Ditching Hourly

DH Carl Franklin

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Introduction

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Jonathan Stark: Hello, and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today, I am joined by guest Carl Franklin. Carl, welcome to the show.

Carl Franklin: Thank you, Jonathan. Happy to be here.

Jonathan Stark: So today, folks, we are going to send a love letter to value pricing. But first,

Carl Franklin's Background

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Jonathan Stark: Carl, could you tell folks a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Carl Franklin: Sure. Well, I have a podcast called Dot Net Rocks that I started in 2002. And if you do the math, that was before the word podcast existed. I had a training company, Franklin's Net, and I was teaching people all about Dot Net. And I held my own classes and had a lot of people on my mailing list because back in the 90s, I had a little web page called Carl and Gary's Visual Basic Homepage. And we had a mailing list that had about 25,000, 30,000 people on it. And so what I did when I started recording these, they weren't podcasts, I called it Internet Audio Talk Show for Dot Net Developers in 2002 with my first co-host, Mark Dunn. And we just would record the conversations on the phone using hybrid telephone technology and put them out on the website as episodes. And then I would email my hordes of fans and say, go get them. And then by the time Apple Podcasts came around, actually, the first one was RSS, right? Dave Weiner and all those guys. And I was there when that happened. I had all the metadata in a database already. And ASP was the, I guess it was ASP.NET, was the technology of the day. And I just wired up an RSS feed. And I can't remember when it was, but I had at least 100 episodes by then. And then when Apple Podcasts, you know, made podcasting take off, that was the next bump or it was the third bump, maybe. I don't know. I can't remember now. It's been so long ago,

Early Podcasting Days

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Carl Franklin: but we just kept, you know, getting more and more popular. And I remember then when, you know, there were other, oh man, we had people who wanted to burn them to CDs. And so they were complaining when the podcast got too long, they couldn't fit it all in one disc. It had growing pains. But in general though, I mean, it's still going to this day and we're almost to the 2000th episode. 1979, I think was the last one we recorded. And you were a guest on one of those shows. That's how we met.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. And we talked about, we might've had a technical conversation about mobile, but that might've been the reason.

Carl Franklin: We did. Yeah. And yeah, the first one was you were talking about your Starbucks app, buy me a coffee or something like that.

Jonathan Stark: Yes. Yes. I don't know if you've talked about on your own show, but probably not a great story.

Carl Franklin: Yeah. That was wild. I won't rehash it here, but that would have been 2011 I think. And yeah, I basically took my Starbucks gift card, which has a barcode on the back of it. And I just posted it on my blog and invited people on Twitter. I was like very active on Twitter. And I was like, Hey, if anybody wants a coffee, you know, you can just go take it. Cause there was no mobile apps for checkout or anything. Starbucks had the very first one and it was just a barcode. So I was like, well, I can probably just check out, pay for coffee with a photo on my phone, which worked. And then I was like, it'd be funny if I put this on my website. And you know, a week later it was on the front page of CNN. Right. Yeah. So they can put money on the card, but you've, you've thought of it as,

Jonathan Stark: wow, this is great advertising dollars. Right. I didn't really think of it like that, but

Carl Franklin: it's the way I thought of it. I mean, at first I was like, well, gee, how much are you going to top that off before you say, okay, I'm done giving my coffees. But, but I would consider that great advertising dollars. Like that's a great place to spend money, to get fans, buy them a coffee. I had more than a million hits on my website in like three days or something. It was crazy. I still have like an amazing domain reputation because of CNN and all of these other big, big websites linking to me. So, so I mean, I have some lasting effect.

The Starbucks Card Story

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Jonathan Stark: Yeah. That was wild story though.

Carl Franklin: It's amazing. What a great story. And then of course you talked to us about value pricing.

Jonathan Stark: Right. Right. So, uh, and then you were, you just took to it like a fish to water. It seemed like you ran with it right away.

Carl Franklin: I remember talking to you about it the first time and a couple of things stand out from that conversation. Like, you know, you were talking about padding, you know, maybe starting with your hours and then padding the, you know, the price, but really what it's all about is figuring out the value of your services to your potential customer and pricing it accordingly. And I didn't really get that, you know, you were saying, you know, we're going to pad it like 180% or something like that. And I was like, wow. I mean, you're talking to us about this. Do your customers feel like you're ripping them off? And you've basically said, my customers love this because they know exactly how much they're going to pay. And I have guaranteed them that I'm going to keep working

Introduction to Value Pricing

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Carl Franklin: until they say it's done and until our spec is complete. Right. And, uh, uh, yeah, I was just blown away by that. And also I have had the pain of being in software projects where at the end, it's an argument, you know, it's an argument because, you know, fix the bugs. Well, I want to be paid to fix the bugs, but we're not going to pay you to fix the bugs. It's like, look, I need

