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It's unfortunate that darig's reply to your comment is being so heavily downvoted that I can't reply to it because essentially they are correct. Most people on

It's unfortunate that darig's reply to your comment is being so heavily downvoted that I can't reply to it because essentially they are correct. Most people only know how to sell their time, which is why most people are employees and many self-employed people have no free time. It's entirely possible to be self-employed and sell something that is not your time, or maximizes the investment of your time so that you can do something once and sell it more than once.

mixmastamyk 5y ago
You can click the time of the post, then vouch, another might help bring it back from the dead.
- busterarm 5y ago
  Indeed, I did vouch.
captainmuon 5y ago
How do you sell something that is not your time? Money is just crystallized work time. If you don't sell your time, you got to... sell other's time (by having employees)? The idea of making something once and selling it multiple times (like software) is nice, but the way I understand the market works is that competition will push down the price so much that even with your one time work investment, you'll only get the "average" rate in the end. So that means, find a niche where there is no competition yet?
- ido 5y ago
  Your notion of competition in the free market is sorta like the frictionless spherical horse in the physics joke. A successful product will produce more profit than your hourly rate.
  - captainmuon 5y ago
    Yeah, of course it is idealized. You know the joke: two economists are walking down the street. One sees a $50 bill on the sidewalk and says to the other: "Did you see that $50 bill on the ground?" - "Can't be, if it was there someone would have picked it up!" Long term I think it is true, though. If you don't have any unique advantage, competition will drive down your revenue to "market" rate. But that's kind of idealized equlibrium, of course there are successful products, innovations, and so on.
    - ido 5y ago
      You should absolutely have a unique advantage!
    - thom 5y ago
      You only really need a brief period of profitability to start building up capital though, and at a certain point that become self sustaining in itself (again in an idealise world, but a fairly reliable one).
- politician 5y ago
  > Money is just crystallized work time. The value of a currency is a representation of the faith the holder has in the issuer. Consider QE: a government issues digital payments to banks for billions of currency and the work involved is roughly as complex as sending SMS text messages, and yet for $1B you can buy a really nice yacht and a trip to space. A paradox? No, we just believe the currency has a value unrelated to any notion of work required to produce it.
  - captainmuon 5y ago
    As a physicist I learned that different, contradictory theories can be complimentary because they approach the truth from different sides. As an employee,´I cannot buy a yacht. I am free to choose many different jobs that all pay about the same for the amount of effort (or less, if I am unskilled in that field for example). So I think at least at the micro level, the labor theory of value still has some explanation power: It explains why there is no free lunch (for employees), but also why you'll want to have people work for you if you want to make more money.
- biztos 5y ago
  Or maybe find a niche where competition doesn't affect price so much? Vinyl records? Text editors? User-hostile "Enterprise" software?
- barrenko 5y ago
  What we call time here is sometimes better understood as attention. Attention is the one true currency.
- em-bee 5y ago
  i sell outcomes and expertise. for 2.5k a month i promise my client that i will be available whenever there is an issue. last month this client called once (actually he just sent a message), checking if i am available in case something that he was working on would blow up. it didn't blow up and i earned my monthly fee literally just for holding hands. the time i invested is the time it took to respond to his message. there is no hourly rate that can measure that. clients will not only pay the least that they can get away with, they will pay what it takes to achieve their goals. what my client needs is assurance that problems will be dealt with. so in effect it's like insurance. you pay for insurance but hope that you don't need it. another way to earn money without an hourly rate is fixed price projects. the goal here is to figure out what is the value of the project is to the client. you may charge 50k to build that custom website, but if the client earns 500k from using it the next year, then it was totally worth it, even if you could have charged less. the challenge here is to find those clients. the answer is generally reputation and referrals. you won't find them on upwork. at least not at first. finding a niche with little competition can help. the client i mentioned above i started out with as hourly rate, continually raising the rate each year until i suggested we simplify the process and agree on a fixed monthly rate. i let the client choose the rate. figuring that if the rate was to low for the amount of work, then we'd renegotiate. it wasn't. i even get bonuses if there is a particularly busy month.
