Which is worth more, Kind of Blue from Miles Davis, or the third Boston album?
It depends on your taste. I hope we can agree, though, that the fact that Miles spent four days on his album and Tom spent eight years on his is irrelevant.
Sometimes, we buy the story of inconvenient creation. The carrots at the farmer’s market or a hand-crafted piece of pottery is worth more because we know the focus and care that went into the creation of an item.
But software isn’t worth more when it’s hand-coded, and WhatsApp didn’t get acquired for billions of dollars because they had thousands of employees.
On the other hand, when British Petroleum paid Landor millions for a new logo, the meetings and effort and deniability were part of what they were paying for. The Nike logo isn’t powerful because they spent a lot of time or money on it…
Freelancers are close to their work, and it’s easy to tell ourselves that what we sell is our effort. That’s an error. There’s rarely a correlation between effort and value.
Even if you charge by the hour, you’re not selling hours. You’re selling something clients can use.
Clients will pay more for something useful than something that was difficult.