00:44 - Balancing Availability and Handling Huge Time Differences

10:42 - Jonathan’s Double Your Freelancing Conference Recap

18:36 - Is there a way to get the benefits of attending a conference without attending a conference?

27:10 - Reading Books

36:23 - Double Your Freelancing Conference Recaps

38:41 - Reading (Cont’d)

Picks

Crowdcast (Chuck)
Pebble Time Steel (Chuck)

 

 

Alright, welcome everybody who’s listening. The question’s there and it is huge time zone differences. Just started working with a client who’s 12 hours ahead. Would love to hear if Reuven has any horror stories or tips on this especially in regards to balancing availability between local clients and global communication delays; setting any expectations.

Well Reuven’s not here; have you dealt with this much? People who are significantly off from you time zone wise?

Yes, in a couple of cases and the two different cases are trying to set up coaching with people who are in New Zealand which is – it’s a 12 or 14 hours difference from where I am in the US. And it’s kind of a deal breaker for me. The person who was interested in doing it was okay with doing late night.

On Maryland, it was like if we did 11 in the morning here it was like 1 a.m. there but it really made it complicated to [inaudible] in schedule and that sort of thing. I know it’s not the kind of relationship that the person who asked the question’s probably talking about but the other type of situation I had is working with external dev shops. So when I’m doing acting CTO type of consulting, retainer consulting for a customer who’s got a bunch of ongoing software projects, a lot of times those are outsource and I’m managing the external developers. So we’ve had developers in – one in Croatia and customers in Cane Islands in Miami and other developers in Colorado so the time zone’s just all over the place.

Uh-hm.

The only way to really handle it is to, like the person asked, about setting expectations that everybody just is religious about; using asynchronous project management system or communication channel. In my case, it was always Basecamp where people could log questions in Basecamp. You just rarely have a chance to have – there’s so little overlap to have an actual synchronous phone call that what we would do when we really needed to do that is we would fly there. So we would – pretty much once a month. With that particular case, we would fly like a full day of meetings, maybe two days of meetings depending on how intense the development schedule was. Especially when we’re coming up to a big deadline, we’d get there and we’d just answer as many questions as we could and hash through as much of that stuff all in person as we could.

And it forces everyone – it’s kind of cool because it gets everybody in the same time zone so you could have an eight hour meeting. Even if we said, “Let’s block out a date to do this,” and for all in our respects to our time zones, that day is going to hit our life at a very weird spot and people would be so distracted and trying to juggle family stuff and all that.

That works for us; it’s obviously a huge pain to fly to a location once a month to deal with everything else but it did work. It was very effective. You could get so much stuff done in those meetings that it would cover you for a month and you could take everything else at Basecamp or Slack or whatever you use.

Yeah. I’ve got a little bit of experience with this, too. I worked for clients in Hong Kong and I worked for clients in Germany. As a full-time employee, I actually work with a team in India and that’s part of a larger corporation and they had a team there that we just had to interface with.

30 in the morning or we would stay after until six or seven at night because they were twelve and a half hours difference between Utah and India. I’m not completely sure why that’s a half hour on there but whatever.

So we would just do that and then the nice thing about it was that we could say, “Okay, you guys need to do this stuff for us,” and then we would come back the next morning and it will be done. So there is that but the flip side was that we were handing down requirements more often than we were getting them and so it’s a little bit different.

The client that I worked for from Hong Kong, he just made sure that his times accommodated mine. So it really didn’t throw things off too much for me; I think he had a full time job at the time anyway and so it was actually more convenient for him to just get on. I don’t remember if it was early morning or late in the evening for him but he would just get on and make it happen then the rest of the communication happen through a system like Basecamp like Jonathan said.

And then the last one in Germany, they actually had several contractors here in the United States, but yeah, we occasionally had hopped on calls and things at weird times. It’s just the way that it was. As long as it’s not too often and too out of sync for me, a lot of times it’s not a big deal. Okay, I have to get on a call at seven instead of an eight or nine which is for me, my kids are already up and going to school so getting on at seven just means that my wife has to do a little bit more in the morning.

But it really just depends on your client. I have heard of people who routinely work with groups of people who are a significant number of hours off from them and you just have to accommodate them by working those weird times where it’s either right before or right after and then just make it work.

Yeah, I had a friend who is a lawyer that worked with people in – I think it was Prague and it was far enough ahead that he often had to leave a social engagement where he couldn’t actually have a few martinis or whatever. He’d be like, “Oh, just water for me; I have to go. I have a call,” and he was sort of a high power lawyer type guy.

Like you said, it’s okay if it’s once in a while but if you can avoid baking that into your schedule, it’s probably good from a standpoint of a long term burnout because it point – it’s like working third shift almost which I’ve done in the past and it just wears you down. It turns you into a different – it separates you from the rest of society which is not a good thing to have to do for a long period of time in my opinion.

Yeah, and the other thing is – I mean what we’re talking about here is the same problem we talked about – probably half the time, it’s communication. So what it boils down to is the time you spend communicating through a project management system where you can have a time delay on it, or Slack where you can have a time delay on it sometimes or whether or not you’re getting clear enough communication to where you actually have to do the call and when that call actually has to occur.

So as much as you can, if you can put systems in place to help people give you the right information the first time or to where you can get clarification without having to make that call at a weird time and without getting help up because you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing next and it’s going to take eight hours for them to reply. So you just have to be hyper vigilant on your communication and you can avoid a lot of this.

