The Official Dayslice Guide: Setting Your Rate

Congrats on taking the leap! Whether you're launching coaching sessions, micro-consulting, or testing the water with a variety of different services, we applaud you for taking the first step 👏🏽

While there's no rate calculator out there which will spit out your perfect rate, we'll guide you through a series of questions that will help you set your rate.

First, and most importantly, remember, your rate today does not need to be your rate tomorrow. The beauty of setting a rate is that you can always gauge demand at a specific price and then adjust it accordingly.

Hopefully, this takes the pressure off of getting it "right" the first time around! With that in mind, let's jump into it.

Question #1: What is your goal in the next three months?

Based on your goal for your Dayslice page, you may choose to price your services differently. If you are interested in building a business with a high frequency of bookings and don't have existing customers, you may choose to initially price your time lower than your long-term rate in order to get your initial bookings and build up testimonials on your Dayslice page.

If you have an existing customer base and are transitioning from another booking tool to Dayslice, this transition could be a great opportunity to test the waters with rates that are higher than your norm.

Question #2: What is the existing demand for your time?

Assuming you aren't already monetizing your time with micro-services, a great proxy for demand for your time is your follower count across social media and whether you've built an audience around a particular niche. It's also useful to measure the engagement of your audience—do you frequently get DMs, replies, or comments with questions? A subset of these folks is likely to be willing to book time with you to chat.

Based on our data, Dayslicers who have the highest demand tend to have built engaged followings around a specific niche and have at least 1,000 social media followers. As your audience grows, you'll be able to increase your rates and launch additional services.

Question #3: Who is your audience and what is the value of your niche?

Understanding your target audience will help you think through pricing. Primarily selling to a specific geographic market (e.g India versus the USA) will inform price points as well as key characteristics of your audience.

A career coach for early career professionals may price less than a career coach helping people make a late-career switch. The reason? People later in their careers are likely to have a higher budget to pay for support during a career transition.

Another thing to think about is the type of value you are providing to your customers. If you're helping people optimize landing pages for conversion, you are helping an existing business that is generating revenue increase its revenue. Reframing the question from "What is the price of one hour of my time" to "What value am I delivering to customers?" should instill confidence in increasing your rate.

Question #4: What service are you pricing?

Dayslice users don't have one hourly rate but have rates that vary based on the types of services they offer. Services that are more structured and output-oriented generally can be priced higher than more free-form, casual sessions. Here's an example of someone who has one service which translates to $100/hour and another service which translates to $150/hour.

The first service, Twitter DMs Q&A, is an unstructured time where the customer can "pick the brain" of the person they're booking. Meanwhile, the Landing Page Audit is a far more structured conversation with a concrete deliverable. You'll notice that this Dayslicer also asks for the link to the landing page beforehand so we can assume he's doing some prep work before the call. Additional work beyond the call should also be baked into your pricing.

Question #5: How much availability do you have?

Imagine you have an audience of 3,000 for your Substack on product design. You have a hypothesis that people in your subscriber list would pay for design reviews of their work. You'll want to price differently based on whether you want to do 1 design review a month or 10 design reviews a month.

The fewer sessions you offer, the higher you can charge and likely book all of them. Your audience will have varying levels of willingness to pay and if you only care about capturing a small number of them, you can price higher than if you want to capture a broader group.

Lastly, when in doubt, price yourself higher! Bet on yourself.

Have an idea on how to price yourself? Be sure to read our other guides for starting your side hustle: Identifying Your Niche and Getting Your First Booking.

👉🏽 Launch your Dayslice page today