Pricing Fuck Ups. Pricing lessons on the indie side of business. Ep05. Price The Job, Not The Client.

Landed a big client and “charged my worth”. I was happy — till I was not.

I charged based on the what the market did. Asked around and I played the same game others were. Didn’t go too high, because I didn’t want to “lose” the gig. Didn’t go too low, to not look too cheap. Sent the proposal and got it approved. Yay!

Few weeks passed by and a contact tells me “I thought you were charging in dollars, not in soles (3.5 to 1 conversion). We had more budget for that.”

Thought “Please, kill me now.”

Approach

It was all about me. What “my worth” was. What I should charge. What would make me happy to work with. How I could find the right solution for the client. It was never about what they wanted and what they valued.

Would have done different

Focus on them. See things from their side and help them get what they wanted. To make better questions about what they valued, not about what I valued and how simple the project was for me (it was most likely that for somebody else would have been maybe not that simple).

What did happen

I left money on the table — like 2.5X what I could have earned. All that because the focus was on me, on “what my worth was”. That was absolutely irrelevant.

Lesson

Focus on what’s important for your prospect. You won’t always value price (you shouldn’t, actually), but you’ll take the value into determining what a price would work for both of you. This is not about your worth, sorry. It’s about what’s worth to them.

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