Noah Labhart

Thank you.

This is Code Story, a podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries who share what it takes to change an industry, who built the teams that have their back, keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was a pain. Yes, we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve.

Took off the shelf and dusted it off and tried to begin. To ride the ups and downs of the startup life. You need to really want it. It's not just about technology. All this and more on CodeStory. I'm your host, Noah Labhart. And today, how Jonathan Stark is known as the ditching hourly guy, teaching you how to price based on value. This episode is sponsored by Speakeasy.

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He attended the Berklee College of Music with a dual major in songwriting. He ended up going back to computers to make ends meet while he was gigging, and he figured out he really enjoyed watching people use the software he built. Outside of tech and professional life, he's married with two kids and two dogs.

He is an avid martial artist, as are his kids, and he got his second degree black belt at the age of 53. At his prior company, Jonathan was leading teams to build software. He wanted to hire senior engineers, but was told junior engineers would better fit the budget. Then it dawned on him. Hourly billing for a junior created more margin.

He wanted to pivot away from hourly billing as a company and went solo to figure out the best way to do this. Once he did, he never looked back. This is the creation story of Jonathan Stark and Ditching Hourly.

So this is really interesting because, you know, as we talked about, normally I ask questions around the MVP of your product, but I'm really curious about what the MVP was about this non-hourly model, right? When you stepped out and you started figuring out how to do this, what was your MVP and how long did it take you to come up with it and what sort of tools were helping you bring it to life?

I want to dive in a little bit to, you know, you grabbed the book that was your Bible, and that's what you're using to sort of build your own framework before you did your first proposal. And you mentioned some nuances there. You had to shift towards building things. Tell me about some of those nuances.

And I suspect in those nuances, you probably had to make decisions and tradeoffs around how you're going to, you know, shift from the service-based, value-based pricing to what you were wanting to do. And tell me about some of those that you had to work through.

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Visit speakeasy.com slash codestory to get started and generate your first SDK for free. So if we've moved forward from that point, right, you've gone out, you're solo, you figure out how to do the value-based pricing, you're getting clients, you're succeeding, right? And at some point, you decide to teach others how to do this. And I think...

I think I'm going to liken that to maybe like a, you know, a company roadmap or a product roadmap, right? Like, how did you decide it was time to do that? Or how did you decide it was time to take a next maturation step in the process for, you know, ditching hourly?

We had talked before about team, right? And I think you have an interesting viewpoint on team. And I'd really like to hear how you view team. You know, team can be important for some things and not important for others. But tell me, tell me how you view team. Do you ever plan to add a team to help run things at JonathanStark.com? Tell me about that there.

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