Ask HN: How to approach learning business skills?
I'm an engineer startup founder. My partner is also an engineer. So we lack business expertise. What are some ways to reduce our knowledge deficit?
Good luck!
Here are a few things I have done over the years:
I went to free classes given by the local Chamber of Commerce.
Read books and articles.
Started a list called "Business Bootstrappers" so I can forward things from HN and have a record to return to. In theory, this might someday lead to actual discussion with like minded others.
Collected recyclables while incredibly poor and in desperate need of the money. This taught me a fair amount about making decisions like "Do I just need The Money today, no matter how much time and effort it takes me? Or is this is a situation where the extra time and effort costs too much and is really a bad idea? Where is the sweet spot here for making money at a reasonable margin of return for what it costs me to do this?"
Over the years, I have spent a whole lot of time pondering the question of how and what to charge other people.
I was a good student in high school and I sometimes felt like the teacher's were vindictively taking points off because I didn't spend enough time on it in their opinion. It was what I thought of as "sweat equity grading." It didn't really matter if it was right, they were just (seemingly) mad that I had the answer with seemingly no effort.
This experience has had me long wondering how to price things based on value to the customer rather than on time and effort on my end. There are sometimes comments on HN that indicate that you shouldn't really charge by the hour as that keeps you trapped as a wage slave. You need to figure out how to charge for value delivered as a separate question from time and effort on your end. That is the only way to really get rich.
It is also the only thing that makes sense for selling high level expertise. Kind of like the joke about the invoice that says something like "$1 for tapping the thing. $999 for knowing where to tap."
So I am trying to figure out how to sell my services by the "piece" rather than by the hour. I don't like selling by the hour. I am trying to commodify my services and say "X item costs $y amount" rather than charging by the hour for most things. That way if I run into a snag, I am not charging customers for what I didn't know and had to research, but, by the same token, if it was easy for me because I have years of experience, I am not undercharging because it only took me 10 minutes.
I am charging for those years of experience and the knowledge I have. I should get paid a reasonable amount because it saves them hours and hours and gets them something better quality than they could create on their own, not for my 10 minutes per se.