Met someone recently whose goal with their business is to be an “idea person”. Basically, they’d look at your business, suggest an idea, and it’d be so good you’d pay them for it and go on to the next idea.

Spent the next 15 minutes explaining that

1) Ideas without implementation strategies are cheap (on the order of free if it’s something you can completely express in a sentence or come up with after a superficial observation)

2) You need to bring more to the table than just what other people are already thinking if you want people falli g over themselves to pay you for your thoughts

Classic Dilbert that should have been tagged in the original post: https://dilbert.com/strip/...

Funny. I just signed a client largely because I was able to advise him on strategy for his website and how to manage his web developer, with a bit of copywriting and hosting thrown in because I have those resources already in place and ready to go. But he told me that what literally sold him was that I was able to tie up his scattered thoughts and ideas into something coherent and achievable. He wanted to write me a check on the spot but I asked him to let me send him an invoice to pay it online so it would be easier on my accountant.

Big consulting companies, for decades, have been making billions off of doing nothing more than validating ideas for marketability.

@stackodev And there's definitely a place for that. The key thing is *value is being added*. Simply stating the obvious ("You should build a website!") without any insight as to how to do it, what will be involved, or if it's even appropriate doesn't meet that bar.

Further, if your ideas you want to be paid for are so simple that everything is being given away in presenting the idea in the first place then you've lost any leverage to be able to charge for it in the first place unless they agreed to sign a contract before even talking to you. I'm sure several people here have stories about when they were freelancers bidding on their first jobs and got rejected because they gave away the farm in their proposal and the prospective customer figured someone else could implement the idea for cheaper.