
How Playing Around with New Technologies Landed Me a 6-Month Freelance Gig - leifg
http://blog.leif.io/how-playing-around-with-experimental-technologies-landed-me-a-6-month-freelance-gig/
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3chelon
This is so funny. I did exactly the same thing. I mean, _exactly_!

I wrote a podcast transcription service using IBM's Watson API. And as a
result, having realised it was getting a very crowded space and I had neither
the energy nor marketing skills/money to launch it alone, I contacted the CEO
of a leading transcription company and landed a gig to build out their mobile
product. At least my app will now get a high profile launch, and not vanish
without trace. Plus, I get paid.

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acalderaro
Didn't you do a Show HN about your service a while back? I swear I remember
reading something like that and thinking "that's amazing!!"

If so, I'm glad things worked out for you! Well done. And if that wasn't you,
congrats anyway :D

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3chelon
No, that wasn't me, unfortunately. I'm a little wary of doing it because of
pre-launch NDA issues. Maybe post-launch I'll write something up.

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anon1094
I'm a remote freelance front-end web developer and most of my gigs at the
beginning came in a similar way. I just showed clients stuff that I built on
Codepen and previous websites I built for fun for myself and things picked up
from there.

My recommendation is to start a daily project of some sort. Daily UI, Daily
blog post, etc.

It gives you a chance to put out a steady stream of non-perfect work and show
off your process to potential clients as well.

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chiefalchemist
I'd say that if you think a 6 month gig is acceptable ROI from a side project
investment then you might be aiming too low.

I suppose it's better than nothing. But then again, as mentioned, that's not
saying much.

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sidlls
This is why I don't "freelance": it's filled with people who think spending 1
hour of unpaid work to get 1 hour of paid (and usually poorly paid, < $150/hr)
work is acceptable. I have no inclination to compete with essentially free
labor.

The only acceptable way to "freelance", in my opinion, is to start or join a
consultancy and _sell something_. And then you're not really "freelancing"
anymore, so much as running a business.

Please note: I recognize that "not all freelancers" are like this.
Generalizations aren't universal truisms, exceptions exist, and neither of
those things is relevant to my comment.

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3131s
> _This is why I don 't "freelance": it's filled with people who think
> spending 1 hour of unpaid work to get 1 hour of paid (and usually poorly
> paid, < $150/hr) work is acceptable. I have no inclination to compete with
> essentially free labor._

You sound really condescending. Less than 150$ is not "essentially free
labor", and the people working for those amounts are not illogically choosing
to do so. Even among developers it's a small fraction that can pull in the
amount you are eluding to making. 150$ an hour works out to $312,000 yearly at
40 hours a week.

~~~
pc86
Solo freelancers (to whom OP is referring) do not bill 40 hours a week unless
they're working a _ton_ or incredibly dishonest. A good portion of your time
is spent marketing, doing unpaid pseudo-work-pseudo-marketing like GitHub side
projects, billing clients, chasing unpaid bills, tweaking your website
(marketing), networking (marketing), etc. Not to mention most freelancers
become freelancers so they can avoid the 40 hour work week! When I freelanced
full-time I tried not to work more than 30 hours a week all in. I usually
billed about 15 hours a week but only because I had a few big clients and
didn't need to do much marketing as they sustained me for the 2-3 years I was
doing it.

A $150/hr freelancer who is busy for the year could reasonably expect to pull
in about $100k gross (before _any_ taxes, etc) assuming they take a few weeks
off each year and bill about half their time or a little less. More if they
automate a lot of marketing, have a local VA or someone doing the client phone
calls, etc, allowing them to bill more. So the very successful ones are
probably in the $150-175k gross revenue range before their taxes or paying
anyone helping them.

I'm not saying @sidlls's implication that $150/hr is poorly paid isn't
idiotic, because it absolutely is. Just pointing out that $300k will _not_
happen strictly from trading 1 hour of work for $150 at any scale reasonable
for a 1-person freelance shop.

~~~
apercu
It's a little more complicated than that for me - I stopped coding a long,
long time ago and most of my work now is strategic and business focused. Some
of those tasks are highly specialized and I can invoice $200/hr. Some are
commodity tasks that the market is used to paying much lower rates for and I
have to bill $100/hr (and then prove value by taking fewer hours to do it than
a cheaper resource would). Other things are well-defined and I can charge a
set price for and net greater than what any hourly rate I would have been able
to negotiate would be.

~~~
pc86
I agree that the math is more complicated but that doesn't mean you're being
poorly compensated or anything. I'll charge as low as $80/hr for stuff like
documentation prep. I also won't do documentation prep in 99% of instances
because I'd rather charge $145/hr to write code.

~~~
apercu
That's where I do a kind of a blended rate. If you need this deliverable and
that deliverable I might just average it out. But, yea, where I can get the
$150/hr+ work I take it over anything else.

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FLUX-YOU
I generally hate anything that I build that doesn't have a solid business plan
with customer need behind it (read: all non-employed side work).

I still don't know how to get out of that mindset.

~~~
cercatrova
You can separate projects for learning technologies and projects for customer
need. For example, when I wanted to learn Elixir, I made a simple to do list
with concurrent users to test Elixir's scalability. A to do list is nothing
new for customers but it still enabled me to learn more about the tech. Often,
these two categories intersect over a large enough set of projects.

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braindead_in
We instead built a alternative to Watson Text to Speech!
[https://scribie.com/transcription/free](https://scribie.com/transcription/free)

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damionx7
What theme are you using with ghost?

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rehemiau
Looks like the default one

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tytytytytytytyt
What's with the obnoxiously large font size? Is that just a more clever way of
typing in all caps?

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Tepix
You mean the pleasantly large font size? It's refreshing.

~~~
tytytytytytytyt
I'm sure it would be 'pleasantly large' if I was used to reading books for 6
year olds.

