Summary: <br> Jonathan Stark is a former software developer who is now on a mission to rid the world of hourly billing. He is the author of Hourly Billing Is Nuts, the host of Ditching Hourly, and writes a daily newsletter on pricing for independent professionals.<br> <br> <br> Links:<br> <a href="https://www.jonathanstark.com/">https://www.jonathanstark.com/</a><br> <a href="https://twitter.com/jonathanstark">https://twitter.com/jonathanstark</a><br> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanstark/">https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanstark/</a><br> <a href="http://valuepricingbootcamp.com">http://valuepricingbootcamp.com</a><br> <br> <br> Transcript:<br> Jon Ash - 00:57 - So before we get started, would you mind just sort of telling us about yourself, how you got started in the industry and such? <br> <br> Jonathan Stark - 01:03 - Sure, I mean it goes way back. My Dad got a, the original IBM PC in like 81 and I started coding basic when I was, you know, really young, maybe 12, 11 or 12, 13 around there, you know, making like Ascii animation art and that sort of thing, you know, go to line 80 and then I got away from it for a long time. Oh really? Fell in love. Electric Guitar. Did that for a long time, but it always, I kept getting pulled back into computers. Even when I was in a band, we needed somebody to manage the mailing lists, so I got a laptop from somebody in an access database on it and I was doing mail merges and I'd go to Kinko's and print them out and send them actual stamps in the mail. For years I went to Berkeley. You've got a music degree and for years I did the musician thing, but always I was doing computers in the background, whether it was for postcards or for, you know, freelance gigs, doing like quark express, it know to build catalogs, paper catalog. <br> <br> Jonathan Stark - 02:01 - So you can tell them I'm a little bit gray, you know, going back to computers in the nineties, a pre internet stuff. And eventually I, I landed a job, um, I converted sort of a freelance job into an in house job at Staples headquarters in Framingham, mass. I worked in their advertising department and I was a dba, so database stuff really loved it. It was super into databases. I came in through access and filemaker started sql. And then around 2003 I went out of my while, I didn't go on my own, but I left there and I went into a boutique, a filemaker from really successful one in Atlanta, moved down there and ended up managing that place. I was the vp there, usually around 10 to 15 developers that all billed hourly. And we made custom database software for all sorts of clients all over the world. Big, small and in between. <br> <br> Jonathan Stark - 02:59 - Uh, and while I was there, I know it was my job to make sure the hours, get all the developers get your hours and get you hours and we have to send out invoices or we're not going to make payroll, you know, you know, I spent tons of time talking about hours, although we talk about is our. So I would say that was the person who, one of the, one of the main people who would do estimates for new clients. So like, uh, we think is going to be this many hours. And then that many hours later we'd be halfway done. So they'd be yelling at us and we'd be like, well, you know, these, uh, you know, they'd be like, why? Why was this, why did this take so long this week? And it didn't take that long last week. And we just talked about hours all the time. A building internal systems to track hours and turn an invoice hours, hours, hours. We get to the point where I was, I was at a sort of an impasse because it became evident that our best to developer who was really fast wrote Immaculate Code, could jump into the most complex customer situation and just get it immediately and bang out a solution was pretty much losing us money <br> <br> Jonathan Stark - 03:58 - because he had the highest salary.
