
Ask HN: How will I know when I'm ready for contract work? - rnprince
Hi HN,<p>I&#x27;d like to switch to doing my work as an independent contractor. The web technologies I&#x27;d like to work with are somewhat new to me, but I&#x27;m getting good at them.<p>The question I have is, how do I know when I&#x27;m ready to start offering my services? I want to make sure I can deliver the right amount of value, but I&#x27;m not sure how to know when I&#x27;ve reached that point.<p>Thanks!
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brudgers
After I got my bachelors and moved in with my girlfriend I figured I would
make a living freelancing. I had a _few_ contacts from having done
moonlighting and part time contracting work while in school. First thing I do
is I call this guy I know out Arizona. We'd work together when he was doing
some contract work before his current stable gig. Two days later he called me
back with a great project that was kicking off "next week". That was May of
1995, it still hasn't kicked off so far as I know.

I took a regular job three weeks later. We'd talked, it was still "a week or
two out." Eventually over the years, my Rolodex expanded to where I could take
another stab at it when an economic down cycle made my job evaporate and I was
kind of more or less able make it work.

You're ready to start when you have a signed contract and the retainer check
has cleared. Software contracting is no different from any other type of
contracting. 80% of it is sales. The other 80% is doing the work. Nobody who
hasn't already asked you to do a project for them is likely to care on the day
you open the doors and hang out a shingle. The three most important things
are:

    
    
      1. Get the job.
    
      2. Get the job.
    
      3. Get the job.
    

Good luck.

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taprun
The biggest secret to contracting is that your technical skills aren't nearly
as important as your ability to sell. I'd rather be a great salesman and a
mediocre developer than the other way around.

~~~
muzani
Agreed on the first line.

I've been freelancing for people who sell my work at 10x what they pay me.

But honestly, you get money equal to the value you create. Having played both
roles, IMO, the sales part is much harder. It is a lot of work to tell a
client how much something costs.

Sometimes you deal with racist big company clients who lead you on but are
just finding some excuse to reject you. You have to learn when to stop. Some
clients are just using you as a point of negotiation, you offer them a cheap
price and they bring it to some big shot contractor to negotiate.

And finally there is the politics of contracts and getting paid. Some people
will try to sharpen their negotiation skills on you. I have seen deals like
"On contract, we wrote $3M but I can only pay you $2 million. And you were 1
week late on delivering this animated PDF feature on Android so technically
you violated the contract."

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rnprince
Hey everyone, thank you for these replies! All of them were helpful. I came up
with these takeaways:

\- Frame your services as creating solutions to business problems, rather than
trying to sell developer skills. This explains the value in terms that a
client understands, and more simply, it lets non-technical clients know what
you do in a way that “AWS, Go, JavaScript, PostgreSQL” can’t.

\- Focus on getting clients. This is a bigger barrier to entry than how good
you are at creating software. Don’t expect to do well just because you are
good at making things.

\- You’re probably qualified to do this if you've been a developer for a few
years.

With this information, I'm going to follow the plan I already had, but with
more confidence and focus since I feel more like I'm on the right track. I'm
going to launch a few nice side projects with moderate levels of complexity to
solidify my skills and figure out how long things take (important for
estimates), and then I'll try getting clients using those projects to showcase
what I'm capable of doing.

Thanks again everyone!

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e59d134d
The question is what you want to be doing in 5 years or so. You should start
taking steps towards that goal. If you want to be freelancer, then you should
start taking steps towards that goal. Your first goal might be to get a
regular job to save enough money for 6 months of living expenses. Or maybe you
don't need to save any money then start now.

As for technical skills, let me tell you a story of my friend. He was an
average or below average programmer in university. We all got jobs in brand
name companies; he could not get even an interview. Honestly, he was really
bad programmer, I don't fault companies.

He expanded his job search from big companies, to smaller companies, to
finally anyone posting a gig on Craig's List. He wanted to get hired by a guy
who was setting up his band's blog. He had no idea what he was doing.

Eventually, he did a few fixed price contract work for setting up blogs. Then
he got a contract to build Facebook for $500. He thought he could do that in a
month. As deadline approached, he asked one of his unemployed friend to help
him with it, who was also a bad programmer. They still thought they can
deliver it within a few weeks. Of course, they never finished and not sure if
they even got paid anything for it.

But they kept on bidding projects, taking on too much work to handle. They
asked their friends including me if we wanted some side work. Of course, we
said no when we saw type of work and money involved.

Eventually, they started a company to look professional. They hired part-time
programmers. They even started an internship program with a local university.

Now 7 years later, they have 20 people working for them. They still like to
code and they know they are bad programmers. They tell me that their
programmers hate it when they get involved in a project. They are supposedly
still working on Facebook clone website.

Now to be honest, they did had several advantages over many people in the US.
They lived with their parents, so had no living expenses. Their education was
paid for by their parents, so they graduated with no debts. So their success
might not be easy to copy if you have bills to pay.

Also pretty sure all these perks came with daily nagging by their parents
though.

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richardknop
I started contracting after about 3 years of perm work. And have been
contracting since then. So you are probably ready.

Contracting is mostly about delivering business value. Solving business
problems is what you get hired as a contractor for, tech is usually not that
important as most companies that hire contractors don't have a good
understanding of tech anyways. So they'll be happy to let you recommend the
technical solution that solves their business problem.

------
BjoernKW
You're ready right now. If you keep waiting for the right time to come or the
perfect conditions to fall into place you'll quite likely never start but keep
asking yourself that question.

So, start by talking to potential clients and try selling your services. At
the very least this will provide you with invaluable information as to which
skills you might need to improve or acquire.

------
bartvk
I'd say when you've saved up, say, 6 months of living costs.

------
icedchai
If you can fog a mirror, you're ready.

~~~
RUG3Y
That's funny. What do you mean, though? That it's easy?

~~~
icedchai
Yes, essentially. I've worked in the industry for close to 20 years and that
bar for "contractors" is quite low indeed.

~~~
rnprince
Hey, thanks for your reply. Would you say that this low bar means that for an
actually good contractor, there's a lot of opportunity for word-of-mouth
references, repeat business relationships, or high hourly rates?

~~~
icedchai
All of these things.

------
softwarefounder
When you land a contract.