Jonathan Stark: to be paid for my time. And then it blows up and it's not good for anybody. Right. And for people listening, the 85% padding thing that Carl's referring to is something I recommend for people who are just, just barely ready to start thinking about not even value pricing, but just fixed pricing at all. And, and you can find on my website, I think it's called, uh, Oh, it's on the pricing curves page. There's a little reference to the 85% premium where you can give them an hourly estimate, just like you always do. It's like, Oh, it's going to be a hundred dollars, a hundred hours at a hundred dollars an hour. Or your other option is I'll give you a fixed price of like 18,500 and you can either sort of roll the dice with the hourly if you want, or I'll guarantee this fixed price. So that's a, that's a sort of a baby step that I give to people who

Fixed Pricing vs. Hourly

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Jonathan Stark: are. Yep. But your questions, the three questions are the, that's how you figure out what the value

Carl Franklin: is. And you've talked, obviously I must've talked on this website. I know I subscribe to your class that I got by email, which was great. Cool. And you know, I, I got the solidified in that, but do you talk about that stuff on this podcast? Does everybody, all the listeners know what those three questions are? Yeah. I think episode 10 of this podcast is called the why conversation.

Jonathan Stark: So folks don't know what that is. And they can go way back to episode 10 and look that up, but it's basically something I learned from value-based fees by Alan Weiss. He doesn't call it the why conversation, but you know, it's like, why this, why now? And why me? And if you can get answers to those three categories of questions, you basically got everything you need to write a killer proposal, almost like Mad Lib style. You can just kind of like, you know, slot in

The Why Conversation

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Jonathan Stark: the things that they said into a template. And then, yeah, well, what's your experience? I've told the story a million times, but what's your experience of, do you remember that like the first time you really tried this approach and how that went? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, first of all,

Carl Franklin: it's always succeeded. Like I've done five or six projects now with it and every single one of them worked all, all the way to the end and the customers are happy. And every time I have a new customer, I get a testimonial and I add that to the proposal. And, um, so the, the, the, the questions are really great and they're, they're constructed to give you insight into their current situation. Right. And so therefore, like why, why do you have to build this? Is there

First Experiences with Value Pricing

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Carl Franklin: something that you can get off the shelf and modify? And by the time they're talking to you, usually the answer is no, there's, we've looked and we'd. It's too complex and too much business logic to customize it to our needs, and we really

Jonathan Stark: need to build it ourselves, right? So, you write that down, as you say. And then the next one is, why now? Can it wait a year? And I love what you said. You're like, you're basically trying to talk them out of hiring you.

Carl Franklin: Yeah. Sometimes they say that.

Jonathan Stark: Why now? Can it wait a year?

Carl Franklin: Right.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Yeah. Can it wait a year? And, you know, hopefully you're going to get something like, oh, well, the current application is hemorrhaging money.

Carl Franklin: I mean, that would be like a ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Right. Yeah. And they've usually waited too long by the time they're talking to you. So, yeah, it has to be now. And you want to know the reason why.

Carl Franklin: You want to know the reason why. Right. Exactly. And then why me? You could find, you could hire a team from Bangalore for, you know, $30 an hour for a team, you know, and why me?

Jonathan Stark: And hopefully they're going to say, well, we did our research and we found that you're the guy or the woman or whatever. You're the person that we want to hire. And, you know, your reputation and all that stuff. And you write all that down. I mean, you're just trying to discover what value you can bring to the customer. And then, of course, you do the phases. Phase one is documentation and discovery. And then phase two, that happens after they agree on one of your prices and proposals.

Carl Franklin: And yeah, it just works great. And it works great for everybody. And also because as developers, we don't know what we don't know about the project when we start out. So we give an estimate, right? But that estimate is probably low because there's a lot of contingencies that you didn't plan for that come up. And so that's why, you know, adding more hours to your estimate is like a default position. Can you give folks a sense of scale for the kinds of projects you're talking about? Sure. Most of the projects that I worked on and are still working on are small to medium size amounts of customers, like maybe 20,000 customers, 30,000 tops, maybe 100,000. But, you know, I also have to talk to them about, well, how many concurrent customers do you think will be using the system at one time? Because that really determines the scale of the project, right? And we learn those things in phase one, you know? Actually, I ask those questions right off the bat, you know? I try to find out if they're having scalability problems now and what the bottlenecks are so that we can take care of those in phase one. The customer I have now, which is a huge customer, and I'm not going to say their name because everybody will know who they are. When we met, they basically say, yeah, our database is really slow. And we didn't say anything, you know? We'll check that out. But I think that that's going to have to be something that is addressed in phase one because it determines the estimate for the rest of the project, right? If we can get those bottlenecks taken care of right away, first of all, bonus for them because they're not really paying for that. They're paying for documentation discovery. But it helps us learn, you know, learn what we can do and how we can do it. And if it doesn't work, like they have to use the system that they have without, you know, whatever modifications to the database or caching or whatever, then, you know, we know we've got a bigger problem.

