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honestyboxx: unfolding the willingness-to-pay for advice

Posted on Posted in economics, Matter of BIZ

As an economist that has been a freelance for the last five years, I had very much in mind that making project proposals was much of a puzzle with regards to pricing my services. Actually, sometimes pricing your services is more an art rather than a science, due to the fact that you need to ‘guesstimate’ the value the client is going to obtain (and perceive) from the project, and how much budget they have available to proceed with it.

This turns even more complicated for the smaller projects, and even mission impossible when we are talking about ‘micro advice’. How much should you charge for 15 minutes of your time? Will anyone be willing to pay 50 pounds for getting your advice being delivered in a quarter of an hour? Further, if you don’t ask them to hire you for such short assignments, they won’t hire you (one of the rules of closing a sale!).

Hopefully, for the last year I had been using a Social CRM solution called CubeSocial. Why ‘hopefully’? Hey, because thanks to being an avid CubeSocial blog reader I bumped into the perfect solution to sort out the problem above: honestyboxx. Serendipity led me to  confuse ‘Ask a question’ with a ‘Comments’ box, which allowed me to realise a new plugin was being tested on CubeSocial’s website. Got’cha! I contacted Linda & Mark, CubeSocial co-founders, to happily find out they were starting up (again) with this new venture. By the way, I kindly appreciate they allowed me to beta-test the service, which is already on!

Would I recommend the service? Seriously!? That’s the ideal widget for your website or blog:

  1. Works better than a contact form, since the person contacting you is already aware that you are giving advice for a fee (not for free, notice the R).
  2. You get to extract the willingness-to-pay of the prospective client (you can always reject the question if you find the suggested price does not meet your reserve fee).
  3. Engagement works neatly, or as the service name suggests, honestly. So, I would say this is a service that helps you be more transparent and socially responsible (yes, that’s CSR as well).

So, shall I recommend it? Of course, and I’m using it too 😉