Become a Luxury Without Sacrificing Leverage

How to monetize your expertise by rationing your attention, the one thing that runs out, while everything you've made keeps reaching more people.

Patrick McKenzie once published what he had charged as a software consultant over the years. His first gig paid $100 an hour. By his third year, his standard rate was $30,000 a week.¹

Looking back across those rates, he wrote that there was "virtually no difference in the mechanics of work done."

The work barely changed. The price did. So what moved it? Everything around the work: which clients he went after, what he offered to do for them, and how he packaged it.

If you're trying to monetize your expertise, you may be somewhere earlier on that road. You publish. Maybe you sell a product. Then the requests arrive: a quick call, a look at someone's pitch deck, an hour of your opinion. Each request takes time from the same week you need for the work that brought it.

Much of the advice on this lists the options (courses, coaching, consulting, memberships) and suggests combining a few. That's reasonable, and freelancers have been mixing them for years.² It skips a harder decision: what should you make scarce?

I'll call what you want to become a luxury, in one narrow sense (nothing to do with watches). Someone who has good alternatives still wants you, specifically, because they expect a different result when you're involved.

Two Kinds of Supply

An essay takes the same effort to write whether ten people read it or a hundred thousand. Books, software, recordings, and courses behave similarly once they exist. The next customer doesn't require another you.

Your attention works differently. An hour spent applying your judgment to one person's problem is an hour nobody else can have. It can't be copied, stored, or sold twice.

The copies aren't free to keep alive, though. Software needs support. Communities need moderation. A paid newsletter, as Kajabi's founder Kenny Rueter puts it, "is due next Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that, indefinitely."³ Count that work honestly. Even when it grows with the audience, it costs far less than working with each of those people yourself, and that difference is what I mean by leverage: reach that doesn't take a separate piece of your attention for every person it reaches.

So one business holds two kinds of supply. One can grow with demand. The other has a ceiling you already know, because it's your week. Limit your week before anyone wants it, or limit what could reach everyone, and you end up in one of two familiar failures.

Hard to Get Before Anyone Wants You

The first failure copies the visible habits of people in demand. They don't take every call. They keep waiting lists. They say no often. It's easy to conclude that being unavailable is what made them desirable.

But… they were in demand first. Unavailability means something only to people who already know what they'd be missing. Before that, nobody notices that you're unavailable.

Before anyone pays for your judgment, they need to watch it work. Public work is where that happens. An essay shows the questions you ask and the assumptions you won't accept. A product shows how you think, even when it's rough. A case study shows what changed because you were there. None of it costs you more time per viewer, and all of it lets strangers learn how you think.

When I look at the times I was sought out, in entertainment and in business, I can't trace any of them to one piece of public work. It was the body of work. A pattern only becomes visible once there's enough of it to see.

McKenzie's consulting grew out of a body of work too. For years, he had written openly on his blog and on Hacker News about how he marketed Bingo Card Creator, a small program for making bingo cards, results included. When he quietly let people know he was available, all three of his first clients, he wrote, "knew me well from the Internets."⁴ That year he called his blog and his participation online his single best source of leads, and he summed up what those emails said: "Do it again, except with less bingo this time, and more of our particular problem domain."⁵ They had watched his judgment work on his own business and wanted it applied to theirs.

The same pattern shows up far from software. In September 2009, the lettering artist Jessica Hische started Daily Drop Cap, drawing one decorative letter every workday until she had finished twelve alphabets. She already had lettering clients, and she hoped the project would keep her motivated when work was slow. It made far more people aware of her work. Seven years later, she said it had brought in more lettering clients, and that people were still asking her for projects based on single letterforms.⁶ They were asking for the kind of work she had shown in public hundreds of times.

After the first few engagements, McKenzie said, Bingo Card Creator stopped being the most credible evidence he could point to.⁷ He collected case studies from clients with good outcomes and put them straight into proposals for later engagements, and most of the jumps in his rate came right after an engagement went exceptionally well.¹ Evidence has to reach the people who decide, and some of the strongest evidence is the paid work itself.⁸

Different in a Way That Changes the Result

Being seen gets you considered. It doesn't make you hard to replace.

That takes a signature: something recurring in how you frame a problem, what you notice, what you cut, and what you choose, recognizable across your work. And it has to matter to someone. A distinctive style that doesn't change the outcome has no value to the person paying for it.

McKenzie's own premium, he wrote, was "not, not, not due to superior skill with Rails." He turned down gigs that were strictly engineering and went after projects "closer to the money," where his work touched a client's revenue directly.¹

Generic competence, even excellent competence, puts you in a comparison with everyone else who can do the job, and buyers tend to choose on rate. When your involvement changes the question being asked, the trade-off being made, or the direction being taken, buyers want you specifically, and your availability starts to matter.

