
Made more money as a contractor than as a freelance developer. Help! - openbasic
I&#x27;ve been trying to find some work on the side in order to build up my savings and achieve my dream of buying a home for me and my wife, so we can start our family. I&#x27;m a full-time senior software engineer, 8+ years of experience, proficient in both backend and frontend development.<p>Unfortunately, my adventures through sites like Freelancer.com, Gun.io, and UpWork have been hard: most developers win projects with rates like $7&#x2F;hr or $10&#x2F;hr. That&#x27;s pretty much impossible to beat, specially for someone living in the US.<p>As a matter of fact, since I haven&#x27;t been able to find quality dev freelance work, I&#x27;ve been making some money as a contractor. I&#x27;m pretty good assembling furniture, plumbing, painting, stuff like that and my wife suggested that I used NextDoor to offer services. My rate is $30&#x2F;hr and my nights are full (I think people who work like my schedule?).<p>How do you guys find good projects to work with? Is there a secret circle somewhere or something? Like a Freemasonry of software development?
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chatmasta
1\. Stay away from those websites

2\. Identify your specialties and craft a pitch for how you can use them to
generate value for a company. Ideally these specialties will result in
measurable value. Examples: saving money on AWS costs; generating sales leads;
optimizing marketing funnels.

3\. Focus on “push, not pull.” Find companies who could benefit from your
specialties, and reach out to them directly. Set up phone calls, video chats,
and face to face meetings. Learn to sell yourself as a product.

4\. If you’re a senior developer, you should have a fairly extensive network
of people who know your work quality, all working at different companies.
Reach out to these people first.

5\. Charge by the day, week or month. Do not charge by the hour. Start with
your market-rate salary for a year, divide it by 50, and then multiply it by
1.5-2.0 to get your weekly rate. [EDIT: Just realized you have a full time
job, so this might not be possible. In that case you’re going to struggle to
compete against full time consultants, unless you’re working primarily on
piecemeal work. The real money is in full time consulting, not moonlighting by
the hour.]

6\. Focus on companies that either have VC funding or revenue, and preferably
3+ full time employees working at market-rate salaries. They will not flinch
at your price.

7\. Increase your rates with each new contract.

~~~
ChrisAntaki
Nice advice, though my experience doesn't resonate with #5. I always priced by
the hour, but charged by the minute. Tools like Harvest made this easy. If
there was a chance to reduce billable time spent by changing the spec a bit,
I'd let clients know. Clients seemed to really appreciated this, and I was
making enough to buy a house in California, a couple hours away from SF.

~~~
chatmasta
How complex are the projects you’re working on? Do you work on multiple
projects for different clients within the same day? I personally look for
greenfield projects of at least a month in duration, and commit my full
attention to them for that time. I treat the project like a temporary full
time job.

I’ve never tried charging by the hour, but my intuition is it could lead to
micromanagement from clients, and also create stress/overhead for me in
accounting for each hour. I also worry it would make clients uncomfortable to
know I’m constantly context switching into different projects throughout the
day.

What if I spend an hour of the day researching a solution? Does the client
need to know the details of all 8 hours of my day? I prefer to keep a “work
log” spreadsheet, with a row for each day explaining at a high level what I
accomplished, and also keep in daily communication with the client to make
sure we are on the same page.