Jonathan Stark: Right. So how do you, so these projects are, like, how long of a time frame are we talking about? Like, are these like year-long projects or these one-month projects?

Carl Franklin: It depends. They're not month-long projects. I would say six months minimum. But one customer that I have now been working with for over a year, and they have a handful of applications that are separate applications now, web applications that they wanted to unify and put under one umbrella with the new technology, with the, you know, Blazor server. And it was web forms before that. So that's, we're taking a piecemeal approach to it. And we did some, we did an initial contract, and then they have applications where there's custom code for each of their clients. So we had a different contract for each one of those projects. And then there's another big project that's like a year long that I'm working on now. And after that, there's another project that's going to be a year long, but we're taking them in chunks, which I totally recommend. And this new customer that I'm talking to today, we, you know, because they're so big and they have had bad luck with consultants in the past, right? Consultants that didn't work well within their programming style. And for whatever reason, they spent a lot of time and money and nothing really came of it. So we want to assure them that we can produce quality. So I'm going to encourage them to not give us like the scope of the entire application because it's big, right? Give us to start something small that we can knock out of the park in a few months, a couple months to give confidence to the stakeholders that, you know, we really ought to continue. And we know for, for fact that we can do that. Cool. So are you pricing each of these phases

Jonathan Stark: independently as they come up or is this, are these all these individual pieces under a huge. With the current, with the new one or the current one, the new, the new client,

Carl Franklin: the new client, we don't know yet. I mean, we were just starting phase one. So yeah, we kind of have an overview of the big picture, but during this talk, you know, I'm going to test the waters to see if they're comfortable hiring us for the whole thing right up front. But I'm going to recommend that we start smaller so that the, you know, the confidence will grow with us. But, and then, and I don't know what that looks like yet. So that's a funny switch when, when people,

Jonathan Stark: that people aren't really expecting, I think when they're switching from hourly or they're imagining switching from hourly to value-based, which is the, you want smaller projects when you, when you do hourly, you're like, yeah, I want this giant project. And you're not really worried about scope creep because you're going to get paid. Eventually the client will start to get dissatisfied if it starts to go way out of budget or way over budget. And then you end up in an argument. But when, when you're flipping it and you're giving a fixed price based on value or anything else, whatever it's based on, if it's a fixed price, the risk is on you. So you, you don't want this monster seven figure risk. You want something small and then have a win, another win, another win. And if you're constantly declaring victory like that, just like you said, increases their confidence and your confidence. Cause you don't know, you know, everything on this big squirrely legacy code base. You don't know, you can't know everything right up front.

Carl Franklin: And they've told us right up front that, you know, their, their boss, the big boss likes to have his fingers in the pie and it's kind of a, I wouldn't, I don't know if it's control freak or what, but likes to call the developers at nine o'clock at night and say, I want this feature by tomorrow, you know, that kind of stuff. So we, I mean, we've, the, the people that are working with me on it have worked for people like that before. We'll just have to see if that's going to be, uh, if, if our responsiveness is acceptable to them. So who knows? I could, we could do the, the first project and the, they could say, no, you're not responsive enough because we didn't jump at nine o'clock at night and say, we're right on it, you know?

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. So trying to get, obviously you can't give like total specifics, certainly about the new client, but like past clients, how do you, how do you actually, in the first proposal, what you referred to as sort of a phase one, is that the whole proposal or is that option one on a larger proposal?

Carl Franklin: No, no. Phase one, phase one is what I call the paid upfront, um, discovery and documentation. I started when it was just me charging $5,000 for that and giving them like a month to work out a spec and, you know, so that we could give them a proposal. And now it's up to 10,000 for big projects. And, um, it's still a month. I still give them a month, but it's basically for the purpose of getting a spec together with them so that we know exactly what they want and, you know, in as much detail as possible and things that are open-ended, we have to, you know, leave open-ended, but they're not part of this scope. So, um, when we give them the three options, you know, for a spec and, you know, for what we're going to do and pricing accordingly, we have to be clear that, you know, anything that isn't in this list of things that we're offering is we're going to have to come up with another discovery and documentation phase for that scope. So, and, you know, most people are fine with that, but that's another reason why I wanted to start small because, you know, we really don't know what to expect until we get in there and start coding. So if, so the, the first phase of discovery and documentation, which sometimes I'll refer to that generally as a roadmap or some kind of design phase, it depends on what you do. If you're a software developer, it might be design and documentation or discovery. So that's basically, is it always now it's just a fixed price. It's kind of like a productized service. You know, if you want to work with us,

