 Thank you. Is this on? Oh, yeah. Thank you. So, yes, you are too cheap. It's a story about two clicks, and it's a very, very personal story. It's my personal story, but I strongly believe it's also your personal story. So, who am I? My name is Tomar Zaman. I'm a Slovenian, so I got to drove here. I'm a full stack developer, used to be a freelancer, now I'm more of a project manager, and I'm a DevOps fanboy. Can you raise your hands whoever knows what DevOps is? That's a good amount. So, for you that don't know, so you have developers on one side that write code, and you have system administrators or operations that manage the servers, and these two parties hate each other, like deeply hate each other, so that's why we're here, the DevOps guys, we love everyone, and we try to make both parties work together for a common result which are better performance websites. And as you can see, I also do some dumb stuff from time to time. The next, the best role in my life is, of course, being husband and a father of four. They said, I should say hi, so hi. And I'm so, thank you. And I'm also the founder of a company called Codable. We're basically like an Airbnb for WordPress services, or Tinder, if you want, we matchmake. So, onwards with the story. By show of hands, how many clients, how many of you heard that from your client? Yeah, I knew it. How many of you said it yourself? Yeah, I knew that too. So, our story begins with my twins being born, and I had to move to the most remote part of Slovenia, which is like really, really far. You see the white there, that's the end of the world, you fall over. So, and the problem was that there was no online business, it's a really, really remote rural area, and I was struggling to find business as a web developer. So, like we all do, we're all problem solvers. What I did is, I checked online, and I found this amazing world of online outsourcing services. Well, it was amazing until I tried to apply for the first project. And as it turned out, I had to compete with many, many, many, many, many 50-ish developers for a project worth 500 bucks. And those developers were literally racing to the bottom when it comes to pricing, right? I would charge 20, 30, 40 euros an hour, whereas they were charging four dollars an hour. So, it's a race to the bottom that benefits nobody. So, if you still work through any of the online outsourcing services, I urge you do not succumb to the temptation of lowering your prices in order to get the work, to get to land the project. Why is that? Well, if you think about it, there are developers in US, but not known in US also in other places that work for a company we all love to hate. And they write exactly the same language we all love to hate, which is PHP, and making several times more money than we are, right? We are charging 20, 30, 40, whereas these guys and girls, they make hundreds per hour. Can you show me, can you show by show of hands everybody that knows at least someone that charged more than 100 bucks an hour? Okay? Now, which one of you does that? So, to the ones that didn't raise your hand, why? Why? You have to ask why. So, I asked myself why, and I decided it's time for an experiment, and yeah, I'll just go ahead, raise my prices, see if it works. But I was afraid. I was afraid that I'm not good enough. Sonya gave a speech earlier about the imposter syndrome, so I won't go into details here. You should definitely check it out on WordPress TV. My second fear was, what if I don't get any clients? And the last one was, what if the projects are too hard for me? Now, I will address the first fear a bit. What if I'm not good enough? So, I ask you, who of you here went to computer science course or school or, yeah, wow, that's an amazing proportion. Who of you that raised your hand or anybody else for that matter attended work, sorry, web workshops that teach you HTML, CSS, JavaScript, not many, right? So, what if I'm not good enough is just a stupid fear, because we became web developers, mostly at least by ourselves. We spent a lot of time, evenings, when everybody was out drinking, partying. We were teaching ourselves how to code. We still do, because the web is an ever-evolving technology, and there's no pause, no break for us. We constantly learn. So, what if I'm not good enough is just not good enough. It's a sucky fear. Don't be afraid, right? The school didn't teach us how to code. We taught ourselves. Thank you. Now, the second fear is, what if I don't get any clients, right? But you admitted yourselves, all of you. You know people that sell their hours based on starting with $100 an hour, so they do exist, right? So, this fear of not getting any clients is irrelevant. It doesn't exist. So, don't be afraid to raise your prices. There are clients and companies that will pay $100 plus an hour. Do it. Now, the last fear is, what if the projects will be also, will be too hard, right? Well, the thing is, we are all, first and foremost, we are all problem solvers. We solve problems. So, there is no such thing