Recently stumbled upon this article titled Making Money by Jason Fried, the co-founder of 37signals. Within this article, I found a goldmine of quotes from him that made me think hard.

People’s reasons for buying things often don’t match up with the company’s reason for selling them.

This quote totally hits the mark. I’m a freelance web developer, and thus, it’s pretty much a shorthand for a web geek. I thought hard about that, and as I think back, I realized that my clients often tell me “I don’t know what you mean, but if it’s going to help me, go ahead with it. Skip the technical terms.”

My first reaction when I heard that was being slightly angry. In my head, I’m thinking. Why, wouldn’t you want to understand how something that can help you works so you can further capitalize on that?

After reading that article. It dawned on me. Clients don’t need to know how it works, they just need to know how it can help them. Telling them how their application is hosted in a cloud environment or how our software is a SaaS really doesn’t matter to them. They just need to know three things:

1. How your product can help them.
2. How easy it is to implement their workflow into your product.
3. and finally, how much it’s going to cost.

Once these three things are clear and are within their acceptance range, you’ve most probably clinched the deal.

Charging for something makes you want to make it better.

I couldn’t agree with this enough. I started web developing as an interest. I started out creating free websites for my friends and family, and eventually, started to learn PHP and CSS. Which in turn, started to create my own CMSes from scratch. This was before college and Aprilism. So all I do is muck around, finding excuses to create new websites for friends. I even went so far as to create complete CMSes for free for an online game’s play group.

It was exciting in the beginning, people were always extremely excited about it, flocking to it every now and then. But eventually, the adrenaline starts to wear off, and this eventually leads to less traffic, which in turn, demotivated me further, creating a vicious cycle of tons of unsuccessful websites that got forgotten and thrown into the internet abyss to die.

Now that I’m an actual freelancer, getting paid for my services. I feel more enthusiastic about providing a solution to my clients. It also gave me the passion I needed. Bottom line, I started to think: “Wow, this is actually going somewhere.”

Getting paid for your service is not just a financial motivational factor, it lets you know that you can create something that someone else is willing to pay good money for.

We’ve even sold promotional T-shirts, for $19, when just about everyone else in the business gives them away. People wear shirts they paid $19 for. People turn free T-shirts into rags. Rags don’t promote anyone.

Don’t be afraid to charge for something. Even if it’s freely available for free, if you or your brand are worthy enough, people will pay money for it. It’s almost the same logic as the last quote. Be daring, be an entrepreneur.