Jonathan Stark: step one is you do this $10,000 phase one. Yeah. And I got that from you. I mean,

Carl Franklin: you basically said you're paying for a product and that product is a spec and our price to you if you want to go with us. But if you want to take that spec, shop it to another team, if you didn't like how it went during phase one, you want to go find, you know, the lowest bidder have at it, you know? Yeah. But this is our price. Right. Okay. So when, once that's done,

Jonathan Stark: do you have another meeting with like, what's your process once it's done? So people can maybe, if people maybe copy it or something. Yeah. We give them a document, right. That has,

Carl Franklin: and this is right out of your playbook, right. It has the entire spec and there will be a optional stuff that they didn't ask for in there. Like recommendations from you.

Jonathan Stark: Well, yeah. And, and things that they didn't think of that we think we could offer to increase the value. And that is, you know, option three. So option one is a minimum viable product. And for less money that doesn't include everything in the spec that they wanted,

Proposal Options and Client Choices

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Jonathan Stark: but it includes the major things, right. Option two will be everything in the spec that we all agreed on. And that's an higher price. And then option three is, you know, optional bells and whistles and those things could be anything from, oh, having a custom

Carl Franklin: application penetration tests from a well-known security company to having a CSS designer come in and fix the style. If there's anything wrong with it that we didn't see or, you know accessibility end to end testing, right. And unit testing just get quality assurance testers in there to bang on the product, those kinds of things that typically aren't in a spec for software. And then we give them the, you know, the, the testimonials and the reasons why we read them back to, you know, the stuff you wrote down during phase one, you read it back to them. You, you need this application to be written. You need it to be written as soon as possible. And you found me and hired me because of my reputation. And, and, and I have another excuse. I'm like, I can't afford to have a bad reputation because I'm a public figure. You know, I talk about programming for a living, uh, as in addition to all this stuff. So, uh, you know, it's my reputation on the line. I'm not going to take the money and run, you know? Right. And then we give them the three options and we send it to them and they think about it and they come back in a meeting and say, we're going to go with option three, of course, because that's what they always do.

Jonathan Stark: So how do you present the proposal? Some people like to, to give it in person or, or like live, maybe remotely or in person and sort of go through it with them in real time. Other people will just email it and follow up, which do you have a, that's what we do.

Carl Franklin: That's what we do. I mean, by then they've seen everything in the spec, right? And they haven't, what they haven't seen is the three money proposals and work proposals and, um, the value and the dollar amounts. They haven't seen that. So by then they've seen the spec. And so I just emailed that to them, uh, and let them decide.

Handling Project Changes

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Jonathan Stark: Cool. Okay. That's, that's great. So how, when it, you know, somebody chooses option three, how common is it for you to have, you know, surprises or things go sideways or, um, you know, sort of regrets of like, Oh geez, we would have made more if we build this hourly or something like that.

Carl Franklin: Never had a regret. No, because we always put enough in there to satisfy our income requirements. You know what I mean? And, and according to the value to them. And you know what, if it's just a mind shift, like you don't think, Oh, I'm doing all this extra work. I got to build more hours. You just go with it. You know, I have confidence in myself that any, any twists that could come up, Oh, we said we would do it this way. Now we're going to do it that way. And I think about it. I'm like, yeah, okay. That's, that's doable. Uh, you know, it's not, it's not any more work. It's just kind of a change.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah.

Carl Franklin: Um, but if they come out, if they come back with, you know, we want to add this feature and that feature in this feature and blah, blah, blah. And it's a lot more work than we'll say, well, that's out of the scope and you're going to have to, we're going to have to write up a new agreement for that. But I've done that and companies are happy to do it, you know?

Jonathan Stark: Okay. So that's, that's trying to think the, when I was doing projects, I'm trying to think of a situation. I feel like it's been so long. I feel like there was one time when a company wanted, they basically changed their priorities internally. Trying to remember, I remember talking about this. I can't remember what happened though. It was the, the possibility of what could have happened was, you know, new CEO, that type of thing, change priority. Um, we want you to do this, you know, do this, basically add another project to the project. And, uh, I was like, well, we can do one or the other, but I can't do both at the same time. Cause I don't, you know, you have some employees and so forth. I didn't, that was just

Partnering and Value Pricing

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Jonathan Stark: me. So I was like, I can't do them both at the same time. So, you know, we can stop the current one, just pause it. I'll give you a whole new proposal for this other one. It's basically what you were saying. Um, yeah, I remember doing that, but I don't remember executing on it. So they must've been like, yeah, what? Nevermind. Just stay on the one you're on.

