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:
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.
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.
I treated those early relationships like a testing ground to figure out my product-market fit.
Where could I actually help a company move the needle? What types of problems did I enjoy solving? Where did my advice land, and where did it just add noise?
Over time, the pattern became clear. Product growth and analytics were my sweet spot. That’s where I could offer evidence-backed advice, grounded in repeatable patterns and examples, not just some hypothetical opinions.
On the other hand, when conversations drifted into core product strategy or branding, I felt I couldn’t contribute as much.
Those early engagements helped me clarify my “superpower” and define what I could confidently sell. That’s what product-market fit looks like when the product is you.
Step 2: start monetizing
There’s a common pitfall I see: people start for free and stay there forever.
They keep showing up, week after week, adding value, but the idea of bringing up compensation feels awkward.
So beat the awkwardness and go for that conversation. Here’s a message I’ve used in the past to introduce the topic in a natural way:
“I’ve really enjoyed working with you, and I feel like our conversations have been impactful. If we’re going to continue, I’d love to explore whether there’s an opportunity to be compensated for my time.”
I began monetizing my advising work 2-3 years into my solopreneurship journey, after I felt more confident in the value I could provide.
My first paid engagement was with a small startup, and I took equity only. I was still working full-time at SurveyMonkey, so I wasn’t relying on advisory work for income. I just wanted to work with interesting companies, and equity made the conversation simple.
“What’s your standard advisor equity?”
I’d take whatever they answered, without negotiating. Some compensation felt better than none, and I still didn’t feel I was in a place to dictate pricing.
Eventually, a company asked if they could pay me in cash instead.
I had no idea what to charge, so I said $100/hour. They agreed, and that became my baseline.
A few months later, another client told me, “We usually pay advisors $200/hour. Would that work?” Of course it did :). That became my second baseline. But I never raised rates for existing clients, I just let pricing evolve with each new engagement.
Step 3: raising prices
About five years into my solopreneurship journey, I was talking to a peer, an advisor at my level, who said they charged $500/hour.
So I decided it’s time to test my prices as it felt like a natural progression.
At that point, I had built traction (advising dozens of companies), I knew where I added value, and I had repeatedly helped companies solve growth issues. And I was still doing all of this on the side of a full-time role.
The next time a potential client asked me for a rate, I tested it: “$500/hour”, I said. They agreed without pushback. From then on, that became my standard for new engagements.
Some clients paid in equity, others in cash, and some split it 50/50. I let them choose the model that worked best for them.
Step 4: going pro
Eventually, I’ve built enough courage to leave my full-time role for the first time and went all-in on solopreneurship (I’ve been isolating between being a solopreneur and having a full-time job ever since). It wasn’t a blind leap - it was a de-risked decision. I knew advising was the model I wanted to double down on as my main way to engage with the market.
But it did force me to re-evaluate everything, especially pricing. I had more time, more mental space, and I wanted to be intentional about who I worked with and how I engaged.
At this point, I’d climbed the ranks in my full-time career. I was operating at the SVP level, with a much stronger brand and track record behind me.
But I still didn’t know how to price myself.
Then, one day, I had coffee with Casey Winters in San Francisco.
“How much do you think I should charge?" I asked.
He didn’t hesitate: “$4,000/hour.”
I laughed. “That… insane!”
But he stood his ground, and he convinced me that’s what the market was paying for senior-level strategic advisory, especially for someone with recognition and operating experience. It still felt crazy.
A few weeks later, I was on a new client call and my mind was racing: “Do I stick with $500/hour? Do I go for $4,000?”
I remember coming out of my home office and telling my husband: “I can’t believe I just sold an hour of my work for $4000!”
But this bump in pricing also changed how I approached engagements. If I was going to charge this much, there had to be bells and whistles around it! So from then on:
I only charged for meeting hours: all preparation, follow-ups, and Slack access were included.
I included ‘free’ on-site visits: presenting at all-hands, running team workshops, or whatever served the clients best.
I implemented a pricing ladder: first hour at $4,000, but the following ones had a dramatically reduced price.
I didn’t stress about overages: I let clients go over when needed without charging them.
I worked on a retainer model: with my time as the core resource to manage, and contracts clearly outlining hourly commitments per week.
Flexible on equity/cash mix: some companies paid me in equity only, some in cash only, some did 50/50.
There’s also a cap on how many of these “hours” I could realistically sell in a week - and spoiler, it’s not 40. Most companies only needed about an hour a week, but I gave each one a lot of mental space. The max I could handle was ~6 engagements at a time; anything beyond that and context switching would fry my brain.
At this point, investing in my own ‘brand’ started making more sense - I started writing about what I was working on to build visibility, which naturally attracted people who were dealing with the exact challenges I was writing about. This helped me create more stable ‘pipeline’ of clients, which was a must as I no longer had full-time job.
Step 5: evolve as you go
As my advisory work matured, so did my pricing, and not just the number - the structure too.
I started noticing that I’d have a great kickoff with the founder, but once I started working with the team, something would fall flat: either they didn’t have the bandwidth to work on what I was proposing, or they weren’t aligned. The engagement would fade out after a few months, and I’d leave feeling like I hadn’t delivered real impact.
If I was going to charge thousands of dollars, that wasn’t acceptable. So I changed the model.
Before signing any client, advisory, or interim, I began offering a free 90-minute workshop where we’d dive into a real challenge. That allowed the team to see how I think and allowed me to see how they worked.
This helped me avoid short-term mismatches and focus on long-term fits.
After two years, the demand for the workshops grew, and some companies wanted just that one session. So I evolved the offer again. Now, I offer paid standalone workshops. Some companies stop there, while others use it as a start of ongoing advisory work.
It’s like any other product: as it evolves, so does pricing and onboarding.
It’s an evolution, not a revolution
You don’t wake up one day and charge $X,000/hour.
You build up to it. By the time I reached that value, I had over a decade of operating experience, leadership titles, years of advisory work behind me, repeatable success stories, and a personal brand that consistently attracted the right kind of clients.
When people jump to premium rates too early, without a clear offer, proven outcomes, or validation, it never works. You might get lucky once, but it won’t stick for long.
The market will tell you when you're ready to level up. Until then, you do the work that, one day, will get you there.
Edited with the help of Diana Bernardo.
This is so true, often overlooked
This is so helpful (and true!)