The fastest model to enter: no accounts, no proxies, no fleet — only your time and what you know.
What is actually being bought
Not information; that is freely available. What is bought is a shorter path: not spending three months on mistakes you have already made. Which means the value of a consultation tracks how much you have done with your own hands.
What to sell
- A teardown. An hour looking at one specific project and saying what to do.
- Setup. More expensive than an hour, because you are answerable for the setup rather than for advice.
- Ongoing support. Regular calls while the client does the work themselves — the steadiest form financially.
Pricing the hour
Not «what feels fair» but from the outcome. If your teardown saves someone a month and the money they would have wasted, the hour is worth accordingly. Too low a price works against you here: it reads as «this advice is not about money».
Preparing properly
An hour unprepared is a chat; an hour prepared is work. Ask in advance what the project is, what has been tried and which numbers exist. Half an hour of reading beforehand turns general advice into specific advice, and specific advice gets bought again.
Leave a short written summary afterwards: what to do, in what order. Half of what was said will be forgotten, the list will not — and it is the list people judge the value by.
Where the free line sits
Answering questions in chats is a shop window and it works. Pulling apart an entire project for free is already consulting. The boundary is simple: a general answer is a window, a specific teardown is work. Your window material is the blog and the guides.