We are deeply disappointed that this happened…

How can the brand launch a marketing campaign without the brand knowing about it? Isn’t a fireworks display extremely expensive and logistically intensive?

Hmm… I’m confused. 35x seems wicked high. You mean if the project was 100 hours, and you would have made $10,000 as an in-house employee for that number of hours, you would pitch for $350,000, and be willing to accept $150,000?

The market decides what something is worth.

This is the part I struggle with, that meta-appreciation of the abstract concepts of “worth” and “market.” I haven’t learned how to believe that those things are real in the way that the person I’m “taking” money from is real.

There is no such thing as overcharging unless you’re charging people for something you don’t deliver.

This helps the above make more sense, though. Basically the question is: Did you do the thing you’re charging for? Did you do it well enough to justify the price? If so, you’re fine. It also assumes that the other person knows what fair market value is. I think my implicit assumption is that they don’t, and so I’m tricking them into paying more than they need to (even though I know that my prices are fair). Which is a bit condescending, now that I think about it.

You too :) Getting feedback from real humans is super helpful.

That’s actually really helpful, thanks :) I’m certainly not starving, and I do make time for self-care. I’m mostly just a little frustrated with myself for not being better at marketing, and with the fact that I was never taught how to do any of this business stuff, which makes it all seem very uncertain and insecure.

But I’ve always run a tiered fee system like the one you describe, but even now anything to do with charging (and increasing) fees gives me the ick. I’m an anarcho-communist at heart, so living and working in capitalist reality is like stepping through the looking glass and the whole world is upside down and inside out.

Where I’m really struggling is that I want to get into writing psychology/self-help books, and my creative sideline is as a musician and novelist. That’s where I find it very difficult to charge for work, because it’s literally just a bunch of entertaining/profound stuff I came up with in my crazy brain. It feels weird to require people to pay me before accessing it.

It can take a long time for good ideas to propagate widely enough for a lot of people to become aware of it. Mastodon was around for years before people started jumping on the activitypub bandwagon.

I have no programming skills and wouldn’t be able to help. But I hate using eBay and Kijiji and something federated would be mighty cool.

Looks like openmarket.ca is available…

It does help. I’ve got the banking stuff settled, but the employer/employee is a good way of looking at it that I hadn’t considered before. Thanks :)

That’s more or less what I’ve done (psychotherapist, so also self-employed). The issue really is the aspect of self-promotion, moreso than how much I charge. I keep myself a bit lower than average because therapy rates are over-inflated and tons of people can’t afford even 5 sessions, let alone a year’s worth.

I think self-promotion is probably more the issue. Money is an easy point of fixation, but the hard part is putting myself in front of people (ie. doing the social media thing). My schedule is reasonably full, but with the amount of demand these days I could be standing-room-only if I was better with the marketing side of things.

No worries, I was also feeling a bit sensitive. I’ve been raising my rates a bit lately, actually because a client told me I should :) But it’s still icky and is much more difficult than the rational part of me knows it should be.

The answer to most of your questions is yes, but

Do your prices feel fair to you?

is where the exploitative feeling comes in. The gist of it is that my primary industry is mental health, which, being Canadian born and raised and accustomed to free healthcare, it feels icky to charge for in the first place. The going rate is actually completely fair, considering the toll that the work takes on you and the benefit it provides for others, but it’s still a lot, and more than a lot of people can afford. I do sliding scale work to compensate and help people who don’t have the money, but because of my limited schedule I can’t afford more than two or three low-cost spots a week.

In owner operated businesses profits are wages and need to be tooled to account for uncertainty.

This is actually very helpful, but it would be easier to reconcile if I was in a B2B business rather than direct, one-on-one. I have a really hard time connecting emotional/rational interactions with monetary value. The two don’t really connect for me.

Yeah, it’s a weird, twisty thing. Part of it is life-long low self-esteem, but also really identifying with the strong undercurrent of “money is evil and all people who have/like/want money are therefore evil” that is very prevalent in the left-ish side of academia I spent a lot of time in.

Oh, wow, you are definitely selling yourself short! But you do also manage to push yourself to charge more… for a while. Which is not nothing.

Is there an emotional cue that makes it difficult to stick with it? I think I know the answer already, but do people express the fact that they’re hard-up and need a discount? Because I’ve been told (though I struggle to accept this myself, obviously) that a lot of people actually like paying good money for good work. They don’t like to get ripped off, but they also get a positive feeling from supporting you, support which you obviously deserve. They also get the personal ego-boost of being able to pay for something expensive. Which I super don’t understand because I don’t really care about status symbols or expensive things.

Something I’ve found helpful with my service-based business (as opposed my sales-based writing/music one) is that I’m legally required to have a contract before I can start working with someone. And, of course, a part of the contract is the service fee… So once it’s changed on the contract, it’s as if it’s out of my hands…

Personally, as I think about my responses here, I’m starting to realise that my problem is more with marketing than charging, though they’re closely related. By marketing, I’m stating that I’m good enough for people to pay for highly complex, nuanced work (which feels arrogant), and by charging, I’m demanding money for that arrogance. And, weirdly, charging them money feels like I am causing them pain, or harming them in some way.

I mean, I know people who grew up poor and became voracious sociopath capitalists… Personally, I think you’re on the better team :)

Ok, I have the same feeling, but I come from a very different context: professional parents who always did well but were never business owners or at all entrepreneurial. Where I really resonate is the sense of taking from others in order to service myself. Somehow I don’t see the transactional aspect of it, i.e. that although I’m technically “taking” something, I’m also giving something up in order to earn the right to take it (if that makes sense). I guess I don’t feel like I deserve it.

Out of interest, how big is the margin between market rate and how much you charge? Could you split the difference?

I used to work for other people, but now I work for myself. The issue is that being an employee is essentially passive (paid to do what you’re told), and running your own business is active (telling/getting other people to pay you). And somehow, I’ve hit a plateau in my comfort level with being an active solicitor-of-business. I can push, but only so far, and then I start avoiding, procrastinating, and prevaricating. I don’t feel like I’m exploiting employees because I don’t have any. I feel like I’m exploiting my customers by asking for money at all.

Ok, let’s work it out. What do you mean by “overcharging”? I use the same word, but everyone has their own definition. In my head, that means asking for more than I need, regardless of what my service is nominally “worth” on the “market.” Whatever those two terms mean…

I mean, I appreciate that you felt moved to reply, but this is exactly the super-judgy mindworm I’m trying to kill. Why should I believe that I or anyone else is by definition a bad person because I charge money for products/services? Sure, the business douche who knowingly charges a 1000% markup is a selfish dick but that’s not where I’m trying to get to. I’m trying to get to the point where I don’t have to be a slave to myself and work flat out 12 hours a day just to keep my head above water.

The first one is paywalled, fyi. Interesting idea with the anarchist management, except that I’m a one-man shop selling things that I design and make myself (should have mentioned). So my businesses will always be dictatorial by definition since any employees I take on wouldn’t be creative partners.

Plus, an anarchistic perspective might be helpful for an internal structure, but it doesn’t solve the interface problem of charging money for stuff.

I would 100% be into this. I have no programming skills, but knowing that Kijiji is owned by eBay makes me hate using it even though they get $0 from my transactions.