Fuck you. Pay me.
There Is No "Exposure" Worth My Time
🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.
While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.
You can buy my book Permissionless here.
Everyone wants something for free.
Everyone wants you to give them your labor and your value for free.
They’ll offer you exposure, or they’ll offer you a chance to build your portfolio, and none of it means jack. They’ll devalue the years - literally, years - you’ve spent growing and honing and building your skills, through sheer blood, sweat, and tears, by trying to barter it out of you for exactly zilch.
And when you say no?
When you tell them you can’t afford to work for free, because you still have to pay for your own rent, your own bills, and your own food out of somewhere - they act like you’re the entitled one.
They act like you’re the asshole.
Their message is this: “If you don’t help me for free, you’re a bad person.”
And their attitude is, if folks like you and me don’t drop everything we’re doing to make everyone else’s projects our personal business and top priority without charging a dime, we’re so many frauds.
It’s pretty toxic, but unfortunately, it’s something I’m quite used to.
It’s the opposite of collaboration - it’s nothing more than extraction.
There are some folks who will always try to get something for free, if they can.
They try to get something without offering even a fraction of its value in return.
And if you work for yourself, if you’re a writer or a creative of any kind, if you’re a small startup trying to gain ground, you’re going to be confronted with this kind of fuckery over and over again.
One publishing company approached me recently and offered me a book deal if I agreed to $0 upfront and $0 on every book until they’d reached x amount of sales, at which point I’d get 10%.
It’s ignominious to the point of being insulting.
And it happens in all the work I do. I’ve had startup founders harass me via my emails because I wouldn’t work for free at my agency and had the audacity to insist that my award-winning work has real-world value. I get the same messages at my bar from influencers who want a free night out in exchange for “exposure.”
You almost feel guilty when you ask people for money, and they come up with a creative way of telling you to piss up a flagpole.
But that guilt has been carefully manipulated by these folks in order to keep you working for free, for as long as possible.