Carl Franklin: Okay. Have you ever had like a big issue like that where someone just, okay, good.

Jonathan Stark: No, no, I haven't. Um, but you know, I've, I've had other weirdnesses that, um, I consulted you on that you hadn't done before either. Like, uh, I had a partner that I was going to do a project with that. I wanted to include him in the value pricing incentive. Right. And, um, my business partner was like, not used to this value pricing thing. It was like, we're going to pay this person hourly. And I'm like, well, first of all, we trust this person. Right. And second of all, we want to give that person the same incentive as we have. Like, it doesn't make sense if I'm doing a value pricing and out of that value pricing, I'm paying this guy hourly, you know, it would be okay for something that I didn't think would take a long time, but he was integral to the, to the development, uh, and did stuff that, you know, was going to have to be there. So what we did end up with, and I remember calling you and having, having a conversation on the phone, trying to convince my business partner that, you know, that it was a good thing as long as you trust the person. And we both did. So we went ahead with it. But what we did is what, um, is we kept track of our hours,

Carl Franklin: not to be paid hourly, but to get a percentage of the money that the, um, customer paid that month. And that worked out really well, you know? So, I mean, you're still, you're still

Payment Terms and Client Negotiations

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Carl Franklin: Still getting paid based on the work that you do, but it's not your hourly rate. It's gonna be more than your hourly rate. And that brings me to the second thing, which is I know that you say that, you know, when you do these options, option A, option B, option C, that they should be paid in full at the onset. And, you know, that's not negotiable. However...

Jonathan Stark: I don't say it's non-negotiable. I say it is negotiable. The price is not negotiable, but yeah.

Carl Franklin: The price is not negotiable. Right. So what I found was that most customers prefer to stretch it out over a year. Right. So if the project is going to take at least a year, maybe two years, but over a year, take that value, take that number and divide it by 12. And then they pay monthly for that. And I'm happy to do that too. And that's actually how it's worked out with most of my clients. There was only one where it was all upfront and it wasn't enough money for them to worry about.

Jonathan Stark: Hmm. Yeah. So I, uh, not all the time, I'd say maybe 20, maybe 20% of the time I would negotiate a client would want to negotiate the upfront payment. And there've been times when I knew where it was, you know, like mid six figure project, like a really beefy number where I didn't want the money upfront, you know, no, it's a tax issue, isn't it? I just a variety of just psychologically, I didn't want to have 200 grants in my account. Like it felt too heavy. So, um, so yeah, so it was like, uh, as long as my, my philosophy on, um, the payment terms is asked for a hundred percent upfront and that gives you something to negotiate, gives you something to sort of, you know, concede. Um, and, and there, there are cases where the number is just so high that it creates a cashflow problem for the client. And so they're, they're just going to be like, look, there's, we just can't get all this money together upfront. But as long as they're paying you on a schedule, not right against sign off. So I'm totally fine with a scheduled payments that are like either 30 days or, you know, it's like, think of it like a payment plan. I'm totally cool with that. The thing that I really don't like is tying to milestones, right?

Carl Franklin: One client tried to do that with us and it was, uh, it should never have been a value price project. Yeah. So that's, that's another cautionary tale is that you should be able to smell when it's not going to be a good client for value pricing.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Keep the project small, right? Yeah. So you can, you can start to detect the odor of the types of people that aren't going to be a good fit.

Carl Franklin: The other thing that I had to kind of figure out is the, you know, how long is it going to take? Because you don't know. And I give what I say in the proposal is I give you an estimate of how long it's going to take, but I really don't know. And it might take longer, it might take less time, but that's not the point. I mean, for me and the, in the pricing, we're not going to stop working until you say, until you're satisfied. Right. And when I said that to, to my new client, they said, sounds too good to be true. And another guy chimed in, another guy chimed in, well, you haven't seen the number yet.

Jonathan Stark: And you're like, yep, these, they get it. They get it. Right. But they love it. I mean, they love the idea that, you know, they, they have to go to the higher ups and get permission for this one sum. And that is the cost of the delivered product. Yeah. That is like really appealing to these customers. Who wouldn't want that? Right. What was the metaphor you used about buying a car? Yeah. It's like, it's like, imagine going to the car lot and them saying, you know, saying like, oh, you know, I'd like this outback. How much is it? And they're like, well, you just take it and drive it around for, you know, a few months and then we'll let you know how much it is. It's like, no, no. Yeah. So what, what would you say, speaking of you haven't seen the number yet, what would you say has been the impact of switching to a value pricing model versus what you were doing before on your finances? Less stress for me, more money. I mean, I'm making more than I had before.

