
Ask HN: Freelance developer hit the ceiling: what to do next? - anovikov
Hi there,<p>i&#x27;ve been a freelance developer on Upwork&#x2F;oDesk for 7 years, and gradually i realized that my income stopped growing (some 4 years ago). I tried to do everything i could think of and yet, there was no further growth, i hit some ceiling at about $100K a year. Trying to figure out what was wrong, i did a study using Upwork API to find who the top developers are and what are they doing to get there, and the answer didn&#x27;t please me: i am one of the very top developers (#10 at the time i did the study) and there isn&#x27;t much room above. Yes out of hundreds of thousands.<p>Which makes me think that freelance sites aren&#x27;t for me: it is that proverbial room where i am the smartest guy in, and when you are the smartest guy in the room, you are in the wrong room. If i am comfortably within top 0.1%, i will definitely make a lot more in the environment where i will be the average one.<p>Question is: where is that room? I am in the EU (can be anywhere except UK&#x2F;Ireland). Anyone who had a similar problem please share your experiences, what did you do to grow from there?<p>One obvious idea is to do my own startup, which i am now trying, but that is another story. Trying, but i am not sure startups are for me, i&#x27;d better work for hire.
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CyberFonic
$100k per year is very good. There are lots of people who would love to earn
that much. No wonder you are in the top 10!

Without knowing what your skills are, it's hard to make suggestions. But ...
have you looked at working at a top notch company where your skills would be
very much in demand. For example, with the right skills you could land a very
well paying job in banking in say Frankfurt or Zurich. I've worked for a
Zurich insurance company and that was one of the best paid gigs I've ever had.

~~~
anovikov
If i trust Numbeo.com, i'll need $530K pre-tax to have same consumption in
Zurich as i now do in Vilnius... So... not even the slightiest chance. Not
even mentioning that my wife makes another $40K or so so combined that will
put our household income requirement close to $900K pre-tax... Simply not
possible, period. I don't think any full-time job opportunity which is not a
lottery (early employee at a startup) can be that thing. I need something
remote.

~~~
ProblemFactory
You are not spending 100% of your income, right? You only need to double or
triple the income you spend on rent and living costs, not the portion left
over for savings to keep the same standard of living.

That said, if you are earning $100k in Vilnius, then it will be extremely
difficult to find a higher-paying employment offer relative to living costs
anywhere in the world. Maybe you can make 1.5-2x that if you go to work in
finance - but you will most likely need to move to some of the most expensive
cities (Zurich, London, etc) in the world.

The typical way of increasing income as a freelancer, after maxing out the
hourly rate on your own is to start a development company. Partner with 1-2
freelancer friends, and start taking on bigger projects. Hire a small team of
junior developers, and bill out their time as well. Grow. Start taking on
fixed-bid mid-sized enterprise and government projects.

But this can be a very tedious and soul-crushing change, especially at the
stage where you have only a few junior developers on staff: you will need to
move from doing actual development work to reviewing their code, and handling
"management and sales".

If that doesn't sound like something for you, perhaps instead consider:

* Moving to somewhere with even lower cost of living than Vilnius. Hell, move to the next beach-front villa somewhere in Asia every 6 months.

* Be more picky about accepting work - optimise for how much fun they seem to be, not only the hourly rate.

~~~
anovikov
I am spending 100% of my income :), 4 years ago when i maxed out i was saving
like 30-40%, but expenses always tend to grow, and when income doesn't it
doesn't end well.

Agency - i tried, so far it didn't work. I haven't found a single client who
wanted me as an agency. I think it works differently from freelancer sales:
you pitch to totally different people in different situations. My Upwork study
also included a separate study of agency success, and it was overwhelmingly
negative, there are very, very few successful agencies on Upwork, looks like
whole agency thing doesn't work there. Of those not in India/Pakistan and thus
working for $10/h (something clearly impossible in my case), there is just 1
really successful one, visibly making >$1M a year:
[https://www.polcode.com/en/](https://www.polcode.com/en/) and a few others
making $200-$500K a year, but i seriously don't want to go from 1 person
business to 20 person business for 2x raise or 200 person business for 5x
raise. And i don't believe i can pull it off. This is something completely
unrelated to what i do now, i'd be as good trying to switch careers into an
opera singer.

~~~
mromanuk
I tried to do that in my home country (Argentina), if you want to get new
customers as an agency, you should go outside upwork and the freelance sites.
Which probably is not what you want.

Probably a good choice (and a challenging one), would be to build a new
freelancer site, targeting better and bigger customers, not the classic
freelancer customer which make decisions based on price.

Obviously this site should get onboard top notch developers/freelancers and
curate them.

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bbcbasic
An idea: Try to get a London, Paris or whatever high paying job where you can
go remote once you have proved yourself.

~~~
ddorian43
Eh, Paris & London still aren't enough. You have to go the top, San
Francisco/Ny/Washington etc.

~~~
anovikov
Bad idea, i want to get my EU passport first. To do so, i must stay in.

~~~
ddorian43
I meant as remote clients/employers.

~~~
bbcbasic
US companies generally want to hire people with right to work in US, even if
working remote.

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leojg
How about investing some of that money? Like Real State or trading or
bootstrapping a business.

Generate passive income on the side, there are only 24 hours in a day and you
cant expect that your salary will grow exponentially.

~~~
anovikov
I dated a CFO of a EU system-forming bank, so i don't believe in passive
investment at all.

Starting a business in a place which has everything already? Not a chance.

One chance may be doing angel investing. I am researching it.

------
ddorian43
Have you tried [https://www.toptal.com/](https://www.toptal.com/) ? They say
they have better freelancers/clients.