How much information do you give your clients as to what you did each hour?
Have you ever tried billing in larger blocks? If so, how did that method
differ from charging hourly?

~~~
imron
I bill by the hour too.

It's the only sane way to do it, and contra to your intuition it stops
micromanagement and makes clients respectful of your time. Clients don't know
or care about context switching for other clients, they care about the quality
of the work provided, so take care of that and you'll be ok. It's not like
you'll be constantly switching anyway. Usually I'll work all day or all half a
day on one specific thing anyway.

In terms of accounting for each hour, there are software tools to help with
that.

Just click when you're working and click when you stop and the software
tallies up the time.

I don't provide clients with hourly breakdowns of everything I worked on, I
just send a bill at the end of the month that includes total hours worked that
month.

Regular video calls and email, plus delivered results are sufficient proof of
work.

------
mindcrime
Well... as a general rule, I'd say "don't use sites like Freelancer.com,
Upwork, etc. Seek out clients directly." And I'd definitely say that if you
meant to make a full-time living as a freelancer. But since you're doing it on
the side, you have limited time to do the kind of sales / marketing /
promotion stuff you'd probably need to do in order to directly source clients.

On possibility might be to befriend as many other locals who do freelance work
as you can, and try to work out an arrangement to take on subcontract work /
handle overflow work / etc.

Anyway, if you haven't tried yet, you might find it worthwhile to ping as many
former co-workers and other connections as you can (this is where LinkedIn is
really handy) and let them know that you're available and looking for
freelance work. Or if you can spare the time, visit as many networking events
as you can (technical meetups, "business mixers" ran by things like the
Chamber of Commerce, "lead swap" meetups, etc., etc., etc.) and network like
mad.

You could also try a direct mail campaign targeting local businesses. Maybe
put together a bundle of software + services using Open Source software and
your skills, and target, say, I dunno, every car wash in your town, or every
bar/restaurant, or every medical office. Whatever makes sense given your
history / skills / experience / domain knowledge / etc.

~~~
richardknop
> Well... as a general rule, I'd say "don't use sites like Freelancer.com,
> Upwork, etc. Seek out clients directly."

Totally agreed. Those websites are mostly for cheap developers from third
world or developing countries. Somebody living in a first world country like
US/UK won't be able to make a decent living there as you are competing with
people from countries where 1/10 of your rate is considered very good salary.
You need to get a proper clients by meeting companies face to face and
offering them consultancy services.

------
BjoernKW
My general advice from these previous comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910781](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910781)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15921156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15921156)

In a nutshell: Find a niche. Solve business problems rather technical ones.
Don't call yourself a freelance developer. Prefer 'consultant' (as trite as
that might sound it conveys the notion that you're a problem solver rather
than someone who turns someone else's ideas and concepts into computer code).

Network and build long-term relations. Forego freelance sites and try to avoid
recruiters as well. Rather do both marketing and sales yourself and on your
own terms. This can still mean hiring someone to do it for you but you have to
set the rules and principles.

(Freemasonry seems to come up a lot on Hacker News recently :-) I can assure
you that Freemasonry doesn't provide you with business opportunities. There's
no secret inner circle of software consultants either that you need to be part
of in order to be successful. For the most part it's just consistent
networking and relationship-building.)

------
kohanz
There is no secret. Successful freelancing doesn't (typically) happen from
behind your computer, you need to get out and talk to people that already know
& trust you or, if there aren't enough of those, you need to build that
network. I've been freelancing successfully for almost 4 years and all of my
clients and projects have come in via someone that already knew me IRL.

I suppose you could be successful without that if you had a well-known brand
as a developer (e.g. famous for leading some OSS project or something), but
most of us are not in that situation.

I'm guessing the fact that you're using these online platforms to find jobs is
because you're doing this part-time and thus don't have the time to go out and
network as much. That may be so, but know that it severely impacts your
ability to differentiate yourself. When you advertise on those sites, you are
basically saying "I am a commodity".

------
amerkhalid
Start teaching and/or blogging.

I know there are 1000s of programmers teaching same basic stuff but it seems
to make you stand out.

I say this because long time ago, I worked with Pentaho, a BI tool. Wrote
couple of posts about using it, mostly for document for myself. I still get a
few emails a year to do some consulting for Pentaho though some of it might be
just recruiter spam.

On other hand, my PHP posts have not send me any legit looking emails
regarding PHP consulting. But that might be because my PHP posts are pretty
basic and don’t show up in search results.

------
gshakir
Avoid sites like freelancer.com. You can try the following:

* Go to meet ups. There are hiring managers that attend that are looking for full time or part time talent.

* Craigslist gig's section is good, since people like local developers that who like to meet etc.