Carl Franklin: And of course, you know, at the end of the, at the end of the project, you're delighting your customer. You know, there's no, there's no chance unless, you know, you get sucked in to more work than is in the spec, but you know, that's, you don't do that. I mean, you say upfront that, you know, if you're adding work, you make a new, you make a new agreement. This is the money you're paying for this work. And it's great because you don't have to worry about, um, you know, the, the end of the project, disappointing them or them disappointing and being disappointed in you. And then your reputation goes down the toilet, you know, but this way I think the, the, the, and the way that these guys found me was just doing research on Reddit. And when I asked why me and they said, well, we researched you, we found you and all the stuff that you've been doing on blazer and, and everything. And you're the guy. I was like, wow. You know, that was, I mean, usually they have, they kind of knew who I was and they reached out to me because they saw up Phoenix and whatever. But I had one customer who didn't realize until we were halfway through the project that I was Carl Franklin from.net rocks. And like his whole attitude changed after that.

Jonathan Stark: That's crazy.

Carl Franklin: It was really weird. Like they, they knew, you know, they, they found me, I guess, blazer train or app Phoenix or whatever. And we did sign the contract and it was a good, you know, it was a good project. And then halfway through that, he said, wait a minute, you're Carl from.net rocks. It's crazy.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. How do clients usually find you? Where do they come from? Is it, could be anywhere or do they normally, well, one of these guys did it. Um, one of these guys just found the

Carl Franklin: app Phoenix website and, you know, sent me, um, an email and say, Hey, we have this project and we think that you might be, your skills might be aligned with us. I don't know if they went to blazer train or whatever, but, um, but then this, the current one that, um, as I said, they found me through, uh, just doing some research, which is great.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Do they have a, I guess it doesn't, I, why does it matter? I'm curious for the listener, you know, the listener hasn't been doing a podcast since the nineties, you know, so, so, you know, if there's any, anything that you could sort of suggest to people who are not getting found, not getting, not attracting, I mean, there's a, there's a huge household name client, like, like how right have a blog, have a blog, you know, use the

Carl Franklin: social medias. And, um, also I would contribute to, um, GitHub repos, you know, open source projects. I found, um, a developer by going to Microsoft forums, you know, where people were asking a knowledge base and stuff and asking questions. And I found there was one guy who was answering all the questions and they were complicated Azure questions. And the, the response was that worked. Thank you very much. And I saw this guy had done that over and over and over again. And I was like, you know, I want to hire you. So first of all, you have to not be a bullshitter. I mean, you can't bullshit your

Jonathan Stark: way into something like this. You actually have to do the work and have to be good enough to do the work. And, but now you just need to show the world that you can. So go answer questions. Go to, I don't know, stack overflow is still relevant. I think they're, I think the viewership went down or something. I'm not sure, but maybe that's a good place too.

Carl Franklin: I recently read the, the stack overflow guys complaining that the, um, their traffic's gone way down since Google started chat GPT and the Google instant answers or whatever it's called. Um, but still, I, I do think the, you know, another example, I just interviewed someone, the podcast isn't out yet. Uh, Tim Dietrich, and he basically a free tool for the platform. It didn't have a feature, so he built basically kind of like a plug-in for the platform that he specialized in. And it was like, it became really popular and then ended up that the platform, NetSuite, ended up that the platform built, basically built the feature into the thing so the product didn't, the open-source thing didn't really need to exist, but anymore, but he got a lot of attention and work from it. Yeah. Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: It's like a way to, it's like instead of writing a book, you know, build a free tool or something that becomes popular. I know a guy who did that for Blazer and after about a year, year and a half, he was snatched up by a company and paid buku dollars because, you know, people were using and they still, and I still use his tools from this day. Yeah. So yeah, that's a good thing to do. Yeah. For people that don't want to be on social media all the time or, or, you know, maybe start a podcast or, or anything like that, contributing to the platform or creating plugins, free stuff that just works, works great. And that can be, that can really attract business. Right. So my advice in three words is just be awesome.