- busterarm 5y ago
  There's a large number of people who make a living basically selling access to their industry contacts...making introductions. There are a lot of creative ways to make money out there that most people don't realize.
ehnto 5y ago
Like any investment they don't always pan out, and you don't start making money right away. It's easy to say you should invest your time, but I think that's going to be tough for someone trying to strike out as a freelancer for the first time. You have to pay the bills right away. It's hard enough to build up contracts without the added concern of trying to productize your time. I think you need to balance them at first, unless you have a year of runway in savings to blow and a fallback job at the end of your runway.
- atatatat 5y ago
  Every contractor at my startup has a full-time job that they're seeking paths of escape or diversification from.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    Full-time employees who double as hourly contractors are a difficult balance. Generally, if they were seeking to escapes their full time job they’d quit and do more contracting. It’s tempting to try to capture the best of both worlds: A full time job with benefits and steady pay where they work on minimizing their workload, combined with hourly contracting work where they focus their efforts to capture those extra contracting paychecks. It works for a while when things are slow at work and the contracting effort is fun and new, but eventually they start cutting corners in one or both areas to avoid burnout. If they really want to contract, they’ll go that route. However, it’s common to simply realize how low-stress and predictable a full time job is and just stick with that. I’ve done freelance work on the side in the past. It’s a difficult balance. I’ve also had employees who tried to contract on the side, usually with an associated decline in day job output. The worst case is when someone goes all-in on contracting but tries to keep their day job paychecks as long as possible, doing the bare minimum to delay getting fired for as long as they can get away with. That situation is miserable for their teammates and coworkers.
    - atatatat 5y ago
      Do paid tasks, not hourly. Hourly work, as a whole, is desirable for slow, inefficient people.
saagarjha 5y ago
I think they're just shadowbanned.
bambax 5y ago
> It's entirely possible to be self-employed and sell something that is not your time Yes, it is possible, but more difficult. Clients will often try to find out how much time was really spent on the project, even if they are officially paying for the outcome and not the effort. To go this route it's much better to build a product, a SaaS for instance, that you can sell many times with zero or negligible marginal costs.
- busterarm 5y ago
  > Clients will often try to find out how much time was really spent on the project, even if they are officially paying for the outcome and not the effort. That's when you respectfully remind your client that you're not a contractor but a business and that you're dealing business to business. Asking you how the sausage gets made is asking you about how you run your business -- it's none of theirs. If they feel like they aren't getting a fair deal, you are happy for them to shop around. If the client is trying to get a sense of your time then it's a mistake in how the relationship was framed. You want them to think that you're a business with employees, even if you're the only employee. Use more "we can" instead of "I can" language in your deals. They also aren't your only client.
  - bambax 5y ago
    I absolutely agree with everything you say... And yet it doesn't change the facts that 1/ some clients are a pain and 2/ it's usually the ones you can't aford to do without. (And yes, you should not depend on just one client.)
    - busterarm 5y ago
      Indeed. /knowing sigh. It does feel good when you get around to firing those clients later though.