as a project too hard. What do you do if you find an obstacle? You Google it. You stack overflow. You ask a friend. You hire a friend, right? Now, in last year in Seville, I was attending this contributor day, which you should all do tomorrow, okay? It was really an amazing, an amazing day. And one thing that stood out the most is Luca Sartoni. He taught us how to speak on the stage. I hope I'm doing well, by the way. So, he said that every story needs the bad guy. Every story needs a villain. So, who is that bad guy, the villain? He is. Is he still here? Why? Well, because he gets to have all the fun. He travels through the world. He speaks at the conferences, right? He takes photos and publishes it on WordPress, on Twitter, right? And we're all just like, right? Because we want to do that. We want to achieve that. And, you know, when he's doing the traveling, we're doing the code. So, why is that? What is met better than, in better than we are? And the truth is, we are our own enemies. We are villains in this story. Why? Because we fail to learn one important thing. And that is business. The business aspect of everything, right? We are not doing this because we're bored. We're doing this to earn money, right? So, if we look at what business is, it's, in my opinion, based on three major components. One is sales and marketing. The other one is communication. And the last one is code, right? And I'm, you know, I've done this talk before and I sense like, no, but code, it's like holy grail of everything. No, it's not. Code is just a means to an end. Now, what I respect a lot in our U.S. counterparts, which I think that we Europeans have a lot to learn from, is their attitude towards value, towards selling, right? They are raised from small children selling lemonade to people. Why? Because they are thought that if there's one person thirsty, that means you can provide some value and expect a sort of payment in return. We don't do that. Here in Europe, what most of us feel like is like we're kind of imposters, like we're forcing people to do something they don't want to do. So, we mostly suck at sales, right? So, we need to get better at selling stuff, right? If you can find one client, you can find 10 clients. And the best part in our business is that our lemonade is WordPress, right? This is our lemonade. This is what we can sell. Well, not directly, it's open source, so yeah, GPL and all that, but still, right? And there's three points, something billion people online today. So, how are you afraid of reaching out? I made the same mistake. I approached local businesses, you know, that were struggling in the times of recession. I didn't look outside the borders, you know, and now I can proudly say we serve more than 25,000 customers in U.S. while the company is based in Europe. So, it does work. Let me tell you another story. So, this is Anna, meet Anna. She's from Stock Photo, something. So, as you can see, Anna is in a bathrobe. She just came from a morning run, ready to take a shower, to take a bath, to clean herself up. So, she's not late for a meeting, right? And as Anna starts pouring water into the hot tub, something breaks, right? And there's this flood coming from beneath the hot tub. So, what does she do? Like everybody, she calls a stock plumber. So, the stock plumber comes in and just, you know, bends over and kind of tightens one screw, right? It tightens one screw and it takes him two minutes, right? And after he's done, he says, that will be $200, ma'am. And she willingly pays that $200, right? Now, why is that, right? He only use five minutes. Like us, it only takes two clicks, right? So, what I'm trying to emphasize here and if there's anything I want you to take from this presentation is that it's not about the screw. It's about value, right? If our stock plumber didn't fix that stock hot tub, then it would be leaking all over Anna's place, right? It would do, the flood would do damage on her floor, on the walls, on everything, right? He prevented that. And that would cost Anna maybe $5,000, you know, making things up. But I hope you get my point, right? Now, I have the next slide I added just the other day because it resonated with me a lot. And you, yeah, you can read it for yourself. Do you agree? See? So, the question now is, how do I start? As I said earlier, business is three-part team. Sales and marketing, communication and code. And coincidentally, we were at work, sorry, WooComf in Austin, Texas, a couple of months ago. And actually, by coincidence, I saw they have, you know, same kind of slogan for WooCommerce, right? Sell, develop, learn, right? It's in the same general direction, right? So, how do we solve these issues? First, sell yourself. Sell yourself? Because clients, and how do you sell yourselves? Clients do not care about how awesome coder you are. They do not care the code. Now, I'm going to say something blasphemous. They don't care about WordPress either. Right? What they do care is their problems and who and how and when those problems are going