In the past 3 yrs, I've coached 1K+ founders through raising seed rounds with workshops and courses I've run with @AWSstartups and @beondeck, so I'm going to distill it into a 🧵. Being ready to fundraise requires you: .1/ Have a strong narrative.2/ Run a strategic process. 1/25.

Been following the slingshot team closely and super excited to see this launch in the wild!.

RT @neilparikh: They said it couldn't be done. They said it *shouldn't* be done. We tried anyways. Today we're launching Ash, the first A….

I'm starting to put more insights to paper from helping hundreds of consultants and freelancers grow their biz. For now, here's a quick playbook that gets into gow to grow a service business via referrals.

As you get going, you can eventually move into value-based pricing to earn even more, but that's a 201 topic. Starting with your hourly rate first is a good place to start.

There are several levers you can use when negotiating an engagement. If you want to use price as one of those levers, then the client should be clear on what your market rate is, the discount they are getting, and for how long.

If you lower your rates, it becomes an uphill climb to get back to your target rate if you extend an engagement. Even worse, the client will not be a good source of referrals because they'll tell other potential clients about your (artificially low) rates.

One last thing that I tell people when they get into negotiating client engagements: there's a subtle but important difference between lowering your rates and offering a discount. You should never lower your rates to close a client.

Using this framework helps you package simple engagement models with easy to digest rates, with the ability to customize accordingly based on flexing the time commitment. You also have good rationale in your back pocket if asked about hourly rate.

STEP THREE: PACKAGE. With an hourly rate in mind, you can price different engagement models and round to easy to digest numbers. For example, with a $150/hr rate, a 15 hour/week consulting retainer can be packaged as $9K per month. A 5 hr/month advisory can be $750/month.

If you divide your total comp target by work hours, you'd arrive at $88/hour (a mistake). When dividing by billable hours, this rate is ~$150/hr. Big difference.

This includes business development activities, admin work, and even switching costs. Also, you get no PTO as a consultant. So if you plan to work 50 weeks per year and 40 hours per week, you have 2,000 work hours per year, but that means only 1,200 billable hours per year.

STEP TWO: DIVIDE BY BILLABLE HOURS. This is where most people make a critical mistake by conflating work hours with billable hours. When doing your own consulting, about 40% of your time is going to be on work that is NOT client work.

STEP ONE: TOTAL ANNUAL COMP TARGET. There isn't great benchmark data for rates, instead start with your total annual comp target. You can use your own personal goals and benchmark data on full-time salaries to figure out this number. Let's use $175K as an example.

Everyone's trying to do their own consulting/fractional work these days, and I get a lot of questions about how to set rates. Here's the total compensation framework I use to help people set their rates and avoid common mistakes.

Everyone I've talked to who was in this program has nothing but glowing things to say about it.

A few weeks ago I was at my 10 year college reunion. Some current female students pointed at us and said, "look - real millennials!" Weeks later, I'm still hurt. But also proud and optimistic about the future knowing our youth can so efficiently and ruthlessly roast their elders.

I love startups, but startups as an "industry" is total bullshit.

I might need to follow through with my idea of a support group for friends of Jets fans.

Seeing lots of startups try to execute a "writing culture" a la Amazon. One of the biggest misunderstandings is that writing a good 6-page memo takes 40+ hours of work. Gotta find the goldilocks of forcing strategic rigor while avoiding excessive costs of writing.

I just typed in a few ingredients into google because I thought it would make a good combo and wanted to find some recipe validation. The top result was a post in r/depressionmeals. I'm doing just fine, but my culinary confidence just took a big hit.