mixmastamyk 5y ago

You can click the time of the post, then vouch, another might help bring it back from the dead.

busterarm 5y ago
Indeed, I did vouch.

captainmuon 5y ago

How do you sell something that is not your time? Money is just crystallized work time. If you don't sell your time, you got to... sell other's time (by having employees)? The idea of making something once and selling it multiple times (like software) is nice, but the way I understand the market works is that competition will push down the price so much that even with your one time work investment, you'll only get the "average" rate in the end. So that means, find a niche where there is no competition yet?

ido 5y ago
Your notion of competition in the free market is sorta like the frictionless spherical horse in the physics joke. A successful product will produce more profit than your hourly rate.
- captainmuon 5y ago
  Yeah, of course it is idealized. You know the joke: two economists are walking down the street. One sees a $50 bill on the sidewalk and says to the other: "Did you see that $50 bill on the ground?" - "Can't be, if it was there someone would have picked it up!" Long term I think it is true, though. If you don't have any unique advantage, competition will drive down your revenue to "market" rate. But that's kind of idealized equlibrium, of course there are successful products, innovations, and so on.
  - ido 5y ago
    You should absolutely have a unique advantage!
  - thom 5y ago
    You only really need a brief period of profitability to start building up capital though, and at a certain point that become self sustaining in itself (again in an idealise world, but a fairly reliable one).
politician 5y ago
> Money is just crystallized work time. The value of a currency is a representation of the faith the holder has in the issuer. Consider QE: a government issues digital payments to banks for billions of currency and the work involved is roughly as complex as sending SMS text messages, and yet for $1B you can buy a really nice yacht and a trip to space. A paradox? No, we just believe the currency has a value unrelated to any notion of work required to produce it.
- captainmuon 5y ago
  As a physicist I learned that different, contradictory theories can be complimentary because they approach the truth from different sides. As an employee,´I cannot buy a yacht. I am free to choose many different jobs that all pay about the same for the amount of effort (or less, if I am unskilled in that field for example). So I think at least at the micro level, the labor theory of value still has some explanation power: It explains why there is no free lunch (for employees), but also why you'll want to have people work for you if you want to make more money.
biztos 5y ago
Or maybe find a niche where competition doesn't affect price so much? Vinyl records? Text editors? User-hostile "Enterprise" software?
barrenko 5y ago
What we call time here is sometimes better understood as attention. Attention is the one true currency.
em-bee 5y ago
i sell outcomes and expertise. for 2.5k a month i promise my client that i will be available whenever there is an issue. last month this client called once (actually he just sent a message), checking if i am available in case something that he was working on would blow up. it didn't blow up and i earned my monthly fee literally just for holding hands. the time i invested is the time it took to respond to his message. there is no hourly rate that can measure that. clients will not only pay the least that they can get away with, they will pay what it takes to achieve their goals. what my client needs is assurance that problems will be dealt with. so in effect it's like insurance. you pay for insurance but hope that you don't need it. another way to earn money without an hourly rate is fixed price projects. the goal here is to figure out what is the value of the project is to the client. you may charge 50k to build that custom website, but if the client earns 500k from using it the next year, then it was totally worth it, even if you could have charged less. the challenge here is to find those clients. the answer is generally reputation and referrals. you won't find them on upwork. at least not at first. finding a niche with little competition can help. the client i mentioned above i started out with as hourly rate, continually raising the rate each year until i suggested we simplify the process and agree on a fixed monthly rate. i let the client choose the rate. figuring that if the rate was to low for the amount of work, then we'd renegotiate. it wasn't. i even get bonuses if there is a particularly busy month.
busterarm 5y ago
There's a large number of people who make a living basically selling access to their industry contacts...making introductions. There are a lot of creative ways to make money out there that most people don't realize.

ehnto 5y ago

Like any investment they don't always pan out, and you don't start making money right away. It's easy to say you should invest your time, but I think that's going to be tough for someone trying to strike out as a freelancer for the first time. You have to pay the bills right away. It's hard enough to build up contracts without the added concern of trying to productize your time. I think you need to balance them at first, unless you have a year of runway in savings to blow and a fallback job at the end of your runway.

atatatat 5y ago
Every contractor at my startup has a full-time job that they're seeking paths of escape or diversification from.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Full-time employees who double as hourly contractors are a difficult balance. Generally, if they were seeking to escapes their full time job they’d quit and do more contracting. It’s tempting to try to capture the best of both worlds: A full time job with benefits and steady pay where they work on minimizing their workload, combined with hourly contracting work where they focus their efforts to capture those extra contracting paychecks. It works for a while when things are slow at work and the contracting effort is fun and new, but eventually they start cutting corners in one or both areas to avoid burnout. If they really want to contract, they’ll go that route. However, it’s common to simply realize how low-stress and predictable a full time job is and just stick with that. I’ve done freelance work on the side in the past. It’s a difficult balance. I’ve also had employees who tried to contract on the side, usually with an associated decline in day job output. The worst case is when someone goes all-in on contracting but tries to keep their day job paychecks as long as possible, doing the bare minimum to delay getting fired for as long as they can get away with. That situation is miserable for their teammates and coworkers.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    Do paid tasks, not hourly. Hourly work, as a whole, is desirable for slow, inefficient people.

saagarjha 5y ago

I think they're just shadowbanned.

bambax 5y ago

> It's entirely possible to be self-employed and sell something that is not your time Yes, it is possible, but more difficult. Clients will often try to find out how much time was really spent on the project, even if they are officially paying for the outcome and not the effort. To go this route it's much better to build a product, a SaaS for instance, that you can sell many times with zero or negligible marginal costs.

busterarm 5y ago
> Clients will often try to find out how much time was really spent on the project, even if they are officially paying for the outcome and not the effort. That's when you respectfully remind your client that you're not a contractor but a business and that you're dealing business to business. Asking you how the sausage gets made is asking you about how you run your business -- it's none of theirs. If they feel like they aren't getting a fair deal, you are happy for them to shop around. If the client is trying to get a sense of your time then it's a mistake in how the relationship was framed. You want them to think that you're a business with employees, even if you're the only employee. Use more "we can" instead of "I can" language in your deals. They also aren't your only client.
- bambax 5y ago
  I absolutely agree with everything you say... And yet it doesn't change the facts that 1/ some clients are a pain and 2/ it's usually the ones you can't aford to do without. (And yes, you should not depend on just one client.)
  - busterarm 5y ago
    Indeed. /knowing sigh. It does feel good when you get around to firing those clients later though.