

Freelance Programmer Survival Manual - d_luaz
http://luaz.blogspot.com/2012/09/freelance-programmer-survival-manual.html

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zalew
It lacks the most important advice: charge more.

> I will give a lower price to a customer who I believe to have good
> character, and I would hike up the price if he is a demanding or difficult
> to deal with type

Please don't. Your beliefs don't matter. Even the coolest guy can come out as
a PITA or a scammer. Or even if he's cool, he can have partners who will make
your life a living hell. In the end, it's all about the money. Just charge
what you're worth, so you don't regret it.

~~~
Sodaware
Don't be afraid of losing jobs because you charge too much. When I first
started on oDesk I charged $10 an hour, because I didn't want to put people
off. Then I realized that kids in my neighbourhood make more walking dogs.
Since then I've put my rates up considerably, and even though I still get
nervous when talking money, I've never had a client say it's too much.

Charging more lets people know you're serious. Low paying customers typically
ask for way more "can you just" tasks, like changing the font colour a dozen
times or moving something "just a little to to right". You don't call your
lawyer to change the typeface on your legal letters.

~~~
anovikov
+1. In fact in sites like odesk, you put people off by charging too little
(putting you in the same league with guys no one wants to hire at any price
whatever low).

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clueless123
IMHO, Nothing like agile for freelancing.. every week the customer gets a
solid deliverable, every week I get a real paycheck. If at any time the
customer does not like my work or I don't like the customer, we can always
part ways, what is done is all 100% his, (documentation, source code etc)

Worst case scenario.. I am out a week's work.

*so far, I've never been stiffed.

~~~
d_luaz
I wish the customers at this part of the world (Malaysia) are sophisticated
enough to accept the concept of "time & material". Most of them will refuse to
pay if they are not satisfied with the work (in regardless of the
completeness); and a partially completed work is of no value to a typical
customer (especially non-IT customers).

~~~
clueless123
Trust is a key issue, if we don't trust each other we are already in trouble.
Trust goes both ways, so that is why I charge at the _end_ of an iteration
with no money advance at all.

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tluyben2
The upfront depends on the project as well; some projects have less, some have
more; depends on the size and the number of milestones. If you have, say, a
project of $10k with 4 milestones, I would never do a 30/70 payment. Rather
30/10/10/20/30 or something.

Also, you can use the popular agile approach which is popular; in that case
you define stories per sprint (which in smaller projects are a week usually)
and every monday morning you agree with the client upon the stories to be done
that week. When you finished the last story, the client needs to pay the price
for that week and go on with the next week. This keeps both sides alert and
doesn't allow for slacking on both sides. It can go very wrong if you agree to
too much, then you get the dark side of agile which means you'll be working
every weekend 24 hours/day to make that monday morning.

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mooreds
I found it interesting that he barely touched what I feel is the most
important part of freelancing: marketing. Yes, right now you can name your
price if you are a good developer, but how do you show that, and how do you
evaluate projects? (I know he touched on what kind of clients to keep.)

When I freelanced, I evaluated clients on three criteria:

* had I worked with them in the past?

* did I know anyone who had worked with them in the past?

* everyone else

If I trusted them or people who had worked with them, it made the engagement
easier all around (though you still need a contract!).

As far as finding new clients, I relied on word of mouth, which probably
didn't lead to as many opportunities as would have occurred if I was more
active in various communities, but I was ok with that at the time.

Also, I wonder what the author moved on to?

~~~
d_luaz
The only marketing I did is word of mouth: friends & family, those are usually
the good paymaster due to our "relationship". Yup, returning customers are the
best.

I didn't try any elance stuff, because I felt it's a race to the bottom price
with programmers from India.

I move on to develop a restaurant review website (sort of lifestyle business):
<http://food.malaysiamostwanted.com/>

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RileyJames
Same comment I put on the blog, but keen to hear HN responses. Why do so many
freelancers gravitate to small(er) clients? It seems to lead to direct
competition with platforms such as freelancer.com, odesk, elance, etc which is
impossible for a local freelancer.

Clients like digital and creative agencies, funded startups and corporates
(managers that don't have access to internal dev resources, but still have dev
needs). They use freelancers and they don't come with a lot of issues small
clients have.

Interested to hear from freelancers as to how and why they work for smaller
clients.

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Tichy
I just like small projects because I get bored quickly. Three months is about
ideal. Projects for larger clients also have a tendency to go nowhere, that is
they never make it into production. It is easier to get good rates from larger
clients, though.

~~~
talkingquickly
Couldn't agree more, part of the fun of Freelance work for me is getting to
work on a range of projects with a range of differing technologies. Might just
be my attention span but more than three - five months full time on a project
which isn't my own and start getting itchy feet.

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anovikov
I will never try doing anything without a 3rd party technically guaranteing me
payments (like the odesk.com which bills people automatically per-screenshot
using money pre-blocked from their CCs - absolutely no excuse can exist to
avoid payment).

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StavrosK
I have also found most (if not all) points here to be true. Good essay.