So prefer work where your particular involvement can change the result. That's where scarcity has something worth protecting.

Rationing What Copies Freely

The second failure treats scarcity as the goal in itself and spreads it to everything: seat caps on a recorded course, a checkout that closes on a timer for no reason beyond urgency, essays locked away so they feel exclusive.

Each of those limits gives up reach, and reach should usually be the reason the thing was built. Picture a recorded course that could have taught ten thousand people, capped at two hundred. The other 9,800 never see how you think, and some of them might have become the people who ask for you.

Part of the confusion comes from treating price and scarcity as one decision. They're separate decisions. A course can be expensive and still open to anyone who pays. You can raise a price without capping how many people can buy, and a cap adds nothing just by being a cap.

Some limits do earn their cost. A live cohort where everyone gets real feedback is hard to run at five hundred people. A community is worth what its members bring, so who gets in matters. And if you promise support, the number of people you can actually support is a real limit. In cases like these, the cap makes the thing better for the people inside.

So before you limit anything reproducible, ask: does this limit make the offer better by enough to justify the reach it gives up? If it doesn't, let it scale.

Let Demand Set the Limit

Many people can reach your thinking. Fewer buy the products. Fewer still get a seat in a workshop. A handful get you, applied to their problem. The closer an offer comes to consuming your attention, the scarcer, more selective, and more expensive it should be.

The scarcity at the bottom should come from demand you can see. Start accessible enough to do exceptional work where people can see it. Keep publishing the evidence. Watch for requests that name you instead of asking for "a consultant." When the qualified ones outnumber what you can take, raise the price, take fewer, and choose.

Choosing is the part people skip. Higher rates pay more per hour, and McKenzie pointed to a second effect: charging more gives you "the wherewithal to decline work below your prevailing rates."¹ Use that room to pick the work where your difference matters most. That work tends to produce better results, better results make better evidence, and better evidence brings requests that are more specifically for you.

This loop is a model of how the pieces can feed each other, and it can stall anywhere: public work the people who can pay never see, a signature nobody values, a limit set before anyone was waiting.

When the Same Request Keeps Arriving

When the loop does work, it creates a different problem. Evidence brings requests for the kind of work the evidence shows, so the requests start to look alike.

McKenzie reached that point with email marketing. He had delivered the same kind of engagement to about five software companies and turned down many more because he had no time left.⁹ He saw two choices: keep doing it for about five new clients a year, or put it into a video course that taught companies to run the campaigns themselves. He made the course and sold it for $250 at launch, then $500, a fraction of what the engagement cost.¹⁰

On the podcast where he described this, his co-host Keith Perhac raised the objection people would have: wasn't he cannibalizing his own consulting? McKenzie called that "the exact opposite of the truth." Perhac agreed, and pointed out that the course held nothing back. It went through every step McKenzie took with clients.

McKenzie's explanation is useful. Clients want advice specific to their business, he said, even when it's the same advice he gives everyone, because someone has looked at all their factors first. When a decision might be worth six or seven figures to the company, that check lowers the risk. They want to know they aren't the rare case where the standard advice is wrong. That reason is strongest where a wrong call is expensive. A client with less at stake may be well served by the course alone.

Repetition had split the engagement in two. The part he had done five times had become a method, and a method can be recorded and sold to anyone. The part that stayed with him was judging whether the method fit one particular company, including the rare company where it didn't. Had he kept the whole engagement scarce, he would have been rationing the method along with the judgment. He wouldn't have chosen scarcity for its own sake, but he would have given up the same reach the second failure gives up.

Go through everything you offer and ask one question of each: does the next customer take more of me? If not, make it available to as many people as possible. If so, that's the part to guard, price, and give to the work that needs you.

Then ask it again whenever requests start to repeat. The answer can change once you've done the same work enough times to teach it.

Ration your attention and let everything else spread. Make sure all of it carries your signature, the kind that changes the result. Then the more people your work reaches, the more of them have a reason to want the part of you that can't reach them all.

That is how you can become a luxury.

Rabbit Hole

More on this subject

• The $5,000 Problem (Includes free tool): Test whether clients pay you for the deliverable or for your judgment.
• Where Automation Stops and Real Growth Starts: Price by the value you create, and serve the clients who gain most first.

See this concept in another subject

• You Can't Afford Most Books: See the gap between a cheap copy and the attention it takes, from the reader's side.