It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.
It’s a strategy I went on to use throughout my career: there’s no harm in asking.
This was how every business worked—creating the demand, building the systems and processes, hiring other people to do the work, then charging enough for whatever it is that you’re selling that you turn a profit. Counterintuitively, you didn’t actually do most of the work yourself, and yet you earned the profits for putting it all together.
After learning my lesson with the JavaScript project, I decided to charge customers $60 an hour for my programmer’s time. In doing so, I had the realization that if you sell your own time hourly—say, as a contractor or employee—you can only ever sell eight to twelve hours in a day. You’re capped. But if you sell other people’s time, or better yet, a service with a markup on your cost, you can grow your income infinitely without doing the actual day-to-day work.
My sales technique was simple: be fun to drink with and ask a ton of questions about whomever I happened to be talking to. It worked surprisingly well. At conferences, I quickly started to learn that the most important business connections were made in bars, gossiping with drunk executives. Buying a round of drinks often generated a huge return on investment.