Holly, the person who asked it actually said, “Thanks guys. It sounds like I have to get them into a project management system,” and I would say absolutely, yes.

I got one last tip in the communication angle which is I find myself, in the past, especially when I was doing more development, I would find that I was more productive. I’ve probably had gone to bed since I worked from home and a lot of those types of tasks take some deep focus, maybe four hours of really digging into a problem and working your way through it, testing it, debugging it, at least first pass, debugging it. It could be some pretty complicated form of JavaScript stuff that I have to test across six devices and a bunch of different browsers on each one.

What I would do once I got it nailed down – obviously, nobody’s awake, right, probably nobody else in the team is awake. While it’s still fresh in my mind, what I would do is record a screencast of me walking through the thing that I had just finished; I just completed how it was supposed to work, how I thought it was supposed to work with the expectations of it working properly, so then the people who are going to test it the next day – so I [inaudible] the client and the client would test it to people – they would know what I saw and so there wouldn’t be this them logging in a bunch of bugs and me saying, “No, that’s expected behaviour.” And I can do that one screencast so easy they take five minutes. Even if you did four hours of work, the screencast will take you five minutes max.

I use ScreenFlow, I turn it on, press record, I just walk through the changes that I made. Sometimes I’ll find a bug then because I’m thoroughly walking through it and be like fix the bug, go back, record a new screencast. Then I’m sure that they know what I think it’s supposed to do. So if there’s some miscommunication on the scope or something like that, it will be revealed right then.

The other thing they can do is once they had that video, they can share it with a bunch of other people. So it’s like a design where you’ve called it and nobody has to jump on and it’s very easily shareable and other people can use it. I’m surprised that I don’t see more people doing this. It’s really great when you’ve got that sort of – either if you’re working weird hours or if the people that you’re working with are in a different time zone, it’s super helpful; cuts to the chase.

Yup. If you don’t want to spring for ScreenFlow, I think it’s $100 or something. There’s a really cheap version called Jing – Jing.com. I think it’s free; I’m not sure. If it’s not free, it’s really cheap but it’s for really quick screencasts if you’re talking for five or maybe ten minutes. But usually that’s enough to at least demo the core of whatever you’re working on and that’s a super way to go, just to make that communication.

I guess the word that I am looking for is just make it as clear as possible, as unambiguous as possible because it can actually see what you see.

Totally unambiguous. [Chuckles] Unambiguous.

But yeah. The other thing that I’ve done in the past is I’ve actually sent emails everyday that I’ve gotten work done. Not necessarily record a screencast but just said, “Hey, here’s the list of the things I got done.” In that way, they have some idea of the progress that’s being made. Then we don’t have to do a big one called the check in; they can just fire back with whatever they’re concerned about.

Another cool thing is if you’re storing your stuff in GitHub, you can have your commit just pushed straight to Basecamp. If you use – if you are aware of that, you can use really clear commit messages and people can see immediately that, “Oh, this thing was done, this thing was done, this thing was done.” That’s nice, too.

Alright. It doesn't look like we have any other questions being asked. Do you want to talk a little bit about what you’ve got going on lately, Jonathan?

Sure. I just got back from Double Your Freelancing Conference which was in Norfolk, Virginia, organized by Brennan Dunn of Double Your Everything fame. So obviously he’s probably pretty well known at the freelancer community. And it was an excellent conference; it looks like they’re going to do it again next year. It was a big success so people should keep their eyes peeled for that. There are really some videos of it so you can check it out so anything that I talk about here, you’ll be able to find out about later.

It was amazing. It was probably – my takeaway from it was thinking in ten years I’ll look back on that conference and say that was the turning point because it was – I’ve probably done a hundred conference but usually it’s for web developers and web designers, and there are people that have – convince their boss to send them to this conference and everybody’s there and they’re talking about skills.

So usually when I make a presentation, it’s about how to do this or how to do that, how to make an iOS app with PhoneGap or how to use JavaScript to for the [inaudible] – no not even. How do you use JavaScript to make a responsive website – things like that. But this one was a bunch of people who spent their own money on plane tickets and hotels and conference tickets to sit around with some people who were sort of a little farther down the road than they were. And talking about making their business better; they were –.

I talked to software developers, web developers, web designers, photographers, ghost writers, copywriters –.

Wow.

Yeah, translate German to English – just a really wide range of types of Freelancers. And the vibe was so much different than a typical web developer conference like [inaudible]. I love all of those guys but it was just such a different feel because people who were there, they weren’t thinking about skills; they were thinking about their mindset, really. They’re thinking about their business, not how to do their job but how to make their business better. And it was really wild.

There were a bunch of – lot of the reactions that I saw in Twitter and from people I met with in person, it was all about them changing their mindset. So the talks that really resonated with people were not the ‘how to do’ – how to automate yourselves from a [inaudible]. Kurt Elster did a great talk on to do that. Mojca Mars did a great talk on how to use Social Media without being a jerk.

That’s all super important information, but the stuff that really clicked with the audience was just to change the way you think about your business. Stop thinking of yourself as a pair of hands that does what they’re told and start thinking of yourself as an expert, which a lot of people have a hard time saying ‘yes, I’m an expert on this.’ I can understand that; maybe you know you’re not the world wide expert on soap making or whatever your deal is, but you probably know a lot more than a ton of people. In fact, you probably know a lot more about it than 90% of the people on the planet even if you know just a couple of things.

