Squibb: give the work away free first — prove value and build trust before you ever attach a price

beginner5 min read · updated 2026-06-20

As taught by Simon Squibb · source

Squibb: give the work away free first — prove value and build trust before you ever attach a price

The lesson, in plain terms

Simon Squibb built a following by doing the opposite of what most people do when they want to make money: he gave the valuable thing away first, in public, for free, with no immediate ask attached. He walks up to strangers, helps them think through their business, hands over advice and sometimes money, films it, and publishes it. The "product" — his judgment, his network, his encouragement — is the free content. The trust and the audience come as a byproduct, and the monetization comes much later and much more easily because the value was already proven in the open.

This is not the same as "do free work forever." It is a sequencing claim: prove the value before you attach the price. When someone has already experienced your help working, the price stops being a gamble for them and starts being a no-brainer.

His own track record gives the idea weight. He built and sold his agency Fluid to PwC, then deliberately chose to make his help free — his earlier project's rule was that it would "never charge for help" because he wanted to reach the people no consultant or accelerator would touch (per Enterprise Nation). On the back of giving away help in public he grew to roughly 3600000 Instagram followers and about 6800000 on TikTok, around a stated mission to help 10000000 people start a business for free.

Why it actually works (and isn't just charity)

Three mechanics make "free first" a real strategy and not a slow road to broke:

• Free collapses the trust barrier. A prospect can't evaluate your judgment from a sales page. They can evaluate it from a result you already gave them. Free work is the cheapest, fastest proof you have.
• Free is the best distribution you can buy. Genuinely useful free things get shared; that sharing produces viral reach that paid ads rarely match. The classic write-up of this dynamic — that a free product of high real value drives both satisfaction and word-of-mouth — is David Skok's "The Power of Free."
• Free builds a body of public evidence. Every free win you publish is a permanent testimonial that keeps selling for you while you sleep. You're not giving away the asset; you're building it.

The trap to avoid

The failure mode is giving away free things that are low-value or that have no path to a paid next step. "Free first" only works when (a) the free thing solves a real, complete problem for the person, and (b) there is an obvious, natural deeper version they'd pay for. Free that's deliberately crippled to force an upgrade reads as a bait-and-switch and destroys the trust you were trying to build. Squibb's version works precisely because the free help is the real help, not a teaser.

How to apply it

• Pick one painfully specific problem in your niche that you can fully solve in a short, self-contained piece of work — a teardown, an audit, a fix, a template, a 20-minute call. Specific beats broad; "I'll rewrite your one worst-performing email" beats "I do marketing."
• Do it for real, for free, for actual people — not a hypothetical demo. Reach out to 5–10 people who have that exact problem and offer the complete fix with zero strings.
• Publish the work, not just the praise. Show the before/after, the reasoning, the result. The public artifact is what earns trust at scale; a private "thanks" earns nothing for your audience.
• Make the paid next step obvious and adjacent. After the free fix, the natural question is "can you do this for all of it / do it ongoing / teach me to do it?" That is your offer. Don't hide it, but don't lead with it.
• Track the conversion, not the applause. Count how many free recipients (or viewers of the published work) take the paid step. If it's near zero, your free thing isn't adjacent enough to a paid one — fix the path, not the generosity.
• Set a ceiling so free doesn't eat you. Decide a fixed weekly budget of free work (e.g., "two free teardowns a week"). Generosity is a marketing line item, not an open tab.

The one-line takeaway

Prove it works before you price it. Give the real thing away, in public, to real people — then the price is no longer a leap of faith, it's the obvious next move.

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Attribution: This entry distills, in our own words, the give-first philosophy publicly modeled by Simon Squibb. It is an interpretation for educational purposes, not a quotation.