Nicolas Cole argues the fastest way to $10k a month is doing free work first. Free projects build credibility and portfolio pieces you can use to land paid clients the next month, cutting months off the traditional sales cycle. Treat it as marketing, not a loss.
What is your fastest path to 10k a month? I would actually, and I do, I often advocate for the step before that, which is you shouldn't even try and charge for the first thing that you do. You're level one. You having 10 copper or 0 copper at level one makes no difference. You can't buy anything with 10 copper anyway. A lot of people, whenever I talk about the ROI of free work, everyone comes back and like, no, you should get paid what your worth is and your value and you should never do free work and don't let people take advantage of you. And I'm like, you're thinking about it completely wrong. In the beginning, free work is basically a marketing cost. It is a way to remove all friction and get yourself paid in experience, credibility, pattern recognition. And everyone thinks, no, that's a short term loss. But if I told you you're going to go pitch that service for three grand and it's going to take you nine months to get someone to say yes. Or you can pitch it to someone for free today, do a project and then the next month have something to point to that you can ladder up to a client Month two, which one would you take? And it's only in hindsight or once you explain that the person goes, oh, I would do the second path, but that's not what most people do. Yeah.
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