.

Right.

And if you trust us to try our best, that, that we might do a good job. And we will try our best because we've done a good job before. Cool. You can take that risk because basically what you're doing and this, oh man, I can't believe we're ending on this. What you're doing is the thing that you're ultimately.

Yeah. Sometimes freelancing, sometimes working in startups, sometimes.

In future pricing, no matter what you price is, you're always pricing risk. The more risk you take off the table for your prospect, the higher your price can be. Dang it. I can't believe we're, we're ending on.

That because there's so much to say about 50k people.

Okay, so let's take the, let's take the freelancer part of that. Let's just, let's just adopt it that the more risk you can take off the table for your, for your prospect and for your customer, the more you are able to price, the more you are able to charge if you guarantee an outcome that's almost no risk for your client. See a freelance practice. What is the, what is the most amount of value that you can deliver to your perfect customer? So you should be handsomely rewarded for that, for taking that risk off the table.

Right?

What happens if you don't have that? Hit that goal and you guarantee it? Well, what happens when you, when you guarantee something that you don't do? It's a money back guarantee, right? If that's what you're guaranteeing, then you give them. You give the money back if you don't accomplish it. So now you're taking all of the risk. And because you're taking all of the risk by that money back guarantee, your fee should go up. All right, my friends, we have. Is that for them to hire you for a custom illustration project or is that something different than that? Done this for two hours. Holy cow. I did not imagine that we would do this. I hope it was helpful. Lots of good comments and questions from you all. Lots of good stuff in the chat. I'll send the recording around if you want to do this again.

Custom illustrations, guidelines, ability to.

Let's do this again. I'll send you some details about the group coaching program that I'm going to start.

Scale to create storytelling for products to have.

Once I have the details, I don't even have them yet. It's a thing that I'm working on right now. And for those of you who I won't talk to before the end of the new year, have a happy holidays. Happy New Year to you all and good luck with all of the pricing and all the work that you're doing. There's a lot of money to be captured. There's a lot of really good stuff that we can do when we could do good stuff for our clients. So I wish that well to all.

Of you and like, I'm very picky in terms of documentation, all the structure, all these separations.

Yeah. Thanks everybody. Have a good Rest of your Monday, a good rest of the year and Good luck in 2025. See you all soon.

Thank you, Dan.

Bye everyone.

Bye everyone.

Bye bye.

Tell us all the workflows to prepare in presentation. So I'm thinking more in white perspective and here I'm lost a bit.

Oh, that's great. So like, I think that it helps to think about like the biggest vision that you have for what you could deliver to your perfect client. So if it's all of that stuff, it's like custom illustration project, but really the documentation of it, the way that you deliver it sounds like, is the thing that is really important and distinguishing about you and the work that you do. So for me, if that's the case, if it was me, I would think about your product for prospects being some subset of that. So as an example, like, and let me say it differently, some way for people to tease that or to get a glimpse of that without fully working with you first. Right? So what's an example of that? It could be, can you give away your documentation rituals or operating procedures or a sample of that. That could be something that gives people a taste of working with you. Could you write an ebook about how you document an illustration project? Could you make a short YouTube video about how you do an illustration project? Because that'll give people a sense of working with you. And I think one of the things that a lot of people are scared of is like, yeah, but if I do that, then I give away the whole thing. And rest assured, almost never do you give away the whole thing, right? So as an example, if you walk through a case study and you made like a YouTube video or a loom video even of like, here's what I did, I did this, I illustrated this, I worked on it this way, I asked the client this way. If you just did a case study, documentation, like end to end, here's what I documented, here's the PDF, here's what the deliverable would be. Here's an open source figma file. You know, that shows you that you know that in practice you can build your own. I guarantee you. Well, I all but guarantee you that somebody will see that and be like, yeah, but what does that look like for me? Right? Because that's how you hook a customer is when a customer sees your work and they're like, but what does that look like for me? What does that look like for my business or for my practice? So I think that's the place that I would start if I were you, is how can you give People a taste of what it's like to work with you. So that by the end of getting that, they're just like, I need more of this. I want to know what it's like for me. I want to know what it's like when applied to my brand or my product. That's the way that I would think about approaching your product for prospects. Is a taste of what or a small sliver or an mvp, you know, or whatever terminology you want around it. The. The smallest piece of what it's like to work with you in full. Cool. I hope that helps.

If you don't mind one more a bit question to this. So I mean this super cool direction and I really appreciate it. What if it is not like personalized illustrations, but more I'm offering my own style, my own brand. So you know, like for example, if I can take an example by Pablo Stanley. So we all know that he has created humans design system. So I mean, he has his own style, but he's not making personal for the clients. So how about this?