~~~
anovikov
I tried, they really don't. Yes they pay vastly higher rates than Upwork
(similar to what i get on Upwork, that is), but control you a lot more,
because their cut is higher, and their clients are a lot more qualified. Not
good for business.

~~~
mromanuk
Thank you for the insight, I was thinking of registering there. I have an
account in freelancer.com, do you find that Upwork is better?

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CarolineW
What are your skills?

What skills do you _want_ to be using?

~~~
anovikov
So i am looking for advice which i imagine could look like 'you have to take
some authoritative skill tests at %s, attend networking events at %s and %s,
and learn how to write killer cover letters as the guy in %s book says, and
you'll get to $200k a year working remotely within a year or two'. I am not
looking for a full time job - any one which could be better than what i get
now will be in a place which is very expensive to live, and where taxes are
high (in Lithuania we pay lowest tax in EU), so unless there is a magic job
which pays $500K or so, i don't win anything.

~~~
codegeek
To get to 200K a year working remotely, the primary skill you need to learn is
how to sell. Forget about authoritative skill tests etc. There is no magic
answer to this. It is going to take a lot more than a killer cover letter
though.

Networking events may work if you know how to use them effectively.

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zerr
Regarding TrackStudio, do you seriously have those AAA companies as clients?

~~~
anovikov
yeah! but:

1) i am no longer a part of the company. i can link you up with the sole owner
if you have any interest though. 2) it is nowhere near successful really. more
of a zombie startup.

i tried to do all i could to help it out, even prepared to apply to YC, but i
couldn't convince the partner (current sole owner, i left it and given up my
share) to agree to go to U.S. if accepted.

~~~
zerr
Interesting. There are tons of project management solutions, including some
very popular ones... So these AAA companies just buy/subscribe to _many_ of
them? What's the reasoning behind this...

Or maybe you've done some target marketing, approached some middle-managers in
those companies or similar.. Interesting how did you get such sales. (But your
[ex] product looks great, indeed).

Btw, I'm in the same situation - living in eastern Europe, working remotely
and getting "western compensation". So I'm stuck here... When you adjust for
cost of living, and especially housing, moving west doesn't make sense...

~~~
anovikov
Probably yes, they buy many. There was no way to track how much they make use
of them, but some probably do, because they bought continued support. In
Russia it is a lot more popular and some AAA companies in Russia order some
customization work so they are serious about it. No special marketing - they
bought from site. Anyway, that doesn't make even a good living, let alone
allow for hiring staff. Owner makes most of his living working from Upwork too
now.

LOL now try to think how coding people making $10K+ a month in Ukraine feel
like! Many of them have 10-acre villas, chauffeur driven cars and full time
gardeners. Real upper class. That's what i call being stuck!

~~~
zerr
While we're at it - one advice - I left upwork (it was odesk back then) many
years ago, because, as everyone knows, it is race to the bottom. So next step
for you could be to eliminate the middle man. Reach to clients directly. Try
searching gigs on sites such as wewrokremotely, wfh.io, SO remote jobs, etc..
Even if you find interesting work on upwork, and posting includes contact
details - contact the client directly, outside upwork. And no need to mention
upwork in your CV. You can mention your past clients/companies and relevant
work.

Regarding the product - I guess if you had enterprise pricing separately
(maybe as "Contact us") you could've arranged better deals with those AAA
shops... not sure :)

~~~
anovikov
In fact, i sometimes did the reverse: found clients outside of Upwork and
brought them in. I am even more likely to do it now since June 1 when the
commissions drop from 10% to 5%. Upwork provides guaranteed billing... It is
extremely difficult to extract payments when nobody does it for you.

Enterprise pricing page - good idea, i will tell Maxim (owner). upd: he said
that in fact decisions on buying it is usually taken by IT department heads
who then massively rework the system for their own needs, so a higher priced
sale would be impossible, in many cases they already prefer open source.

In fact, even selling whole company failed through - interested buyers who
definitely had money, eventually refused to pay even $100K. Working on Upwork
has definively been way more productive activity.

~~~
zerr
I'm freelancing almost 10 years now and so far I've never had any single issue
with payments - I just send PDF invoices and get funds through bank/wire
transfer. Even when I was on odesk - I've only logged offline time, i.e.
haven't used that spying/monitoring desktop client.

~~~
anovikov
What kind of clients do you pitch to?

Is your manager/main contact typically a business boss or technical?

Lastly, how much do you charge?

That sounds interesting because in my experience people don't pay unless they
are forced to (some system does it for them, or they need something more from
you so forced to pay for the previous work to get that done, etc.)

~~~
zerr
I've only worked with established companies/startups and maybe this is the
reason. Usually, after initial talks I deal with tech people (CTO, lead
engineer, etc..). I don't want to comment exact numbers here, but usually I
charge 3-figures per hour for short term tasks, somewhat less for long-term. I
have to say, I've tripled my rate since I left odesk... :)

~~~
anovikov
Ah then you are a different category from mine. There is no way i could charge
that money. Or at least i don't have ways to approach clients that pay as
much. I don't know who it can potentially be and why any work i could do may
worth as much.

~~~
zerr
Not on upwork, that for sure... As an experiment, when you reach to your next
client directly (outside upwork) - double your current rate. That is feasible
with proper clients e.g. from Germany, UK, North America, etc...

