I've been doing product design for the past 6 years as a freelance designer and practitioner in my own entrepreneurial endeavors. As a freelancer, I was an early designer for platforms like Gigster and Design Inc, designing interfaces that have helped raise millions of dollars and exited for millions more. As a client, I've hired freelancers to help with marketing, operations, and design. As an entrepreneur, I've built million dollar global brands.

Having been on both sides of the table, I understanding the incentives and motivations that clients and freelancers have. Clients want the best solution to their problem in the shortest amount of time and cost. Freelancers want a stable income stream and to work on exciting projects with great people. When contract projects don't work out, it's normally because of a misalignment in these incentive structures.

The project management system I created is one that realigns client and freelancer incentives to deliver the most value to both parties, which means the focus can be on creating great products. This system is not for everyone. If you're looking for a quick fix this is not for you. If you're a client that believes in creating value for your customers and for your team, this is for you.

The truth about most free introductory client-freelancer calls is that they are sales calls. This means the freelancer or project manager's main goal is to sell you on buying their services. As a client, this means you're probably not going to get a honest opinion about your problem or its potential solutions.

What excites me as a designer is getting to the core root of the problem by asking questions to understand it better and evolving the hypotheses with new information until the desired solution. This requires a different approach than a sales call.

Before we start working together, you'll fill out a form that asks some questions to better understand your problem. You will also be able to book a 30 minute ($100) consulting call with me. If we decide to continue with the project, the cost of the call will be deducted from the total bill. If it's not a fit, you paid for a thoughtful and informative design thinking session. This approach allows me to spend our call time helping you solve your problem rather than pitching you on solving mine. It also acts as a filter for clients that aren't the best fit.

After our call, I will have a pretty good idea on the scope of the problem and the constraints that we are operating under. This will allow me to put together an action plan, broken down into milestones for features and the hours associated with getting them done. This project architecture plan is free and is completed within 24 hours of our call.

Next, I will send you a signup link to a Portal which I personally designed and developed. The Portal is where all of our project management, deliverables, messages and payments will take place in one transparent and easy to access webapp. In the Portal, you will also be able to schedule time on my calendar to have the deliverables done. This is the key innovation of my system, where work is done on an "hour blocks" structure.

Hour Blocks are a time based system that allows you to prioritize both the speed in which your deliverables are done as well as the flexibility for ongoing work. Every human has the same 8,760 hours in a year, so a way to think about this system is that you are buying a right to my time so that I can help solve your problem according to your schedule in the best way possible.

My time is based on one hour blocks that range from $50 - $250 an hour depending on the number of blocks purchased upfront. For example, you can buy 3 hours of time for $250/hour or 120 hours for $50/hour.

Once blocks are purchased, you can assign deliverables to them across my swiss-army knife of skills across design, development, and growth. How and when you schedule the blocks for usage is completely up to you as long as my calendar is free for the block times. You can schedule a block 24 hours in advance and have the peace of mind that your work will be finished according to your schedule.

For ongoing work or larger projects, this allows you to book my services weeks and months in advance while receiving a discount for pre-paying blocks to the extent you are comfortable with. It removes the typical problems that all contract projects have around short term incentive misalignments and allows us to build a relationship where value is better aligned.

If you have any questions about this process, feel free to email me at j@jkwong.com or text me at (415) 971-9306 (I respond faster to text).

If you're ready to get started with your consulting call, click here.

I look forward to creating something great with you.
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