Carl Franklin: I don't want to gloss over your other point, which is like, you can't bullshit your way into this. You have to actually be good. Right. So like assuming you're good, then it's like, okay, then you can do these, there's some other things you can do and then you can really increase your income and your quality of life. Just your stress levels, keep your stress levels down by giving these value-based approaches. And by the way, by good, we don't mean can use chat GPT or agents to answer all your questions and educate you. That's not being good. You have to have experience, you know, and we've been talking about this on dot net rocks a lot, Jonathan, which is that it's, it's, it's more difficult for junior programmers right now, first of all, to get a job because the jobs are dwindling. But second of all, to just use chat GPT to solve problems that they don't know how to solve about things they don't know about. And it's easier for guys like us who've been around the block, you know, for many years, because we know what questions to ask and we know to recognize the answer as inappropriate or not right. So, you know, the agents might give you an answer to a technical answer to a code solution that works, but it's dumb, you know, and you wouldn't know that unless you had the experience to tell, nah, that's, that's not necessary. There's a simpler way to do that. So you got to know what questions to ask. And, and also along those lines, I tell this story, like if the, your boss comes to you and says, we need a tool that does this, you know, or a class that does X and you go to chat GPT or whatever it is, and you say, write me a class that does X. And it does. And, you know, you test it and it kind of works and you go back and forth and all this stuff. But then you find out that, oh, well, the framework that I'm using already has a class that does that. Right. So that's basically a dumb question to ask it to write you a class that does that. The question should have been, is there anything in the tool set that I'm using that does this? That should have been your first question. But that's the kind of thing that a seasoned developer would know and would be able to spot that a junior developer or a newbie would not. So don't just lean on, don't think you can be a hotshot developer by leaning on chat GPT or the agents.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, that's for sure. And it's not just code it's in other domains. I find that I get the most utility out of chat GPT when I'm asking it to do some grunt work that I'm capable of doing. I just don't want to do it.

Carl Franklin: Right.

Jonathan Stark: Right. Cause then I can verify the results. I can just take a look at it and be like, oh, that was, that was a dud. Let me try it again or ask a different way. But if I didn't know what I was, if I didn't know what correct looked like, if I didn't know what the air quotes or right answer was, I have no way to verify it. And whenever I've asked it to do things where I, I can't, I don't know what the right answer is. I'm kind of using it like Google or be like, oh, how do I, I don't know. What are the history of the ITF forms in Taekwondo? It could tell me anything like, I don't know. So it's like now to verify it, I have to do the research that I would have done in the first place. Right. You know? So

Carl Franklin: it's like for certain things, it's more work than just doing it. Or, you know, a Taekwondo expert,

Expertise and Pricing Strategy

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Carl Franklin: but they charge $500 an hour, but you say, Hey, if I pay you a hundred dollars, can you verify that this information is correct? And you might get, okay.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah.

Carl Franklin: Yeah. Some people I've interviewed

Jonathan Stark: people who are like, well, you can take the results and put it into Claude and say, does this make sense? Or does this, you know, and I'm like, you could, you could, you might get another answer, you know? Right. So I, I find it's anything that, um, I really don't use it for anything or use it in a very different way. And it's a lot less productive when it's something where I I'm outside of my normal domain of expertise. It's really, but, but when you're inside your domain of expertise is amazing. It's like, yeah, that's great. And I didn't have to type it. Yep. You know, exactly. So what, what would you tell people about the switch that the

Overcoming Resistance to Value Pricing

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Jonathan Stark: actual, if you can think back to when you were switching out, what, you know, sort of maybe resistance you had internally, your, your own personal resistance, resistance from other people involved or like, uh, things that you would do differently the next, if you were somehow at a time machine and could do it again, or they're like things that you didn't feel like you executed very well. The first time, the first project went exceedingly well, even though it was kind of small.

Carl Franklin: The second project that I did, the customer actually ended up taking my proposal and going somewhere else. That was fine. Yeah. Um, I was trying to think ahead in that case because they had a lot of users that they had to add to their user database or identity database. And so, you know, part of my proposal was to write a little console application that could do that for them pretty easily. But I think I got a little too focused on that and they were just like, you know, you know, I don't know. I can't remember exactly what the problem was, but, but I gave them a good proposal and it was a good phase one and it was pretty detailed. They just decided to shop it around and they never came back to me, but that was only the second one. The third one was the one that shouldn't have been value priced. The fourth one was amazing. Um, the guy found me from dotnet rocks. He was a huge listener and I still keep in touch with them and do work for them to this day. The fourth one was great. And, uh, the fifth one, um, I currently still have as a customer and working on a two year project with them. And then there'll be another one or two year project with them. And then the, the current one we're getting into phase one, you know, about 40 minutes from now. Yeah. So we'll see, see what happens. But this, this current one, I'm working with two other guys that, um, you know, from out Phoenix that work with me to round out the expertise. So, and we're going to do that same percentage thing where, you know, we're, we're

Collaborative Projects and Revenue Sharing

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Carl Franklin: gonna, if we get to phase two, we'll divide up, you know, the, the monthly money according to

Jonathan Stark: how many hours we worked before. And it's a, yeah, it worked. It's good model. Everybody likes

Carl Franklin: it. Cool. Yeah. I've, I've talked to other people who have either employees or long-term contractors

Jonathan Stark: and that kind of thing. And, and they, you know, would just get fixed prices from the contractors

Carl Franklin: for like the module or the, the feature. And so like my guy would, you know, as a tech guy could

Jonathan Stark: really describe exactly what he wanted in terms that another tech person would really understand.

