
My First Year of Freelancing - starbist
https://www.silvestarbistrovic.from.hr/articles/my-first-year-of-freelancing/
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acconrad
8 months into my first year of freelancing in the UI space:

* Closing in on $250k revenue

* 2 major clients, 4 smaller, short-term engagements

* 100% utilization rate (no downtime between clients)

* Successfully raised rates with all client projects (avg: 19% / engagement)

* Closed via a sales funnel of: 5 new prospect outreach / day, 2 proposal follow-ups / day, 1 existing (or prior) client referral / month

What worked:

* Networking aggressively (see sales funnel)

* Setting up a 3-prong presence of blog + personal site + consulting site

* Pruning and refining available code/assets for portfolio

* Pricing / week & value-based, fixed-cost pricing

* 100% money-back guarantee (no one has asked for it)

* Having an accountant

What did not work:

* Thorough proposal / contract documentation. I figured having detailed, in-depth scope of work showing I had knowledge of their industry, problems, etc, would help close deals. The teams that closed the fastest already knew they wanted to work with me, but the ones that weren't sold couldn't even be sold with excellent SOWs and proposal documentation.

* Having a lawyer. For a one-man consulting shop, you really don't need one. Most standard SOW/Contract/IP documents are easy enough to generate/find yourself.

* Toptal / Upwork / any of those race-to-the-bottom sites. There's great arbitrage if you're international like OP. But I'm in the US, and it's not worth the effort for US rates.

* Meetups. I just didn't invest time in them (yet). I think the next leap in rates will come from becoming more "well known" through blogging and speaking engagements, which this is a key area to invest in.

* All this "double your rate" business. Sure, I imagine this works if you're used to pulling in $50/hr, and I imagine Brennan Dunn and the sort are marketing themselves at more commoditized development. But trust me, people ran away when I doubled my rates. I had to find a sweet spot and build up my rates slowly per client rather than just assume I was wildly undervalued.

~~~
pibi
I cannot speak about Toptal, but Upwork works pretty good. You just have to
avoid silly jobs,be focused and perservere.

Disclaimer: I'm italian, working remote, strong focus on nodeJS and fintech,
estimated revenue for 2018 (first year of freelancing full-time, not fully
from Upwork): 360K$, working 220 days per year

~~~
sireat
Admirable, where are most of your clients located?

$1500 a day sustained seems like an incredible rate in Europe.

~~~
pibi
UK, US, Malaysia, even India pays well (if you look carefully).

You should not care about the rate, but the value of your work. In other
words, it's about trading in value, not time

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themodelplumber
That's a pretty great first year as a freelancer, maybe even an amazing first
year. I'm in my 17th year and am tempted to think that if I started out like
that, I'd be retired by now ;-)

My first year was like: "Client bought me a computer! That was amazing. Man
these eMachines boxes are a steal. Got some software from school, too, and a
former employer gave me Photoshop 4.5 on a CD. [Update a month later] Oh, I
get it. People give you free stuff hoping not to have to pay you later."

~~~
zedder
No such thing as a free lunch I guess.

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Uberphallus
Warning: rant, sample of 1

My first year freelancing was my last (for now).

The only client I landed, following the guidelines stated on the link (cover
letter, etc), was for a very niche job (IoT/FPGA related). I undersold myself
as it was my very first gig on Website.

The client ended up hiring me and another guy from Country. They explained
what they had, what they wanted, and I explained the problems with their
architecture and possible solutions. The other guy was like, yes, all can be
done, yes, great idea, sure, it's easy, yes, of course, nothing is wrong, it's
so smart.

I was constantly dropping quotations from RFCs, IEEE, FCC and recommending
hardware choices for backing it up with documentation, but they consistently
followed the other guy's advice, to the point of deploying extravagant and
unnecessary hardware: think of a workstation plugged to a Zynq, plugged to 3
Arduinos, and a Stratix 10 in the middle with a plethora of custom circuits
and transceivers attached kind of mess, just because the guy only could find
libs and IPs that ran precisely on those devices to do the puzzle that he
himself sold to the client. I suspect this was not out of pure incompetence,
but an evolutionary way to make one seem expert and make the project take
longer to cash in more money.

And all of this was ON REMOTE. We literally had to ask the remote office to
verify connections, and status LEDs on the devices, and obviously debugging
out of business hours was an absolute PITA.

The other guy was insanely productive, in a meaningless kind of way.
Everything was documented but badly, some stuff had CAD, some hand drawn; the
designs had some corner cases well thought and commented, while basic things
completely overlooked. Half of the code was copied from OpenCores, Arduino
examples, etc, and the other half didn't make any sense. The only way I could
describe him is as a bored engineer on the 5th day of a meth binge.

One day I just snapped during an argument, calling their project "Internet of
Spaghetti", and called it quits. Then the client contested all the hours I
filed, and Website took their side, I assume because they had high rating and
I had just started.