So maybe the word ‘expert’ is strong but you need to think of yourself as having valuable information that you not only can share with your audience but almost have an obligation to share. If you do something like – I don’t know; what’s an example? You integrate Stripe with Gravity Forms and people struggle with this all the time and you’ve got this solution that is super affordable, super plug and play and if people just know about it then they could stop all these suffering that they’re going through, spending tons of money trying to find a custom developer, etc.

So you know you have this value to offer to people who are experiencing these specific pain – you kind of owe it to them to let them know about it. So it flips the script on sales; it’s like, “No, I’m not trying to stick my foot in your door and but into your house like I’m selling you a vacuum cleaner that you don’t need.” If somebody has a problem that you solve in a really affordable way, it’s not sales in that gross way; it’s more like thinking about your business in a different way and thinking about the value that you offer and finding the people who [inaudible] the benefit from it the most. Once that clicks with you, then you’re going to need all the other techniques. You’re going to want to automate your sales on, you’re going to want to know how to use Twitter without annoying people and all of that other stuff. It’s all important but if you don’t do that first thing, which is change your mindset, the rest of the stuff is not going to work.

Yeah, I really love the thoughts about seeing the way you have has value and so instead of thinking about how do I get somebody to pay me, what you’re thinking about is how do I change the way that they do their business so that it saves them thousands of dollars? And the side note is I get paid somewhat less than that thousands of dollars so it makes or saves them five grand then I make two grand.

Uh-hm.

Obviously then, what you’re offering is an immense value; it’s not just, “Hey, you can pay me to do this work.”

Right.

Yeah, there are a bunch of other mindsets like that. I don’t think they get explicitly called out at MicroConf because I went to MicroConf in May – April, May, one of those. And there was a lot of tactical stuff that it sounds like there really wasn’t a ton of – at double your freelancing but at the same time, it all stem from that mindset stuff. And if you were watching, that’s really what they were telling you was think about it this way and then you’re going to go find that you have these tactical needs that will enable you to work better and smarter and serve your customers better because you’re thinking about it better.

Exactly. Yeah, you need it all but you got to keep the cart before the horse. And unfortunately, the mindset won, for a lot of people, is basically – I had two kinds of reactions. One were people like ‘you just blew my mind’ and those people got it, like all of a sudden it clicked and they’ll never be able to see their business the old way again like ‘I ruined it’. [Laughter] They’re the new way, they switched the new way. And then there were people who were like ‘but how do I’ and they’re focused on their – maybe a little bit nervous about –.

My talk was about the path to value base fees like how to stop doing hourly billing and start doing value pricing. A lot of people get hung up on the specifics of it and they can’t let the switch flip in their brain until they understand the specifics. I don’t know if it’s two different kinds of learners or people that are in different places in their business, maybe some have more experience than others but you can see that certain people would just make sense and other people, they need to be – a little bit more explanation. And maybe you have to come at it from the tactical stuff for them to – for the light to go on for them.

It’s wild. People just learn so differently. I think that until you figure out how to get that light bulb go on, it’s going to be really hard for people to benefit from something like value pricing because they end up doing fixed bids and if they place the bid too low and then they get burned because the [inaudible] all over the place because they never had a valid conversation in the first place, etc. So it’s this snowball effect that really started at the very beginning of the relationship with the customer where they got off of the wrong foot and they have a hard time closing deals and people are trying to nickel and dime them and hag all the quota and work them down. It’s wild; my head is just exploding from it.

The big DYF Conf was just – I connect with so many people. It’s ridiculous; I’m still drowning in emails from Friday. I met probably 20 people that can remember my name and another 10 that I never got their name in the first place. So just emailing back and forth to follow up and connect them with other people, etc. It was a really good conference.

That just sounds great. I’m just going to ask a question since we don’t have any questions for Q&A and that is it sounds like in your case and in my case, too, with MicroConf, some of these realizations came because we got away, we got into a conference. We met up with a bunch of people who were talking and thinking about these stuff and that’s where those connections were made but I recognize that some freelancers may be struggling or may have other obligations that make it really hard for them to travel and to attend conferences. So if that’s not an option for them, is there a way for them to get these benefits without having to go to a conference like Double Your Freelancing Rate or MicroConf or one of these others?

Yeah, it’s expensive to go to; you’ve got the client work that you can’t do while you’re there and fly in a hotel and tickets – it costs a lot of money, no doubt about it but there are a bunch of other ways that aren’t as good but are drastically less expensive or free.

Let’s say, in this case there are going to be videos after the [inaudible]; I think Brennan’s selling them for 99 bucks for two days worth of videos. So if you went to the conference page and you looked at the speakers, I don’t know if this is true for everyone but certainly true for me, you could search on YouTube for other talks I’ve done because there are videos. There’s going to be a mix of things; it’s not all freelancers’ stuff but that is certainly one place where you can at least get the input. You can’t ask questions obviously but you can get the input and the data podcasts like this one or other – you could say – use me as an example.

You could just Google for Jonathan Stark podcast and you’re going to get 20 podcasts and you’re going to get 20 podcasts including this one and others where I’ve talked about the same sort of stuff that I talked about at this particular conference. Then you can try and engage with people; if they’re too busy, they’ll say no or if they send somebody an email, tweet at them; if you just have a really quick question about something really specific, they’ll probably answer. I’ll probably answer. But here’s the thing – don’t give me the whole back story. If you’re going to email me, don’t write a book. With me anyway, just be like – polite intro sentence – “listen, I’ve got this one simple question for you,” just ask me the question. I don’t want to hear your whole life story; just ask me the question. I’ll answer it and if I need to ask you a follow up question before I can answer it, I’ll do that over email.