Carl Franklin: And it's like, Matt, you know, I could give you $5,000 for this. Is that enough to build

Jonathan Stark: out this module? And, you know, he knows they do high quality stuff and, you know, there's a lot

Carl Franklin: of trust and it's like, yeah, okay, cool. Here's, here's, here it is upfront. Let me know when

Jonathan Stark: you're done. There are people I've worked with that. Well, I would definitely do that with,

Carl Franklin: but these two are like long-term.

Jonathan Stark: People that I want to do have other projects with in the future and want them to be invested in

Carl Franklin: the process. The same to the same degree that I am. So sure. Yeah. Cause they're in for the

Jonathan Stark: long haul. It's not like one module that each of them is going to do. Yeah, exactly. It'd be

Carl Franklin: trickier with a really long one. But for example, um, one of the optional things that we're probably

Jonathan Stark: going to offer is an application penetration test from a very reputable security company,

Carl Franklin: and they have a dollar amount that they want for that. And so it's very easy for me to add that to

Jonathan Stark: option three, you know, because I know how much it's going to cost. Right? Yeah. That's great.

Carl's Current Projects and Podcasts

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Carl Franklin: Cool. If anybody in the audience, if there, if there are any.net people in the audience who

Jonathan Stark: somehow haven't heard of you or.net rocks, where could they go to find out more about what you're

Carl Franklin: doing? Sure. Well.net rocks.com is the podcast and it's still going strong. Richard Campbell and

Jonathan Stark: I have been doing that since episode 100. We had a, I had a cohost for episodes one through 50

Carl Franklin: and then 50 through a hundred. And, uh, so that's good. And we talk about all things,

Jonathan Stark: not just.net, but anything that a.net developer would be interested in.

Carl Franklin: That's what we talk about. Uh, and then I have some YouTube video content. Blazor train is like

Jonathan Stark: a complete course in using ASP net core blazer server and web assembly, all the little things

Carl Franklin: there. Um, blazer puzzle is another one I started after blazer train was kind of done

Jonathan Stark: and I'm maintaining blazer train, obviously with new versions of.net, but blazer puzzle is something

Carl Franklin: that, uh, Jeff Fritz from Microsoft and I do. And that is, we present an issue and we say,

Jonathan Stark: all right, pause the video. If you want to, if you want to try to figure it out and then we give

Carl Franklin: the solution. That's fine. It's fun. We have reposts for every episode. And then we started a new one called code it with AI where, and Jeff is really the expert on this because he works for Microsoft and all the Microsoft, you know, tech evangelists or whatever you want to call them, they have a mission to do more AI stuff. So he really dove into, uh, the GitHub copilot agent and working with it and visual studio and in visual studio code. And so now we're doing topical,

Jonathan Stark: Cool. I'll have to check that out. I think that's it. Oh no security this week.

Carl Franklin: This is a podcast that I do with two guys from Pulsar security. And these are the guys that would do the pen test. They basically are a professional security company that other companies hired to have them hack into their businesses and try to find the weaknesses and shore them up. Um, and we basically talk about security concepts through the lens of the week's news, which is usually security breaches or those kinds of things. And for each one we talk about, does this affect you or not? Um, we take the CVSS severity score and we sort of make that, okay, that's fine. But what's the real contagion score? Like how likely am I to get this? And then we go down the path of, well, you already have to have an admin account on the system. Oh, okay. So it's not really a nine. So the first they have to get into your system and then they can hack the, to use this hack. Uh, and then, you know, go patch is another thing that we say about if you're using this product, go patch. And then, um, this one is just an interesting story, you know, so be careful. Don't click on links and emails and text messages, those kinds of things

Closing Remarks

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Carl Franklin: we do a lot. So those, those are them.

Jonathan Stark: Jeez. Got a lot going on. Keeping yourself busy.

Carl Franklin: I know. I don't want to, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. That's basically the problem.

Jonathan Stark: Cool. Well, this has been great, Carl. Thanks for joining me.

Carl Franklin: Thank you for having me, Jonathan.

Jonathan Stark: All right, folks, that's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Stark and I hope you join me again next time on Ditching Hourly. Bye.