🧠 Bill for brains, not keystrokes

✏️ Clients love your sentences, but they need your strategy. The problem? Too often, they think they’re buying keystrokes, not the brainpower behind them.

This week’s focus: how to make the invisible parts of freelancing—research, positioning, frameworks—visible, billable, and valued. We’ve handpicked tools, tips, and a little humor to help lighten your load. (3-minute read)

🔦 Week’s highlights

• Tool Spotlight: Qwilr + Harvest show clients the difference between typing and strategy

• Sherpa Shortcuts: Reframe hours into packages clients actually choose.

• Sherpa’s Pack (freebie): Free calculator turns “$500 for research” into “wow, that’s cheap”

• The Ridgeline news: Banana selfies in WhatsApp; free AI course for journos

• 😝Tools Gone Wild: Perplexity caught serving copy-paste as “strategy”

AI tool spotlight:

Tool Sherpa explores the flood of new AI apps and carefully selects only proven tools.

🔍 Harvest: Make invisible work visible

Why it matters:
Clients often see only the final draft, not the hours of interviews, research, and idea-shaping embedded in it. Harvest tracks every slice of that hidden labor, to prove where time goes and why strategy isn’t free. It turns “I spent forever on this,” into clean, credible data you can point to on invoices and proposals.

Who’s it for

• Freelancers tired of justifying “thinking time”

• Solopreneurs juggling multiple projects with hidden hours

• Small teams who need clear proof of where work actually happens

Best use case:
Show clients that research, calls, and revisions are real billable tasks (not invisible extras). Use reports to reframe your value: “strategy time” is half the project.

Pros:
Easy timers, clean reports, integrations with invoicing apps. Makes hidden labor visible and helps set stronger boundaries against scope creep.

Cons:
If not billing hourly, tracking can feel like overkill. Works best when you actually use the data to reset pricing.

Pricing:
30-day free trial. Paid: $13.75 + month.

👉 Try Harvest for free

🔍 Qwilr: Proposals that sell strategy

Why it matters:
To a client, “just words” look like typing. And typing looks cheap. Qwilr makes the invisible thinking—audience research, voice guidelines, message hierarchy—show up as shiny, clickable strategy packages. Suddenly, you’re not a keyboard for hire; you’re the mapmaker charging for the trail. (Harvest is the receipt for where your time went; Qwilr is the menu that shows clients how to buy strategy upfront.)

Who’s it for

• Freelancers who want clients to understand the why behind their pricing

• Solopreneurs pitching projects with execution and strategy

• Small teams seeking to upsell strategic work without sounding pushy

Best use case:
Use Qwilr’s tiered pricing to anchor strategy as a middle or top-tier option. Clients see what’s missing if they choose “words only” (and often self-upgrade!)

Pros:
Makes invisible work (audience insights, positioning, frameworks) part of the deliverable. Interactive proposals, pricing tables, and analytics help you win larger projects.

Cons:
Takes setup to translate your process into packages. Templates can feel too slick unless you tailor them.

Pricing:
14-day free trial. Paid: $35+/month.

👉 Try Qwilr for free

_{Disclaimer: If readers click through, some links may earn us a small commission}

Sherpa’s shortcuts 🪓

Sherpa-approved hacks to streamline your workflow in today’s most popular AI apps.
 

⚡ Hack #1: Add a discovery line item

Problem: Discovery calls, research, and prep often vanish into “free.” Clients assume you just show up with ideas fully formed.

Solution: Make discovery its own deliverable.

• Add a simple line in every proposal: Discovery & audience research: $300–$500.

• Frame it as the foundation that shapes the project, not an optional extra.

• Keep it boring: “Discovery & Research” lands better than “Creative Alchemy Session.”

• Deliver a short doc afterward—3–5 bullets of insights from your discovery & research. It proves value and sets up smoother drafts.

💡 Sherpa tip: When the first thing clients buy is your “thinking,” they’ll expect to pay for it later too.

👉 Add a line item to your next proposal doc today.

⚡ Hack #2: Use AI to summarize discovery

Problem: Discovery calls produce messy notes, and clients rarely see the thinking that happens before writing.

Solution: Record the call → run it through Otter.ai or NotebookLM → prompt:

—“Summarize the key audience insights, tone preferences, and goals that should shape the draft.”
—Drop the summary into a one-page doc labeled Discovery Insights and send it as a paid deliverable.

💡 Sherpa tip: AI isn’t doing the strategy, it’s packaging your notes so clients see the value in black and white.

👉 Try it now with Otter.ai or NotebookLM

🏔 Sherpa’s Pack

Free stuff to help freelancers get an edge.

Value-based pricing calculator

Link: Jonathan Stark’s Value Pricing Calculator

Stop selling hours, start selling outcomes. This free calculator shows your work’s real worth by comparing hourly rates against client ROI. Plug in the numbers, and watch it spit out value-based pricing that makes “$500 for research” sound like a bargain.

The Ridgeline news🏔️

The latest on how AI is rewriting the rules for solopreneurs and small teams.

This week’s AI news. Let’s trek:

🍌 Banana-powered AI art: Gemini Nano now makes images in WhatsApp. Yes, surreal banana selfies are officially a thing. 🔗 See it in action. 

📰 Free AI course for journos: Google’s tools handle checks, transcripts, and tweaks. Knight Center shows reporters how to skip the grunt work.
🔗 Grab a seat

⏳ The 4-hour rule: Mark Manson proves deep work comes in bursts. Four focused hours beat twelve distracted ones every time.
🔗 Work less, do better

📈 Future-proof your marketing: AI will reshape ads by 2030. The smarter play: grab today’s quick wins that save time now.
🔗 Plan your next move

💼 LinkedIn without cringe: Influence comes from small, genuine moves (like headlines and comments), not guru playbooks. More clicks, less eye-roll.
🔗 Do it right

☕ Final sip:
AI won’t replace you, but it will post for you, check your copy, and add a banana filter to your smoothie.

###

Tools gone wild! 😜

Let’s end with a laugh — when AI tools take a detour off the happy path.

Perplexity caught copy-pasting “strategy”

Perplexity AI sold itself as a shortcut to smarter research. But when WIRED and The Verge peeked under the hood, they found the “summaries” were lifted nearly word-for-word from their reporting. It looked less like insight, more like dressed-up copy-paste.

📌 Lesson learned: AI can scrape words, but it can’t deliver the judgment behind them. Your strategy is what keeps clients from confusing copy-paste with real value.

🧭 What’s Next?

Next week, we’re diving into AI hacks for client communication—from faster updates to smoother feedback loops. Don’t climb alone.

👉 Ask a friend to subscribe: toolsherpaai.beehiiv.com

Because the climb’s better with company.

—⛰️ Your Sherpa team