
Ask HN: How do you brand yourself as a freelancer? - bluewalt
I&#x27;ll quit my CTO position in a few months to become a Freelancer.
I know personal branding is an important part of the job to get customers.<p>In short: what do you do for that?<p>* Where do you ensure to be visible? LinkedIn, personal website, etc?<p>* Do you create and post content (blog, LinkedIn groups, etc.)?<p>* What content about you do you emphasize to find leads?<p>* Do you use your own name, or a company name?<p>* Did you chose to brand yourself a generalist Freelancer (&quot;I&#x27;m a developper working with X and Y languages&quot;) or a specialist one (&quot;I can be a CTO as a service building your MVP for your startup and help recruiting and train your team&quot;)<p>Thanks for sharing your tips and experience.
======
brudgers
_I know personal branding is an important part of the job to get customers_

It pales in comparison to sales. Everything pales in comparison to sales.
Including competence. Including doing the work.

 _What content about you do you emphasize to find leads?_

To a first approximation, finding leads consists of finding leads. Not making
content. It means pounding the pavement. Making cold calls. Making warm calls
to people you know to ask for leads.

Don't get me wrong, I love avoiding sales as much as anyone. I've built
websites and used Linkedin and blogged to avoid selling. I joined the local
Chamber of Commerce and Rotary to sit in a room eating instead of going out
selling.

Selling is really hard because it is mostly rejection. It is even harder when
starting out because good clients already have consultants. It is even harder
when starting out because you have no idea what sells. And crazy ideas about
what might...like consultant CTO who also handles hiring and builds the
product. There probably is someone who might buy that. You are unlikely to
find that person because there are not enough days in the world for you to
meet them and close the sale.

Even worse, if you meet someone who thinks they might buy that thing, they are
probably a bad client. In the best case bad because they have no experience
working with people like you. In the average case, bad because they do have
experience working with people like you...new desperate freelancers.

Sell something that sells. Sell what other people sell because that is what
sells. Every snowflake is different. Being different, being niche, pitching a
snowflake...these are all excuses to avoid selling. Selling into a niche works
when you've found the niche is organically through experience.

Good luck.

~~~
jason_pomerleau
> Sell something that sells. Sell what other people sell because that is what
> sells.

Agreed. I tried for ~3 years to sell ‘general development services’. Got
tangled up in mobile apps, SharePoint, web development, basically anything
that I didn’t consider to be “IT”.

It was a financial and professional disaster. The solutions all sucked,
because I didn’t have deep expertise in anything and there was never enough
budget to “do things right”. There was no opportunity to develop any kind of
reputation for anything. It is _insanely_ hard to sell “well, I can build
things”.

As soon as I started focusing on a single, well-understood, boring business
problem (“we need a good website”) everything changed. I started getting good
at it, margins became healthy, referrals started to happen. Try getting a
referral when the problems you solve are too vague to describe.

> There probably is someone who might buy that. You are unlikely to find that
> person because there are not enough days in the world for you to meet them
> and close the sale.

If there’s a market for CTO-as-a-service, or anything really, you need to be
able to reach it. A hyper niche service can be OK if you can reach the people
that need it. Broad markets can be just as hard because you tend to need to
reach lots of people (think advertising). For me, the sweet spot turned out to
be “small to mid-size regional companies” because you can identify them and
sell to them as a freelancer.

~~~
poulsbohemian
^ There's nuggets of gold in this comment. I went through a very similar
cycle. Learn from our mistakes friends!

~~~
hieunc229
Is this the nugget of gold? “As soon as I started focusing on a single, well-
understood, boring business problem (“we need a good website”) everything
changed.”

~~~
poulsbohemian
It’s the generalist vs. focused part. Many of us who have been successful in
tech have done so because we are good generalists. But, that doesn’t transfer
well as something that you can _market_. So there is great power in narrowly
focusing on some skill that has demand you can meet.

~~~
everythingswan
It's also important to identify the thing that people request first, such as a
good website. Plenty of work is done after that problem is solved or in
addition to that problem.

The person who solves the "we need a website" problem gets to solve those
additional problems if they want to.

~~~
ehnto
That is a great point. Advertising as a generalist is hard because at the
point a generalist is needed they already have a website and a developer.

You need to meet them at where they are, when they are in the market for a
developer.

------
bloudermilk
I've had a successful career as an independent consultant for the last six
years and in my experience branding hasn't been a primary concern at all. As
@brudgers already pointed out, sales should be your top priority. Until you're
fully booked you should be speaking with friends, acquaintances, and strangers
every single day to find work. Your next priority should be delivering the
absolute best work you can, so that you can stop making cold calls and start
fielding inbound leads. Your past clients are your best source of new
business. Even better, keep your clients long-term so you're not kicking off
new projects all the time.

