A solopreneur’s guide to pricing yourself

A decade-long journey from free work to premium advisory rates

Solopreneurship is running and building a business entirely on your own - no co-founders, no employees, just you. Unlike freelancers who typically sell time for money, solopreneurs often design their work to scale through advising, products, courses, or services they control end-to-end.

I’ve built a solid solopreneurship career by selling my hard earned knowledge - through advising, workshops, public speaking, courses, and interim work - where my brain became the product I was monetizing in the various ways. If you’re considering this path, start by reading Is Solopreneurship Right for You? Then come back here to learn how to price yourself.

---

“How much should I charge?! I have no clue! Gahhh!”

- Every solopreneur at the beginning of their journey.

But no one ever taught you how to put a price tag on your knowledge.

You end up navigating this uncertainty with a constant fear of either over- or undercharging. You do maths, ask around, and probably still pick the wrong number.

But pricing yourself isn’t much different from pricing any other product. It requires finding product-market fit, testing demand, and adjusting as you go.

So why does pricing yourself feel so much harder than it should? Because most people start with the wrong assumptions.

Why you’re probably pricing yourself wrongly

Most people try to solve pricing by leaning into one of two extremes:

1. They anchor pricing to their salary: they divide their full-time compensation by the number of working hours and assume that’s their hourly rate.

2. They ask around: usually to people who’ve been advising much longer and charge premium rates. Then, they copy those numbers without context.

Neither of these approaches works.

Let’s start with the first trap. At first glance, dividing your salary by the annual worked hours seems logical, but it ignores everything that makes solopreneur pricing different:

• Your ‘offer’ changes - the work you do as a full-time employee is quite different from what you offer as a solopreneur (advisor, interim, etc)

• Your full-time compensation usually included 20-30% in benefits, where as solopreneur contract work comes without any benefits from the company

• You likely received equity, sometimes worth as much or more than your base salary

• You’re now running a business, which requires admin work, and there is absolutely no way you’re going to work 40 billable hours per week

On the other end, copying someone who’s 10 years ahead and commanding premium rates from the get-go skips the entire validation process.

Beyond that, not all work should be priced the same:

• Project-based: this is the most execution-heavy, so it should be priced most similarly to your full-time compensation.

• Interim: should be priced higher than project-based, but still lower than advising.

• Advisory/consulting: the highest-leverage work, and highest priced per hour.

If you price all three the same way, you’re either leaving money on the table or making yourself unhireable.

“Right, but then what should I do?”

Let me tell you my story, it might help guide your journey.

Step 1: begin your solopreneurship journey while you still hold your full-time job

I’d never recommend quitting your full-time job and jumping into solopreneurship cold turkey. Treat it as an evolution, not a revolution. Start with side hustles while you’re still employed - so you can test hypotheses, validate demand, and feel things out before making the leap. I began my journey by doing both contractor & light advisory work.

Step 2: doing it for free until you find PMF

I didn’t charge a single dollar to my first ~5-10 engagements.

And I don’t mean one-off coffee chats with founders. These were real engagements, with recurring calls, discussions, and back-and-forth. But I never brought up compensation, because I didn’t yet know what I was offering.