Invoice #0001

You send the first invoice at 11:47 on a Thursday night, because you've been putting it off since Monday and you've realised that if you don't send it before midnight you'll have to change the date, and changing the date feels like lying. Invoice number 0001. You considered starting at 0100 so it wouldn't look like your first. You decided that was the kind of thing a person does who'll never send 0100. The client is a dentist in Bristol who wants a website that doesn't look like a dentist's website. You spent forty hours on it. You're billing for twenty-eight, because the other twelve were you learning how to do things you told him you already knew how to do, and that seems like your cost, not his. Your flatmate comes in while you're staring at the send button. "Is that the invoice?" "Yes." "How much?" You tell her. "That's not enough." "It's what we agreed." "You agreed it in March when you thought it'd take a fortnight." "That's not his fault." She leans over your shoulder and reads the line items. "You've put 'minor revisions' and then not charged for them." "They were minor." "How many?" You don't answer that. The thing nobody tells you about leaving a job to do this: the work isn't the hard part. The work is the part you were already good at. The hard part is this, the moment where you have to look at a number and say it out loud to another human being as if you believe it. You've read all the threads. Charge for value, not hours. Never be the cheapest. Raise your rate every third client. You've read them the way you read about running a marathon, with total agreement and no intention of moving your legs. "Add two hours for the revisions," your flatmate says. "Then send it. Then close the laptop." "He might push back." "Then he pushes back and you talk about it like adults. He's a dentist. He tells people to floss for a living. He knows about awkward conversations." You add two hours. It comes to a number that makes you slightly sick. You change the payment terms from thirty days to fourteen because you saw someone say to do that and you've got rent on the first.

11:58. You send it. Nothing happens. Obviously. It's midnight, he's asleep, the email will sit in his inbox until he's between fillings tomorrow. But you sit there anyway, the way you'd sit by a phone. Your flatmate's gone to bed. The flat's quiet. You open the invoicing app again and look at the little list that now has one entry in it, and before you can think about it too hard you make a new draft, blank, number 0002, and save it. Nothing in it. Just so it's there.