But if I get an email that’s like a thousand words, I’m just going to delete it, I’m sorry. I’m not going to read it. Even if I archive it, I’m never going to come back to it; it’s too much. So just send a really, really brief, specific questions to people and I almost guarantee they will answer you.

I just want to jump in on that. I’m in the same place, in the same boat. I reply to pretty much everybody who emails me but I will admit that, yeah, the ones where I get a ten page novella, what winds up happening is it’ll stay in my inbox, in the ‘I really want to get back to this’ and I’ll never get back to it. And it’s not because I don’t want to answer and it’s not because I’m even filtering consciously my email, it’s just, “Oh, I don’t have time to read this, I’ll get to it later.”

[Inaudible] try to get to it later and eventually later, later, later and it’s like, “Oh, it’s been two months. I’m a little embarrassed to answer this now,” and then I’ll archive it.

Exactly. That’s exactly it, yeah. That’s exactly it; you just start to feel bad and then you’re never going to answer it.

Yup.

Just ask one question. If you have a follow up question, ask that one later but a long one like that is not good.

I know that a lot of people, myself included, if you need something more in depth [inaudible] and something a little bit more real time, pretty much everybody offers some version of paid phone calls. And if they don’t you can just suggest that. You’ll be like, “Hey, getting paid [inaudible] Skype call.”

It’s not hard to do; somebody just PayPal it and if it’s worth that much to you, it’s a heck of a lot less expensive and time consuming that flying to a conference. And you get direct one on one attention which is cool, too. I’ve done it in the past. I remember setting up a phone call at Paul Boag when I was getting ready to start doing some podcasting from Boagworld. And I got on with Paul Marcus and talked about this and that.

It was great and it established a relationship. We ended up meeting at a conference where we were both speaking at it and they ended up having me on the show a couple of times. It’s not a bad way to start a relationship either. There’s tons of value there.

Well, I was going to say that that’s a good substitute for that because there are two parts of the conference, right? There are the talks and a lot of times you can either go and watch them online or pay for access to them in the case of Double Your Freelancing Rate. But there’s a social aspect, too, and a lot of cases, like you were saying you can pay somebody for their time or sometimes people just – it’s like, “Hey, I got a couple of questions and I was wondering if you could do a ten minute call or fifteen minute call.” Some people do that.

The other thing is go find the Slack channels that have all those people in them. I can tell you that there’s a Slack channel that I’m in that Jonathan and Eric are both in. and I think we all joined and independent of each other more or less. And it’s got a whole bunch of people who are in the situation that we’re in with our businesses, running our businesses and interacting.

So those are out there. Email lists – same kind of thing. Get involved, be yourself, get to know people, have those conversations. I think that can open up some possibilities in your mind. Then if you find a group of people that you can get together with on a regular basis as a mastermind group, I can’t tell you how helpful that’s been for me in having a mastermind group.

But find these places where the people who are having these conversations go to socialize and get in there and then have the conversations. You can start them; you can get in to, for example, the water cooler shaft that Jonathan and I are both in on Slack, you can get in there and ask questions and ‘what about this’ and ‘I saw this and I’m thinking about this’. Those start really fascinating conversations. And if anything, people are going to be grateful that you chimed in.

Yeah, there’s usually it seems – especially in that one, every single person has one amazing area of expertise or experience. There’s one guy who had a podcast that’s in the top 20 in iTunes. Another guy who’s made – I’m going to say a million bucks selling classes online. The list goes on; everybody in there has some really unique expertise.

It’s endless. In fact, there’s so many people in there that are like that that I can barely even keep track of it. So masterminds are huge. I don’t think you mentioned Facebook groups but that’s been another really good one for me. And a lot of more public or are just really easy to get into, you can find them really easily and just request an invite and boom, you’re in.

And meetups in your local area. If there’s a meetup in your area that seems good for that then go for it then if not, start one.

Uh-hm. Yeah, the other thing is that I have a meetup now that I do every Thursday I’ve talked about it before where we just get together and do co-working. So we’re all just working on different stuff but we’re all there hanging together on Thursdays. But I actually met one or two people just going to the café and I’d see them because the place that I go there are three booths down this hallway back to the kitchen and bathrooms. They’re a little quieter, they’re a little more private. There’s many people walking on around you and so the people who go there to work wind up sitting back there because it’s just a nicer area to be in so you see the same person the last three times you’ve gone there.

So it’s like, “So hey, I’ve seen you here a few times, what are you working on?” And you meet some really fascinating people that way. If you’re also looking for some business, I advice then here in Salt Lake there are two startup incubators. And they actually have meetups when they’re trying to recruit their next cohort and so they all have entrepreneurs from the local area comm and speak about some aspect about running a business or starting a product or whatever. And so a lot of those are great and then afterward, they just stick around for as long as they want for networking and what they’re hoping is that you as the business person or you as the technical person – because one of them is a technology startup incubator – we’ll get together and go after an idea and submit your idea to the startup incubator.

But you can totally meet other people who are like you there and start having the conversations that we’re talking about here and level up where you’re at just because you’re in a place where people tend to have those conversations and be thinking about those things even if you’re not going to directly participate in a startup incubator.

Yes, even we in tiny [inaudible] around have a startup incubator.

Ohh wee!

Yeah, we’re big time.