Then I went back to corporate, it's boring but I don't have to deal with such
bullshit.

~~~
thomk
You are thinking like an engineer not like a businessman. I'm speaking from
experience here as I have been (recently) guilty of the same thing and I
assure you my case was much, much worse.

Engineers love to solve problems. They love it SO MUCH that they very often do
it for free (see: opensource). You yourself said you 'underbid' the project.
You were trying to solve a problem with logic, reason and an attempt to
deliver a clean, well functioning, properly designed product.

Business do not care about those things. They care about 2 things:

1\. Money 2\. They want it to work

Your best defense against stupidity that has money is to collect money as
often as possible. Get a deposit, stop working if they are late on payment,
changes cost more, phone calls where I'm consulting to you costs money.

It's hard to hear, but the other guy kind of did it right. Save yourself a
lifetime of lessons that I have learned (or stay in corporate) by simply
treating every single client like you are running a business.

Be transparent about your unwavering focus on payment. You can do that and
still be friendly by the way.

You (and I) think "I'll do an amazing job, this product will be clean, fast
and standards compliant AND cheaper!"

And when you are done all they will say "does it work?"

The unclean truth is, customers don't care about well functioning, well
designed code until NOT having it costs them money. See #1 above.

Of course you have the choice to not continue working with these types of
clients, but, the truth is there's going to be some insanity in any business.
Lessons are hard to learn and the best you can do is protect yourself and be
honest, meaning, "This isn't the right way but it'll work and save you a few
bucks, is that OK?"

~~~
derangedHorse
I would honestly read a blog dedicated to stuff like this, 'Freelance Business
Lessons for Engineers' or something like that.

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mtolan
It's strange that this person didn't also describe the lessons they'd learned
about Content Marketing, but I guess it doesn't work if you point that out.

~~~
barry-cotter
Look at their footer

> Silvestar is a fearless web developer and consultant, JAMstack enthusiast
> and Wordpress coder currently available for hire.

This person may have accidentally reinvented content marketing but they aren’t
implementing a known good strategy. They are a web developer, a coder,
available for hire. They say they’re a consultant, which is nice but they
don’t understand the difference between a consultant and a contractor. A
consultant is way more expensive. If this person has a marketing position or a
niche I don’t know what it is. I’m completely convinced they’re a good web
developer but they don’t have a market position more differentiated than “I
build websites”.

~~~
starbist
Actually, this "Consultant" part is released today. I could consult a client,
and charge my hours, but I wouldn't mind if someone else implements the
proposed solution. :-)

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barry-cotter
Great. I wish you every success but if I might offer some suggestions you need
to figure out what expensive problem you are solving and sell that solution.
Persuade people you can save them a lot of money or make them a lot of money
and sell based on the value you can provide for them. Not a coder for hire.
Sell based on value, not capacities.

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anarchitect
I'm in my first month freelancing. The last time I wasn't in a full-time job
was when I was running a small web design company in the 90s (it still exists
and is run by @prawn).

Finding work was not difficult – I was lucky enough to book all of my capacity
from day one. The biggest challenge I've had so far is managing my time across
clients, and adjusting to not having a team.

~~~
GFischer
How did you get your customers, through your network? Do you do mostly
frontend or something else?

~~~
anarchitect
I do E-commerce consultancy, CRO and Facebook advertising (still figuring how
much to specialise).

I was fairly fortunate to bring by previous employer on as first client, the
rest of the leads have come through my personal network. The nice thing about
prioritising lifestyle over growth is I don't need many clients.

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gk1
Hey Silvestar, I just emailed you about possible work. Something tells me
you'll have a good second year! :)

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starbist
I surely hope so. :)

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aantix
A developer for Toptal tops out at $3,200 a week? $80 an hour is peanuts in
software engineering and they certainly aren't attracting the entire "top 3%"
of "experts in the field" with such a low, max rate.
[https://www.toptal.com/faq#how-much-does-toptal-
cost](https://www.toptal.com/faq#how-much-does-toptal-cost)

~~~
mantas
$80/h is peanuts only in SV. It's totally viable for "top 3%" of eastern
european of "experts in the field".

~~~
cheez
Chances are TopTal takes a 30% cut

~~~
COil
30%? That would be huge.

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paulpauper
For citizens of developed countries, freelancing seems like too much work for
little pay. for coding and web work you're computing with foreigners who can
do the job at a much lower price. Bidding process creates a race to the bottom

~~~
toasterlovin
If you're in a situation where you're competing with low cost foreigners on
price, then you're doing it wrong. There is a huge market for freelance
software engineers who are based in the U.S. and speak English (or who are
based in Germany and speak German, or whatever). If you have a client who will
benefit 5x+ from the money they pay you, they don't really care that there is
somebody in Eastern Europe or India who will do the work for 1/3rd the cost;
the overriding importance is on getting the work done well and quickly. Fluent
communication is critical to this.

You just have to find the clients (the hard part). What has worked for me is
making myself visible inside of my particular niche, then forming
relationships with established freelancers so they send their overflow my way.
Still in my first year, but this strategy seems to be working.

~~~
toasterlovin
Case in point: I just got an email from a client who wants me to take an image
from their designer and turn it into HTML + CSS (not what I normally do, but
you end up doing weird stuff to take care of good clients). They are going to
pay me about 10x market rate for this kind of work. But they probably need it
for a sales demo and they _know_ that I'll get it turned around for them
quickly and _it will be done right_.

That's what consulting clients are paying for: an assurance that things will
be done right and on a dependable timetable.

~~~
mattmanser
People still pay for that? These days I usually get it from the designer as
HTML/CSS.

~~~
derangedHorse
That sounds like a dream, I rarely see a designer who also codes. Do you work
in a big corporation or freelance?

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CrankyBear
This is an interesting discussion... but it really has nothing to do with the
article. Which, really doesn't say much of anything unlike the note from
acconrad, which gives real details.

