I don't know what the "market rate" is there. The way I determine if we can take on consulting gigs is to look at the hourly rate and figure out how many days w

I don't know what the "market rate" is there. The way I determine if we can take on consulting gigs is to look at the hourly rate and figure out how many days we get "off" for how many days we work. It's somewhat complicated by the fact that we don't live hourly, we live annually, so I do the following: Let's say, to live comfortably, we want $60k a year each. There are some 220 work days in a year, with about 6 productive billable hours per day on average. That means if I charge $100/hour then I get 2 days to work on the startup for every 3 days of contracting work. You can pretty easily plug that into a spreadsheet and vary your hourly rate, then come up with an estimate on hours for a project and see how many days you'll get to work on your product. If your goal is to have 4 spare days per day contracting, you need to charge a lot more per hour, so you need to find a market segment and service that will pay that amount. Once you've decided this it gives you a really strong sense of "fixed costs" for your time so you feel much more comfortable saying no to work (because it's as simple as having bought something for $1 and therefore needing to sell it for $2). The one thing that we consistently come across is that people often want to negotiate "partnerships" or cheaper rates in exchange for Other Value Proposition X. The stock standard answer to this is, of course, we have no spare capacity for that type of proposition because all of our speculative investment is tied up in investment of our own products. I've found I have more time and more money since I started thinking about things in this way.