[Chuckles] Alright, I’ll talk a little bit about what I’ve been doing. My focus lately has been on Angular Remote Conf. it’s actually going to be this Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I also just launched the website for the Rails Remote Conf. I’m thinking about doing on for Freelancers’; I’m kind of tempted to see if Brennan would be interested in teaming up on that and then just doing a Double Your Freelancing summit that’s an online summit.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing and then I just picked up a retainer client and I’m not super thrilled about it at this point because [chuckles] it’s hourly and they don’t seem to quite completely know what they want. Then I’ve picked up another client and I’m having the value conversation with them as well but they’re actually talking to their audience and things like that so they’re in flux right now as well but yeah, I’ve got a few things going on. Then I took over a project for another friend of mine and I’m having that conversation with them as well, that value conversation – what does this mean to you and stuff but their products are already built and at this point, we’re talking about solutions that will make them hundreds and thousands of dollars. So I’m starting to figure out ‘okay, well I can do it for this amount and then you can make ten times that’ – everybody’s happy.

But yeah, it’s really interesting to just – all the things going on. I also just renewed sponsorships for the shows. Anyone who wants to sponsor this show, I would appreciate the referral. And I’m actually having that conversation with myself as far as – I’ve been reading the book Essentialism and so I’ve been looking at what I’ve been doing and this show actually just barely breaks even. I know there are some products I could probably make for the audience here that would make money or do that summit or something like that. Then the other show that I have, iPhreaks, actually doesn't even break even so I’ve been looking at that, thinking about whether or not I should continue to produce the shows.

Now I don’t think these shows are going to go anywhere because I enjoy doing them but it is something that I’ve been thinking about. And I’ve been looking at the other things that I do and deciding what to cut so it’s been really, really interesting just to – okay, so what are my options? What would I have to do in order for it to be a slam dunk to keep? Then I started chasing things down so I am talking to a few sponsors at this point that may make it worth monetarily but then I’m also looking at my time and what I was spending my time on and how do I justify the time or is it worth my time?

Anyway, lots of things that I’m thinking about there. Back to the conversation of changing your mindset, I think and agree that books is another way that you can get information that makes you at least consider where you’re going and what you’re doing.

Absolutely. I just have one thing though is try to get recommendations from people you trust because I have found that not all books are good.

That’s true.

And sometimes they can – not all the time, but occasionally they can confuse you more than not so if you’re reading a book. There’s this thing where, as the author of several books, where I know that the reader imbues the author with this expert guru, worldwide guru status on the person who wrote the book on X and it does not mean that they’re 100% right or they’re talking exactly about your situation or that there isn’t something about your situation that invalidates the information.

So when you’re reading book, go into it with an open mind but not too open. So some of my business books that I just consider bibles of solo consulting, like value-based fees by [inaudible]. The thing, I’ve read it a million times; I read it every year and every year, I get more out of it but there’s some things in there that do not work for me. It took me a mile to be like, “You know what, this thing that I’m trying to implement is just not working for me. Maybe I’m not there yet or whatever it is but there’s something.

This is probably my favourite book – my number one book that, if it hadn’t been written, it would’ve had a huge negative impact on my life if I hadn’t found it. But still there’s stuff in there that just does not work for me so I pick and choose – pick and chose? Pick and choosing the things that work for me and 80 or 90% of that book is just directly applicable to my business.

I’m a software developer basically and he’s a management consultant and I deal with a certain type of business up to a certain level and he’s on a different playing field. So there are certain things that I think work for him and his environment that just did not translate whatsoever to my whole world. So just keep an open mind but also don’t blindly accept everything that you read.

Yeah, the books that I read, they’re the kind that start a conversation in my head. So then it’s, “Okay, these are the principles that have been laid out,” or “these are the practices that they’re advocating.” I have no problem trying out a particular practice for a few weeks or a few months if I see that the merits have been explained well. But yeah, you want to glean these ideas and then figure out which ones a [inaudible] situation.

Yes. So if you know someone who does the same thing you do and you are in the impression that they’ve levelled up from where you are, ask them inaudible].

Yup.

Presumably, they’ll say, “Yeah, I’ve read a ton of books on this.” These three were just the best ones to read for somebody in your shoes.

Yeah, the other thing is that one of the mastermind groups that I’m in is actually run by a guy named Aaron Walker and he’s a millionaire. He lives out in Nashville, extremely successful. He’s in a mastermind with Dave Ramsey, lots of things going for him. So when it comes down to business, he has a lot of great ideas and so a lot of the recommendations that he gives are things that have benefited me directly. So finding a mentor, finding somebody to pay attention to really works out but some of the things he told me to try I’ve tried and they just don’t work for my market or they don’t work as well as they worked for his market.

So there are definite things there as far as the ability or payoff but everything he’s told me with very few exceptions has paid off. So when he recommends a book about business or about life or about some of these different ideas, I take it on. So he did; he recommended Essentialism that’s why I’m reading it.

I’ve talked to other freelancers and gotten recommendations for other books. And typically, unless it comes from somebody that I almost trust implicitly, I have to hear a recommendation for a book two, three, four times. Then it’s like I keep hearing about this from the people who are in the situation that I’m in and seem to be, like Jonathan said, moving up so this must be a part of what’s making the difference. But for one person, a lot of times it’s just – it may have blown their mind but in some cases, I’ve read those books and they just haven’t worked out as great sources of information for me so I usually wait until I’ve heard about it two or three times.