to be solved. And they're also control freaks, which is awesome. They should be because we are not, right? It's awesome because they teach us to communicate. They ask annoying questions, and you're usually the ones like, why, why? Like, oh, client, you're sorry, but we need to communicate a lot. We need to always be proactive, explain problems early, and most importantly, avoid excuses. Once you start with excuses, it builds a snowball, it gives you the lower hand, and your client will always be able to bully you about those. Avoid them. There's actually one excuse that I've seen over and over, even on Codable and on Elance and other competition, right? And I thought at first that, you know, our competitors and, I mean, the online outsourcing services were a threat to one another, but there's this excuse, and this excuse is, my grandma just died. And I've heard it 15 times, so it makes me wonder whether online outsourcing services are threat to old people rather to one another. So next step is to learn your tools. Like, really, really learn it. There's a lot of people I know that call themselves developers, not just WordPress, but developers in general, and, you know, what they do is maybe write a for loop, and this is not PHP, by the way, JavaScript, they know an if sentence, and, you know, that's it, and they call themselves developers. That is fine if they can sell themselves, but I urge you to always improve your skills. Who knows what these are, roughly, test runners? Almost everybody, congrats. That's super. A big round of applause for you. And I'm saying that, why? Because last year, I asked the same question and the percentage was much lower. So thank you, learn this stuff, and also learn who he is. This is also pretty important. Do you know who Uncle Bob is? Anybody? Okay, so look this up. Uncle Bob is the old school programmer, and he emphasizes what we know as solid principles. It's how to organize your code. Once you hear him talk, you will never get enough because it's really, really good. It's that good. Now, I may hear some of you thinking to yourselves, but I don't have the time to all this. Well, the solution is easy, actually. Charge more, right? Because if we look at, you've probably seen this in high school or university, right? It's a supply-demand chart or graph, or how do you say it here? Yeah. So, basically, what we see here is this is the amount of developers, right? Right here. Now, we cannot produce many new developers overnight, right? So in order to reach the equilibrium, we need to raise our prices so demand will go down. Think about it. If you don't do this, you're practically violating all the laws of the economy. So don't do that. Raise your prices. I can assure you, you will get clients. We all use Max. Some of us have fancy cars, not me. Some of us have other toys. And as you know, when you're buying something and you're doing your research on Amazon or wherever, you have to admit to yourself that the pricing does affect your decision-making, right? If it's expensive, then you automatically kind of perceive it as higher quality. Am I right? So if you charge more, if you say to a client, I'm not expensive, but this is my hourly rate, and you are able to communicate why, so you're able to sell yourself, then that client will perceive you as higher quality. So do that. And if you earn more for the same amount of time and you want to earn the same amount of money at the end of the time, it just means you will work less, right? So if you do work less, you have more time. And if you have more time, then you can educate yourself, right? If you have more time, you can sell yourself more. You can go out, visit all the amazing people at work camps, right? And if you have more time, you can have more fun. Maybe even join Matt on a trip someday. And I would like to close this talk also with one emphasis, which is opposite to what I've been saying right now, almost. You should work for free. And you can freely change the word free here with open source. And why? It's a conscious decision, right? It's not that somebody is making you do it. You decide it for yourself because you're charging more. You have more time and it makes you a good person, giving back to the community that we're taking a lot from or getting. It's addictive. What comes around goes around. And it's important to note this is also a business decision, right? Facebook, for example, open sources, a lot of their things, right? I mean, we all know React, right? It's a Facebook open source project. And they don't do that out of philanthropy. They do that to attract many, many, many eyes and heads and brains to the project to find bugs, to solve real world problems and to find those gems of developers that they can hire back into Facebook because they're in great demand. And it's a great filter to see who's who. And I know many friends in our WordPress community that also got poached into working for great businesses because they were contributing to open source. So always contribute back. Thank you.