The Paid Bar: Filtering Inbound Requests Without Being a Jerk
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Once you are known, inbound requests outnumber the hours available, and evaluating each one individually becomes its own full-time job. Harbinger's solution is a bar the requester has to cross, not a judgement you have to make. He offers consulting to literally anyone who asks at a thousand dollars an hour, and every dollar goes to charity — which means he is not a selfish jerk for quoting the price, and he can then write an eight-thousand-dollar cheque for a friend's charity gala without thinking about it. He applies the same charity honorarium to podcast appearances and will do a show's first-ever episode if they pay. Ali Abdaal runs a non-monetary variant: 'I'd love to be your 51st episode.' Both bars cut out the people who were never going to use the advice anyway.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Notice that your willingness to help scales with their proof of work
Both hosts describe the same instinct: someone at 100,000 subscribers struggling with team scaling gets hours of time and a walk in the park; someone who has made three videos gets no reply. The differentiator is not size, it's whether the person has done enough work to ask a question only you can answer.
Pro tip Being honest about this also means admitting what you are bad at answering — Harbinger tells people he is the worst person to ask about launching, because he launched 17 years ago.
- 2
Set a single, published price for open access
Rather than triaging, offer consulting to anyone who asks at a fixed hourly rate. The rate is high enough that people who think your time is worth nothing self-select out immediately, and if they do pay, you have been fairly compensated for the hour.
- 3
Route the money to charity so the bar isn't self-serving
The money going to charity is what makes the price socially clean — you are not asking for a thousand dollars an hour for yourself. Harbinger notes the requester cannot write it off, because it's paid to him and he directs it to the causes he chooses later.
Pro tip Bank the proceeds so that when a friend asks you to buy a table at a charity gala, the answer is instant and painless.
Watch out Be transparent that it is not a tax-deductible donation on their end.
- 4
Apply the same honorarium to appearance requests
Harbinger will do any podcast anyone asks him to do without evaluating whether it's big or small. He just states the charity honorarium. If they pay, he shows up, even for a first episode that never airs, because the time has been bought.
- 5
Offer a non-money bar for people who have none
Abdaal's version is 'I would love to be your 51st episode', which cuts out roughly 99% of requesters because almost nobody makes it to 51 episodes. It costs the asker effort rather than cash, which suits audiences who can't pay.
Pro tip Honour it when someone comes back years later having done the work — Abdaal has said yes to people producing a three-year-old email.
- 6
Stop auditing the outcome
Some people who pay use the advice brilliantly and some never use it at all. Harbinger says he no longer has to worry about that, because the bar already did the filtering and the money already did something useful.
Watch out Don't reintroduce judgement after the fact — that recreates the evaluation cost the bar was designed to remove.
In the wild
Because consulting income is ring-fenced for charity, when a friend asked Harbinger to buy a table at a charity gala for children with leukaemia, he handed over eight thousand dollars without needing to think about it. The money had already been earned specifically for that purpose by people who wanted an hour of his time, so the ask created no internal negotiation at all.
→ A filter on his calendar doubled as a pre-funded philanthropy budget.
Abdaal's standing answer to podcast invitations is that he'd love to be their 51st episode. Most people never get there, so the request quietly disappears. But occasionally someone emails three years later saying they DM'd him on Instagram back when he was a student, he told them to come back at 50 episodes, and they have now done it. His answer at that point is simply yes — they've done the work, and they kept the receipt.
→ A zero-effort filter that still rewards the small minority who are serious.
Common mistakes
Charging for yourself and feeling like a jerk
If the fee lands in your own pocket, quoting it feels grabby and you will quietly stop quoting it. Directing the money to charity is what makes the bar sustainable to enforce without social cost.
Evaluating every request individually
Deciding case by case whether a show is big enough or a person is worth the hour is itself an enormous time sink. The point of a bar is that it does the evaluation for you.
Ignoring the well-qualified specific ask
Harbinger will answer someone who says they don't understand something and he's one of the only people who can explain it — even when he won't take a Zoom. Blanket refusal loses exactly the conversations worth having.
From the transcript
“what I do now is I offer Consulting to anyone who asks and that money goes to charity”
“I just say here is the charity honorarium that I require if you pay me this I will go on your show I don't care…”
“my thing for podcast requests is um I would love to be your 51st episode”
From the episode
Lessons from 17 Years of Podcasting - Jordan Harbinger
Jordan Harbinger