Yeah, sometimes you’re not in the right place to read a book. You might not be read for it or you might be pass the point. Another thing that’s happened to me – because in coaching, I have this reading list that I say to everybody, you start at the top of this list and keep reading, take it to the bottom.

When I first started out doing that, it was a little bit naïve because people come back with questions and I’ll be like, “Oh, wow. I should’ve really told them why I want them to read a particular book because there’s certain ones, for example, The Brain Audit by Sean D’Souza. Great book for writing sales pages. Sean, if you’re listening, I love you but a lot of people have complained that the book is – got a choppy writing style. He does it on purpose but it’s a turn off to some people and I say to them ‘just don’t worry about that’.

It’s a strangely written book but the inform – if you can just look past that, it’s almost like listening to somebody that has a strange speech pattern but that person still can say something that rocks your world. I’d be like ‘don’t get caught up in the way he writes it’. It’s like a million headlines with one sentence paragraphs broken out but just look past that and just listen to what he’s saying; listen to what’s underneath it and do not mess with the formula.

So the other books were all saying ‘do this’; pick and choose this particular book. Don’t mess with the formula. It’s not for everything; it’s for writing sales pages. And having that little bit of background that would’ve taken me 30 seconds to write down would totally change the way the person takes the book in – that’s another one.

There’s just plenty of them, like value-based fees like I said before. There’s just certain things that are [inaudible] really specific to work. If you’re directly working with a CEO or an extremely high level C-suite person in a Fortune 500 company. It’s not uncommon to need to be a little bit arrogant because you have to combat that ego almost always.

I’m not usually dealing with that. Probably anyone who listens to this show is not dealing with that so arrogance as a tool is not going to serve you well at all. So playing the diva card – it’s not going to work.

I’d love to know what’s on your reading list.

Yeah, I’ve got a link to it. I’ll share it in the show notes. It’s expensiveproblem.com/readinglist but we can put it in the show notes.

Alright, cool.

That can be my pick.

Oh, great books. Wow. I haven’t read all of these.

I should update the page with little blurbs about why I think each one’s important. So we talked earlier about the Double Your Freelancing Conference and a bunch of people have written really good notes about how it went, like recaps. Matt Inglot; Freelance Transformation did a podcast about this mindset of professional consultancy thing. So if you go to freelancetransformation.com, there’s the most recent episode. It’s about three minutes on that; I think it’s pretty interesting.

Another thing is if you go to my conference page for it at expensiveproblem.com/dyfc, there’s a link to download my slides and links to some other resources. My talks specifically was about the path to value based fees so it was like how hourly billing holds you back and hurts your business, then how value pricing works including a little bit of talk about how to write a proposal for value pricing and then finally three ways to transition from hourly billing to value pricing in a slow way so that you don’t screw up your whole business in one go. Sometimes if you’re giving people a loaded gun when I talk about value pricing because it’s not something that you can just switch to overnight. It’s very difficult to do that.

So that’s some good information. Also, Kurt Elster and Julie [inaudible] from Just Tell Julie. So kurtelster.com and Julie [inaudible] from justtelljulie.com, they both did good recaps of the conference. Yeah, and there’s probably some other – and on each one of their pages, there’s a ton of resources to other links. Kai Davis – kaidavis.com, he did a recap as well. He just have tons and tons of notes on each of the talks.

So if you can’t afford to buy videos or you don’t have time to consume that much video content or you don’t want to wait until the videos are available then you can access any one of these pages and get tons of emails. Not as good as being there but you’re going to get most, if not all of the information that was shared at the conference.

So if we can’t put all those – I’ll try to get all those in the show notes but you can also tweet me @jonathanstark.com and I can give you a few of those links if you’re interested.

Actually, I can go over to expensiveproblem.com and bid my top three books that I think all freelancers should read. First is The Positioning Manual by Philip Moran. We’ve had him on the show before and The Positioning Manual is just the bible – as far as I’m concerned, the bible of how to position your freelance business to attract crazy amounts of customers. So as he says in the book, the smaller your focus is, the bigger it gets. Focusing down and being a specialist is the most amazing thing you can do for your business.

Another excellent book that we’ve talked about on the show before is Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port.

We actually had him on the show to talk about the book.

Oh wow. That’s impressive. Yeah, he just released the new thing and he is crushing it. He just really knew series of materials, books turning classes, podcasts on Steal The Show; it’s about how to do amazing public performances. So whether it’s a talk at a conference or a job interview or whatever else, or a pitch meeting for a venture capital, he explains how to create a performance instead of just delivering a talk. He’s just – I’m super impressed with this guy. He’s great. [Inaudible] good on the show.

Oh, he was excellent.

Yeah.

Yeah, I’ll make sure we get a link to that in the show notes as well.

Cool. And then my third one is value based fees which we’ve already talked about at length but absolutely everybody should read that.

Yup. We’ve talked several times about value based pricing but it just makes a lot of sense and then everybody gets what they want.

Yeah. I did – one of the quotes from my talk that seem to get a lot of retweets was a lot of people want me to tell them how value based pricing works. They say, “Oh, but you’re just making that up.” And I’m like, “You just made up your hourly rate and you just made up that estimate of how many hours it’s going to take you. Everybody’s just making it up.” The difference is when you do value pricing, the client is making up the number instead of you making up the number and it changes everything.

Yup. I think you spend a few hundred dollars in my money on these books. [Laughter] I own a few of them but –.

It’s good stuff.

Yeah.

When I have new ones, I swap them out.

Yup. Cool. Alright, well while I am purchasing The Positioning Manual, I’ll go ahead and throw a few picks out there.