* Find a niche area, blog about it, put some sample code on GitHub

------
tejay
Hi there - I'm the CEO of Gun.io. Shoot me an email at teja[at]gun.io. Our
average rates on platform are 10x higher than that. In fact, that's why we
started the business.

~~~
openbasic
Message sent. Thanks for the attention, I really appreciate it.

~~~
ddorian43
Depending on how good you are on the thing you're applying for you can get
jobs as much as $60/hour (only tested upwork). You also have to apply some
country filtering, don't hope to get paid $30/hour by some Pakistan company.
Higher than that is really difficult.

But there is other coin too, once tried to hire some `solr` experts ($100/hour
rate) whom after I asked about some extension development went out of touch (1
agency & 2 contractors). So it can suck on client side too.

------
saluki
y, don't use the online sites at least not the upwork style ones, it's a race
to the bottom and usually the clients have unrealistic expectations.

Your best projects are going to come through your network. So start talking to
friends and contacts about providing development services, websites, web
applications etc. Almost everyone knows someone who needs a website or web
application.

I wouldn't really recommend going the chamber of commerce route or business
after hours. Most businesses you meet there are typically interested in simple
inexpensive websites. If you do go this route I would recommend trying to
offer building websites for small businesses for a monthly fee. Instead of
charging them $750 to $1000 for a basic site. Offer them a site for monthly
fee starting at $99/mo for the most basic site. You provide basic design,
setup the site, provide hosting and once monthly content updates. Have tiered
pricing where new pages/features increase their monthly fee. It's a lot of leg
work to build up but can bring in some nice recurring revenue.

Since you are trying to make extra money to save and aren't depending on this
work you should specialize in something like web applications (rails/laravel)
or react projects where you can charge a high hourly rate to make it worth
your time. And is more interesting work than websites.

Since you are a contractor you probably have more flexibility to build your
own projects(review your contract on IP of projects outside of work).

Give this a listen, start in the archives, episode 1.
StartUpsForTheRestOfUs.com you can follow Rob from drop shipping beach towels,
to selling Drip for $XXM.

This isn't a fast option to make revenue but you can build it up to something
in the future that can make life a lot easier.

Good luck

------
phyller
How about a full time job? With that much experience you should be able to get
one that pays well. If there are no full time positions for your skill set in
the area, there are companies that hire remote workers. Search for the "Who's
Hiring?" post that comes out every month or get in touch with a recruiter.

~~~
openbasic
I have a full-time job, as I mentioned in the post: full-time software
engineer, 8+ years of experience. I earn 120k/y. Unfortunately, with my wife's
college debt + my own + rent and, well, life, it's been hard to save real
money for our down payment on a house.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I wonder if adding more keyboard work is a good idea when you already have a
full time job writing software. If you end up burning yourself out you will be
in a much worse financial situation.

$120K is quite a lot, four times the median wage in the US, you may be better
off working on lowering your outgoings rather than increasing income.

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
Depending on where he/she lives it's not. I've been there. Full time jobs are
not paying enough. It all depends on your personal situation. Some developers
I worked with used to live with parents and they thought their salary was
great, I couldn't do that so I found I couldn't save anything.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Possibly, but even in San Francisco the median wage is $78K.

------
gadders
I'd read some of the material on here as well:
[https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/](https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/)

I can't say it will solve your problems, but there is definitely some good
advice there.

------
ioddly
I don't know about any secret circles (would appreciate an invite if there is
one), but you could try the HN freelancer thread, submitted by the account
'whoishiring (the February one will be up next week). I have had good results
through there.

~~~
openbasic
Didn't know about this thread, thanks.

~~~
DoreenMichele
It gets posted on the first of the month every month.

------
TokyoKid
I'm in a similar situation. 4 whole months with no work. I've sent 100s of
applications and done dozens or interviews. I have 8-9 years of experience and
3 of those in React and Node. I've got an impressive resume and experience at
4 other starts ups, and even at a big game developer.

Are these the early signs of a slow down in the tech industry. I've also
considered ICOs to be a big red flag as well.

~~~
averagebear
If you're doing React, you should look at a tech shop. It's a smaller one, but
we've done work with [http://g2i.co/](http://g2i.co/)

