Rates exert gravity. If you charge more, you’ll spend your time talking to more sophisticated clients, working in better businesses, specializing in projects close to the money. These are compounding advantages. If you charge less, similar dynamics apply.
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A lot of low-sophistication freelancers get trapped in a cycle where their rates mean that they are hired by bozos, and then stiffed by bozos, because bozo. So they spent their time chasing bozo bucks, not getting better at delivery or pipeline management.
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Your community becomes other people whose businesses are constantly on the knife’s edge. If you experience success or threaten to, they will (not necessarily purposefully) try to sabotage you (e.g. by talking down your rates or by introducing clients who you should not talk to).
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The discourse in your community becomes toxic about money (hiya, artists). Good operators leave. The local socially acclaimed experts are not good at operating businesses (if they were, they would have exited, almost by definition).
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Folks sometimes ask me what to do if they find themselves in a bad market, like undifferentiated web design for local businesses. The right answer is probably “Leave.” Take skill set, add to it, apply to a better market. This rarely gets implemented.
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(I think there is an analogous mechanism in product businesses, too, and sometimes wish I had cut my teeth on something a bit more ambitious than the path I actually took, because it would have resulted in learning more, faster, and finding a better peer set faster.)
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Replying to @patio11
Are you implying instead of going small SaaS solo founder the typical SV founder path *may* have resulted in more faster learning (mo

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Replying to @mirchiseth
I think there are some ways for those distributions to overlap, but in the interest of rigor: do I feel I would have learned more over 5 years doing YC than running the companies I actually ran the first two times? Yes. Unambiguously yes. Do I regret meeting my wife? Nope!
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(I am cautiously optimistic that TinySeed and spiritually similar efforts plus the broader community sharing a body of practice will greatly accelerate the next generation of solo SaaS/etc entrepreneurs versus my generation.)
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