One of the picks that I have is Crowdcast. That’s what we’re using for this Q&A. It’s also what we’re using for Angular Remote Conf. It is super awesome so I’m really digging it. It’s just – I really, really like it. So anyway, I’m going to throw that out there.

Then, I’m also looking at putting up a page with some productize consulting as far as setting up Remote Conferences for other folks. So if you’re interested in that, send me an email – chuck@devchat.tv and I’ll get you some information. I don’t have the website up yet; I’m just putting it out there to see what people are looking at, but anyway, those are my picks. I’m also really loving my Pebble Time Steel.

I got mine last week, too.

Yeah, I think I mentioned it on the show last time but I am – I just love the fact that I can just leave my phone somewhere.

I went downstairs to take care of my kids with something or other and it was really interesting. I was like, “Okay, well I get [inaudible], somebody’s trying to reach me on Skype. Oh, this or that.” And yeah, I just love the thing.

Yeah, that’s great.

Yup. I want to get the Apple Watch and see how it compares to this point.

Don’t. No.

No?

No. I am both.

And what’s your opinion now? I want to know.

It’s not worth the money. It’s just not worth it. There’s a – we’re going to spon a whole new show and a bunch of haters but –.

That’s fine.

It’s expensive – it’s too expensive. Yes, it’s a beautiful hardware. By far the nicest hardware, no doubt. I’m wearing one right now as a matter of fact.

Uh-huh.

It’s really nice. It’s not as good as a Galaxy Gear or the Samsung Gear Live which is an Android Wear watch. For any of the actual interactions, all the software stuff is just not even close. The Okay Google stuff is way better than the Siri stuff.

Yes, all the animations are prettier, the haptics are way better on the Apple Watch so that tap on the wrist is amazing but everything’s slow, the battery life is atrocious which is a major problem if you ask me, and it’s just really – you hold it up to look at it, I just held it up to look at it and it didn’t come on. The screen’s not always on because the battery life’s already atrocious so they try to keep the screen off all the time. So then it doesn't come on when you need it and you’re trying to shake your hand or tap with your nose because the other hand’s full.

Another thing is it’s too nice for me to wear in the gym. I’m not wearing this watch to the gym. I’m not going to go sweaty, I’m not going to go running outside and have sun tan lotion slathered or sunblock slathered all over it. It’s a nice watch so you’re not going to use it for a bunch of the fitness stuff that it’s supposedly for.

I could go on and on but the deal breaker for me is the cost to battery life ratio. It does absolutely nothing that Android Wear doesn't do for half the price better. So I would definitely go – if you’re going to get one, I would go with the Asus Zen Watch which is probably the best looking of the Android Wear options in my opinion, or Pebble Steel which does far less. Pebble Steel, Pebble Steel Time or Pebble Time, Pebble Time Steel – they do far less than either of the smart smart watches but they last for seven to ten days on a single charge. They do all of the really key things that you want them to do.

The only thing it doesn't do that I wish it did do, I was hoping it would do it because – or maybe it will do it because it does have a microphone, is that you can’t say it like I can on my Android watch. Say, “Okay Google, remind me to send my taxes tomorrow at 3 p.m.,” and it’s really just as easy like that. You don’t have to wait, you can say it just like I just said it. It probably just recorded it on my watch over there [chuckles] but you can – I ride my bike a lot and being able to just talk to my watch and set a reminder for myself or set an alarm or a timer, I’m really missing that on the Pebble; I really wish they would add that. So we’ll see. It has a microphone so maybe it can do it.

Yeah. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t be able to do that because it’s Bluetooth, right?

Uh-hm.

I have a headset that’s Bluetooth that has a microphone in it and so I just hit the button and then I can talk to it, so I don’t know why it wouldn’t be able to activate the microphone on my watch and have some mechanism for sending the ‘Siri do this’ or whatever.

Right. Oh that reminds me, speaking of which, both Android Wear watches and the Pebble work with any iOS or Android phone.

Oh really?

Yeah. And the Apple Watch obviously only works with Apple products. So if you’re – if so dear listener, if you have an Android phone, in my opinion your two options are Pebble Time or Pebble Time Steel and one of the Android Wear watches and again I’d recommend the Zen Watch from Asus. I’ve seen it in person and I was like, “Dude, what kind of watch is that? It’s so awesome.”

My favourite thing in the whole world is when someone comes up to me and asks me if my $100 watch is an Apple Watch and I say ‘yes, it is’. [Laughter] My Apple watch is 550 bucks which is a joke. That’s ridiculous.

So the other question I have – I know this is completely off topic but that’s fine. The other question that I have is, so the Asus smart watch, do you ‘Okay Google’ or do you ‘Hey Siri’?

You ‘Okay Google’ it. So it connects to – I haven’t attached my – not all of the Android wear watches are compatible yet with iOS but there’s an Android Wear app for iOS and I’m almost positive that you should check – I’m almost positive the news on watches do work or [inaudible] will do. All the watched that are going to come out this year for Android Wear are going to be compatible and there’s some weird reason why the older ones aren’t but I can’t remember what it was. So you would say ‘Okay Google’ still.

Okay, so instead of sending off to Siri services, it sends off to Google Service.

The Google App in your watch, yup.

Okay.

[Inaudible] Google with Google Map. There’s an app for OS just called Google that you can use as – it’s like Android on your iOS.

Huh.