It's because Pablo's so the, the. For those of you who don't know the reference, Pablo Stanley is an entrepreneur and an illustrator and designer. And also. And he has this open source library, illustration library called Humans that you can do all these cool configurations and figma it. It's awesome. The difference is that Pablo's product for sales is not a service. Pablo's product for sales is one of his products, right? So he has made software companies. So he's not trying to get people to hire him to do customized illustrations or personalized illustrations. There are examples of a lot of people out there who do that. I forget the name of the person, but there's a person out there, I think on Twitter who does like this kind of line art, profile, pictures, things. And if I'm not mistaken, his product for sales is like, hire me to do a set of illustrations for you. It's a service. So he's giving people a taste of it and the taste of it is a limited subset. Like, yeah, I'll draw you, you know, in this style, in this way very quickly. But if you're like, yeah, but I want you to draw it in color and I want you to draw it this way. He's like, great, hire me to do that. So it's a taste of what it's yeah, tiny pfp. Thank you. Thank you for that, John. Like tiny pfp, Darius, you know, it's like he's giving you a taste of that and that taste is a taste of the product for sales. Like the bigger version of that thing with Pablo, the bigger version of the thing is not. He doesn't want you to hire him to do that. He does. He does different things. Stuff. He wants you to buy stock illustrations and photos from the company that he's. The AI company he's created. He wants you to like to. To do something else. So he directs you in a different direction, you know, because his product for prospect is not to get you to do that. It's. It's basically like a. It's more of a lead magnet than it is a product for process. It gets you in to go. Like, what else is this Pablo guy done? You know, that just introduces you to his ecosystem of stuff. So I think the. The custom illustrations is really good. I think that's a good approach. You know, doing something that's not custom for people allows them. It kind of instigates that. Like, but what if it was custom for me? Like, what if it was in color? What if it was this style? So I think that's a good direction to employ. One last tip that I would give you is, you know, as we've talked about before, I would then not try to do that to attract strangers. I would first try to do that product for prospects in a way that actually attracts the people who already trust you. And then you can get testimonials and recommendations and things like that from there. Okay, got it. Hope that helps.

Thank you so much.

Cool. All right. I know we're over half. Half the hour, but I'm happy to go until. Until the top of the hour. I do have to go to the top of the hour here though. But happy to go if you all are hanging out and want to. Want to keep doing this. Dmitry, you want to go next and then. And then Josh Byers after that.

Yeah. Peyton, you're superhuman. Thanks for giving back to the community, by the way. A little context. I've been in design for over 17 years now, most of the time in house. But I had some freelance experience early on. And yeah, I changed fields since then and moved to two countries. But I see some opportunities now. I see some needs now as well and also know a couple of designers in my new market where like two years here, but they are focused on different areas. They basically graphic designers with some extent. My question, what is easier starting solo and scaling to a team later or launching as a team and growing together right away? Because basically I can offer to expand their existing sort of freelance business with my product Expertise and with my digital UI and UX expertise.

Yeah, good. Good question, Dimitri. Thanks for that. So the question is, is it easier to start as kind of a solo practitioner and then expand from there or better to kind of like launch the thing now and then learn together, kind of iterate together? Definitely. Pros and cons to each one. I think both are viable. I have a personal preference in it. It's generally my slight recommendation, although I think it's, you know, it kind of depends on what your skills are. For me, my personal preference, my also experience is it's easier for me to start. It was easier for me to start as one person and then slowly add people than it was to like launch out of the gate with. With that. I've been part of both versions of that. The reason that I picked the solo version is number one. Ironically, for those of you who know me for design systems and design system work, I'm not a person who is good at scaling, so I'm actually not good at that part, which is why it's easier for me to start with the solo part. The second thing is, in general, what I've seen with working with a lot of teams as they're trying to figure out scale is I think it's easier to figure out what works in a small scenario first and then scale what works than in a big scenario. So I would suggest that you start as a solo practitioner first. Find out what works and what resonates with your clients. Because otherwise I think you'll be pulling in, pulling a bunch of people into your. There's a word that I want to use for this. Your. And I say this not, not negatively, but neutrally, your ignorance in what your clients wants, right? Because, like, you don't know what they want yet. So you're going to be experimenting with a bunch of stuff. And a lot of people who join you as not a founding partner or things like that are often uncomfortable with the ambiguity because you're going to be like, oh, we're a video production agency. And then the next client you pitch, we're a design system agency. And your team's going to be like, wait, where? What? Like, where did that come from? And it's because you're trying stuff, you're experimenting with stuff, but they don't know that. And so you'll have to loop them into that. And it just creates more work for you to loop them into all that stuff. So I would recommend starting small and then scaling from there. I've seen a lot of teams have more Success in that than starting, you know, fully. The one exception that I'll make to that is depending on what you're doing small, the smallest version that you can have could be five people. For example, you can't build a basketball team one person at a time. Like, oh, I'll work as one person and then I'll add a center and then a point guard. And then, no, you have to launch with five people if you're playing a five on five game. So like, the minimum that you can do in that, in that instance is five people. I don't know how that's true. I don't think that that's true. If you're thinking about an agency, because you can be a solo practitioner first and then scale that. So if you're not a basketball team or a football team, but, but there might be some instance where you're like, maybe you're trying to launch a full service agency, and in that case you might need a designer and an engineer, you know, to be able to launch that. So that, that might be the case where it's like you need a founding team before that. Even as I'm talking, I'm sort of walking it back. When I. When you think about startups that, that go to through places like Y Combinator or something like that, they often suggest, like, I don't know if they, they let single solo founders apply. I think they, you have to have a founding team. So, you know, maybe that, that kind of flies against my recommendation, you know, in that. But in terms of freelancing, in terms of consulting, I think it's easier to figure stuff out by yourself and then scale what works. When I had. Last thing I'll say about it is when I was running super friendly and we really started to scale up, the. The most frequent question that people were asking, what was. What is the super friendly way of doing this? And luckily that was six years in. So I had the answer, but I didn't have it documented. And so because I didn't have it documented, everybody kept coming to me to answer that question over and over and over again until finally it was like, okay, we need to document this in a handbook. And then once we had the handbook, then people knew how to do that stuff. But because we had scaled before we had the solutions, it just became a little bit frenetic at that point. So I suggest the small version before you grow.

