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Your plumber, your butcher, your dentist, and your baker have no problem raising their prices. But as a freelancer, you've decided to stay put?
Raising your rates is scary (I know), but if your expenses are going up and your invoices aren't, you're playing a losing game, my friend.
Hopefully this article gives you another way to think about it.
jasonglynn.substack.com
Asking for More Money Is Normal
Your plumber, butcher, dentist, and baker have no problem raising their prices. But as a freelancer you’ve decided to stay put?
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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Most web agencies undervalue speed because they treat websites like art projects instead of business tools.
When I work with founders, I rarely talk about design trends or premium features first.
I talk about launch dates.
Because time is the real cost.
Founders don't hire TeqStrive because they want award-winning design.
They hire us because their current site is costing them deals, their agency has been "working on it" for 3 months with nothing to show, or they need to be live before their competitor launches.
When I look at a web project, I'm not asking "how impressive can we make this."
I'm asking:
→ How fast can we get this live and converting?
→ What's the minimum needed to start closing deals?
→ What's actually blocking revenue vs. what's nice to have?
→ Can we launch in days instead of months?
Speed earns its value when it creates momentum.
If your business is losing deals, it's almost always because you're not live yet.
Your agency is on week 8 of "discovery."
Your competitor launched last Tuesday.
Your prospects are signing with whoever has a functioning site first.
This isn't a timeline problem. It's a priority problem.
And priority problems cost you customers.
→ When your site takes 12 weeks to launch, your competitor takes the market.
→ When your agency needs "just two more weeks" for the 4th time, momentum dies.
→ When you're still in wireframes while competitors are already iterating, you've already lost.
Good web development doesn't make things perfect. It makes things live.
If you're paying agencies and still waiting to launch, you're probably hiring for process when you need execution.
Hire for speed. Everything else follows.
What if you could practice your hardest client call before it actually happens?
I built a skeptical startup founder on Character.ai: Series A pending, burned by freelancers before, allergic to vague answers, and used him to stress-test a real discovery call.
He pushed on ROI. On timeline. On rate. On revision policy.
Slide through to see how it went.
This is genuinely useful. Not as a toy, as a rehearsal tool. You find the gaps in your pitch before a real client does.
What it's good at: stays in character under pressure, generates objections you hadn't thought of, forces you to articulate your value out loud.
Where it breaks: gets agreeable too fast if you don't push back, no memory across sessions.
Want to run your own discovery call with Jake?
👉 https://character.ai/chat/mcniunEMMbgyGf4KfmMSI302PTb2TdPgJ2dqAhTBg3Y
What would you use a character like this for? Drop it below.
This is brilliant! Sometimes I don’t feel I articulate my value well enough so I’m going to check this out
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