This is a great rate. I’d love to know how you find clients willing to pay this amount. Most people I’ve come across that need a new site/app built have extremely low budgets. Like $10,000…total for an app. Certainly not $10,000 for a week.
Simply put: Talk to people who have more money and higher expectations, and highly value efficiency (OP's selling point of being a "single person" means not dealing with a whole team, back&forth comms, etc). Don't talk to your local barber who wants a website to show up on google maps.
I have a similar weekly rate but $200 hourly; How I bill depends on the client (though yes, gravitating more and more towards weekly over time).
This doesn’t answer my question. How do you find people “who have more money and higher expectations, and highly value efficiency”?
> “Don't talk to your local barber who wants a website to show up on google maps.”
The specific case I was referring to was a series seed funded startup that needed to build an MVP. Even for them $10,000 was too much. They ended up finding someone for half that to build their entire V1. This was maybe 5 years ago. They’ve since rebuilt everything in house and are doing very well now.
Your last point there is the stinger: they rebuilt everything themselves after going cheaper to start. So: they had the money, and they had cause to spend it, but they chose not pay you for your service, and as a result they likely paid more in the long run. It is a (admittedly pretty tough!) sales task, but it is the task: you had to convince them that $10k was worth it for you.
Once they have 3+ programmers working full time, they'll be spending _at least_ $15k every single week on their site/app -- likely way more. Save them even a single near-future month of crap-rewriting, "switching frameworks", infrastructure headaches, "one-click signup", getting their shaky foundations sorted out, etc., and it's a very clear win.
I've seen founder and first contractor tech debt that was really hurting the business take _a year_ to clear out, because once the business is running at all, you can't just swap out the engine. Heck, I've seen it take 5 years! Making the right choice today can really change their whole outcome, from struggling or closing to thriving -- and a bad contractor is not the right choice. (etc...)
You have to show them: your rate is
just a demonstration of your value. If they pick you, they're gonna be laughing all the way to the bank.
> So: they had the money, and they had cause to spend it, but they chose not pay you for your service, and as a result they likely paid more in the long run.
That's one possibility. Another, and one that I think is more common with startups (majority are people using their own savings and family/friends, not raising millions from seed rounds) is that they really didn't have that much money up front, but paying a cheaper way allowed them to minimally get a product out the door until they had enough revenue to "do it right."
A tech seed round can easily be 7 figures these days. A new initiative at a non-tech fortune 50 could start in 8 figures. Hiring someone at 10k per week who can kickstart the project to working production system isn't a bad deal at these budgets.
In B2B it may be quite sufficient that someone has a track record in the industry + good customer contacts/buyers. Why wait for an MVP if the MVP doesn't seem like the risky part?
Would you kindly share some examples of the types of people/orgs to seek out, then? For example, if not the barber shop, then the owner of a barber shop franchise, or owner of a chain of barber shops? Genuinely interwested in learning the archetypes of people to seek out here. Anything that you could share would be greatly appreciated!
With the caveat that I charge a bit less, and have only had two clients (but kept them each >1y, and have gotten other client interest I did not have bandwidth for): Keep up with the talented people you worked and want to school with. If you are in your 30s, some significant fraction are managers with budgets. At any given time, a few will have a need which is too time-sensitive for the whole hiring cycle (which can take >>$10k and still return a dud).
If they remember you as dependable and all-around competent, they would be thrilled to be able to deploy their budget against the problem nearly instantly.
Networking is critical. My clients are mostly in fintech, so I network in fintech, but you should seek out in whatever field you're most comfortable in and have loads of expertise with. If you're good at what you do and produce excellent results, you only need to hunt for the first few clients, and then you'll get a lot of referrals.