So if you’re a big Gmail person, you use a lot of Google Services, Google by far is the best place of recognition of all of them. It’s amazingly convenient to be able to say, “Okay Google, remind me to send my text tomorrow at three,” but if it doesn't recognize it, I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it’s my voice or something but Siri just does not work for me – on my watch. It’s always doing the wrong thing. I say always; it’s about 35% of the time, it does the wrong thing and then I’m just like – I want to smash it because I have to take up my phone anyway. And Heaven forbid, if someone was watching me and I was trying to be cool or try to demo it for someone like, “Look, how cool this Apple Watch is,” and then it fails. And then you’re like, “I feel like a tool because I just spend 550 bucks on this watch that doesn't work.” [Chuckles]

Yeah, we did an episode on iPhreaks with Neil Ford and he was giving us tips for training Siri so that she – he or she gets [inaudible] switch the voice, right? Gets better at –.

getting you.

Yeah. So basically what you do is on your phone, after you’ve told Siri to do something, you tap the screen once and then you can actually type in what you really said. And then it sends that back and then it gets better at recognizing what you’re saying.

That makes sense but [crosstalk].

Yeah, it’s got to be a hassle.

You don’t have to do that with –. I have great experience with Google. I text people with it all the time, just say, “Okay Google, text Erica that I’m going to be home in five minutes.” And then you see it go – and then it types it out and then it gives you three seconds to cancel it if it got it wrong but it almost never does.

Yeah, I’m having minor buyers or more now. I’m still super happy with the Pebble Time Steel but yeah, the Zen watch – the Asus Zen watch, it’s a hundred dollars less than I spent back at the Kickstarter campaign. If it works with the iPhone then –.

Double check because certain models do and certain models don’t. Eventually all the new ones will but I’m not sure.

Yeah.

That one’s very new.

But anyway, I’m really curious; I’m tempted to buy a couple of – at least one of each kind and then figure out how do you make your stuff work on the apple watch or whatever watch. It doesn't make sense.

Yeah, just ask me because I’ve got eight of them hanging right over here on my dresser.

Oh nice.

I bought them all for a while. Don’t feel too bad about the Pebble; it’s definitely the second best if not the best.

I’m seriously happy with it. I could’ve spent less money and gotten the voice feature – is the only thing that I’m seeing there.

But you’d have to charge it every single night.

Oh, that’s true. With the Pebble, I’ve been wearing it since – when did I charge it, Friday? Thursday or Friday?

Yeah, you never think about it.

And it’s like halfway.

With the Pebble, every once in a while maybe I’ll throw it in the charger while I’m in the shower. When I think of it, it doesn’t matter. I can go on a trip. From travelling, I brought both my – I just went on a four day trip, brought my Android watch because the watches are super useful when you’re travelling with smart watches because if you got TripIt or something installed or you’re getting updated notifications from your airline – I use United all the time, they’ve got a pretty good app. And it’s just like ‘boop’ in your wrist – oh gate change to whatever; or boop, you’ve got an hour to make your connection or boop, whatever. Flight is on time or you just landed and you’ve got – you’re at gate this, you need to go to gate that. It’s so great having that right on your wrist and I not having to keep pulling out your phone.

It was great because I had the Samsung watch – Gear Live was good but I forgot to bring the charger so it was dead after a day and useless and there’s no place to buy Samsung charger anywhere. But on my Pebble time, it lasted the whole trip, no problem. It was still at 50% when I came back and it had been vibrating like crazy for five days.

Yeah. So my take and then we’ll probably wrap up because we’ve been talking about this for about ten minutes longer than this call was supposed to go but just looking at the watches – I was just looking at the Apple Watch and the Pebble Time. I definitely like the battery life, and I guess its color e-ink is what they used on here and it’s an LCD or LED screen on the Apple Watch which is why it sucks so much power.

And it’s a touch screen and Pebble’s not.

Yeah. The thing that I liked about the Apple Watch is basically that it seems like a lot more apps are going to be integrating with it than with the Pebble.

That’s true.

But the flip side is that I think the most interesting and useful feature of the smart watch is the notifications which the Pebble time does just fine.

Uh-hm.

I just had to go and turn it off on my phone. Don’t give me notifications about this because those are the same ones I get on my watch and I know that on the Apple Watch, you can turn them off just for the watch. But the other thing was that I would love to have a fitness tracker on my smart watch and that’s everything that the Apple Watch is really interesting for.

Yeah, if you don’t mind ruining your $600 watch. That’s the problem; I don’t get it. I don’t know who that watch is for. It’s too nice to have all these fitness features in it. Other than straight up step tracking, I’m not wearing that thing to the gym. I’m not going swimming with it.

That’s true.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Last thing I’ll say to compliment the Pebble is that any garden variety web developer can program apps for it – no problem.

Yup.

It’s really easy to hack. You can put stuff on it easily but just for the JavaScript. And if you want to go nuts, you can write some C-code which looks a lot like JavaScript although it’s a little bit trickier but you can go –. I think if you google for – I did an O’Reilly talk about how to build an app for ten different platforms in one hour and it included Pebble as one of the platforms. There’s something called Pebble.js that people should look for if they’re interested in hacking apps into a smartphone.

It’s pretty sweet. It’s amazing. Pebble’s really cool.

This guy that has a JavaScript podcast, I might be interested in getting somebody on to talk about that.

Alright, cool. Well let’s go ahead and wrap this up since we’re completely –.

Off topic and over time.

Thanks for the folks who watched this and –.

Thanks Chuck.

Yup. Catch you later.