Right, thanks.

Yep. Dimitri, thanks for that question. Josh, you're up. And then Uday Kumar.

First is your design is the group coaching program Only going to be for design agencies. Have you thought about that?

I'm still thinking about that. I think it will be for freelancers. I think it'll be a combination of freelancers, small studio owners, and agency owners. Because I think that all of them have something to learn from each other. So having them in a group, I think will benefit all of them, even if they're in slightly different scenarios. So I think it'll be for all three. I reserve the right to change my mind about that, but that's kind of where my head's at right now.

Other productized businesses that are adjacent.

Less so. Because I think that the like. So you're talking about, like, if you sell, like courses or if you know something like that. Less so for that. More. More service based, I think is where I'm starting.

Okay. All right. I got two questions. You can choose which one you want to answer. So I've got a product that I believe with all my heart should be selling better, but it's not. What are some things that I can look for to diagnose why? And the second one is, can you break down how you value and price branding?

Let's do the second one. I have. I have less filtered thoughts about the first one, so I'd have to stumble my way through it. So I'll pick the second one if it's all right. Can you give me an example of maybe a prospect that you've had or a conversation that you've had where you're like. And this is where I got stuck in, like valuing that. That work or that. That. That deliverable.

Well, just so you can, you can, you know, do a branding project as simple as just a, you know, basic logo, or you can do an entire design system. So in trying to evaluate where is the value here for the specific client, I'll just take a church, for example. That's what I deal with the most, you know, not a lot of big budgets. And they don't understand the value of branding most of the time anyway. And I'm sure a lot of small companies are like that too. So how do you determine what the value of that brand is? And then progressively, you know, going up from a small, just a, you know, just a generic logo to an entire branding process integration to. With all their products, things like that.

How do you do.

How do you show them the value and then how do you price that?

Okay, cool. Yep, got it. Thanks for. Thanks for the extra context there. So, Josh, you're a brand guy. I'm gonna ask you some brand questions and this is what I, I specifically love talking value pricing with brand designers because I think brand designers and identity designers actually have a good hold on feelings and emotions and the words that capture those. Right. Like more than web designers and UX designers and product designers. So I like using brand stuff as, as an example and all that. Why does someone buy a brand? And I realize there's a lot of wrong ideas in that question even right that you're probably going to be like let's, let's, let's walk some of that back. But like why does, why does any client need or buy a brand.

To man, you're just, you're catching me. To show their value. I mean that's there, I mean there's a number of reasons to show their value, to promote to. I basically to show who they are, it's their identity. So yes, who, who is who, who are you?

Yes, totally so and like great answer, Josh. And then also in the chat too, like good, good response as well. Like solve a problem, increase recognition, maybe increase sales. So brand in general is about like coincidentally to I think Josh's question earlier. Josh Lowe's question earlier. Like brand is about feelings, brand is about gut feelings and identity is about expressing some of those feelings. So you know, a brand that wants to appear fresh versus a brand that wants to appear new or futuristic or, or old timey or whatever, brand is about expressing some of that stuff. And so those are things that have inherent value but implicit value. It's hard to say what those things are. So our job as we try to value that Internet into a price is to turn it from implicit to explicit. And there's a couple ways to do that. I'll give you an obvious example and then we'll kind of go to more nebulous examples from there. My brother's a financial strategist and one of the things like he doesn't have a website or anything like that. And so I did some work for him on the brand and we're working on some web stuff too. Now I did it for him for free because he's my brother. But if I were to put.