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Free Gets Fifteen Minutes: Four Rules for Making Money From What You Know

Four rules from fifteen years of teaching: free consultations get fifteen minutes, be a community contributor before you think about money, don't look down on things you assume anyone could google, and how to spot the frauds in your own field.

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  1. Free Consultations Get Fifteen Minutes
  2. Be a Community Contributor First, Worry About Money Later
  3. The Curse of Knowledge
  4. Instructors Who Sell Convenience and Skip the Risk

Free Consultations Get Fifteen Minutes

Book a 15-minute BD call for free. Want a second one, that’s a paid consultation, and the fee can be credited against the engagement if it closes. This is the mature approach law firms and accounting firms have used for years, and it reliably filters out clients who never intended to pay.

I’ve been teaching for 15 years. I started out answering anything for free, and now the most I’ll give away is 15 minutes. Free will absolutely get treated like dirt by plenty of people. No-shows, rudeness, freeloading, I’ve seen all of it. None of us are saints.

Be a Community Contributor First, Worry About Money Later

The best ideas usually aren’t the ones you thought up alone. They come from being deep in a community and solving its problems.

Stop trying to monetize every idea. Be the generous, enthusiastic person who shares things, and once you have roots in that community, those people become your first customers.

The Curse of Knowledge

Information you think anyone could google is information plenty of people are genuinely grateful someone collected for them. If they can sell it, that’s a skill, and as long as nobody gets hurt there’s nothing to criticize.

Threads really is the most brutal adversarial review tool vibe coding has.

Instructors Who Sell Convenience and Skip the Risk

Any instructor who talks about convenience and never about risk, security, permissions, or review can basically be treated as a scam.


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