I don't think this matters as much as what I mentioned above, but I'll answer
your questions:

* Maintain your LinkedIn, Twitter, AngelList profiles just enough to back up your credentials when a potential lead google's your name.

* Don't waste your time blogging unless you plan on committing to being the "go-to" individual for a very niche technology/service. You'll read successful content creators advising the opposite, but for each one of them there are 1000 who never got traction, didn't publish anything valuable, or simply gave up.

* Your most important asset is your reputation

* Use your "personal brand" for as long as you can (i.e. until you're hiring other people). Building a reputation is hard enough, don't make it harder on yourself and others by adding misdirection when it's really just you behind the curtain.

* My niche for the most of my career has been "early-stage startup needs product-minded engineer to wear many hats". There has never been a shortage of rewarding work for me, but your mileage may vary.

Good luck! Happy to chat some time if you want to dig deeper. Contact info in
my profile.

------
gk1
Been consulting for seven years. Congrats on your decision to try it, and best
of luck to you.

Bits of consulting advice here, from answering similar questions in the past:

[https://www.gkogan.co/blog/consulting-
advice/](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/consulting-advice/)

And here’s a summary of my first year as a consultant, with lessons learned:

[https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-
consulting-l...](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-
leads/)

And why you should call yourself a consultant rather than a freelancer:

[https://www.gkogan.co/blog/freelancer-or-
consultant/](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/freelancer-or-consultant/)

For your last question I think you’re thinking about it wrong. People care
primarily about _their_ problems and whether or not you are the person who can
solve them. And their problems sound more like “We need to launch X by end of
quarter but we’re not moving fast enough,” or “we have a talented team of
engineers but continue to have production issues that are causing us to lose
customers.” Their problems _do not_ sound like “We are lacking a part-time
Rust developer!”

------
nickfromseattle
I generated ~105 leads from social in the last 18 months for
[https://contentdistribution.com](https://contentdistribution.com) by
(inconsistently) building a brand over the last 2-3 years.

I have had people wire me a lot of $ within 24 hours of talking to me, because
they spent a year reading my content before reaching out.

I'm working with companies backed by A16 and Peter Thiel because of my
personal brand.

It works, but it takes time.

\- Delete your friends from HS and college. Anyone that you'll never talk to
1:1 again, and don't see yourself reconnecting with. When they don't engage
with your social content, it lowers your overall reach

\- Join Facebook Groups and connect with your target audience. Like 1,000 -
2,000 people. Doesn't have to be all at once

\- Post long form content in your status. If you are going to link, drop the
link in the 1st comment. FB / LI want to keep people on their platform and
reduce reach of external links.

\- Be vulnerable. Share vulnerable stories that are actually humble brags.

\- Drop knowledge in the group. If the audience who hires you is non-
technical, don't talk about super technical stuff. Talk about how you saved
the day, or accelerated development, or worked on something that helped win a
deal, or developed a process that whatever

\- Share wins

\- Keep doing it. 2-3 times per week for 2-3 years

\- Write down everything in your head on your blog that you repeat. If you
have specific positioning on you, or how you do things - document it in the
blog.

\- Use this content once a lead engages with you to differentiate yourself and
build trust and credibility before you hop on the phone

Ultimately consulting services are hard to differentiate.

People like to work with people they like, and people they think will make
them look good.

Focus on excelling at both.

A lot of people who will hire you, won't hire you today.

But if you're stay top of mind over the next 2-3 years, an opportunity will
come up.

~~~
hackerman123469
I work a lot with automated posting on FB and just got one thing to say to:

\- Post long form content in your status. If you are going to link, drop the
link in the 1st comment. FB / LI want to keep people on their platform and
reduce reach of external links.

Do not post the link right away, wait a tiny bit AND if you can make the link
a subcomment of another comment that would be even better.

If you put the link as the only and first comment and right after posting then
FB will absolutely put 2 and 2 together and figure out the post is linking
external but if there is a time frame OR the text is somewhat misleading to
the link then it can work.

It's very tricky to fight the reach system of Facebook. Moreso if you're using
pages and not your personal account.

------
kirktrue
> I'll quit my CTO position in a few months to become a Freelancer

I'd suggest that you should consider a transition from FTE to freelancing over
some (fixed?) amount of time vs. a quick change.

Depending on who your prospective buyer is, I would also reconsider using the
"freelancer" title. I equate freelancer with the quick, sub-$1000 jobs that
are advertised on various "gig" sites. That's not really a pool you want to
swim in as it artificially constrains your rate ceiling.

~~~
villgax
Rightfully said, I transitioned from Upwork/Guru to solely Fiverr & get
incoming requests on a daily basis around my niche, been earning twice of what
I earned previously doing even less work. Went from service to product
basically.

------
lioeters
From my admittedly difficult and possibly anomalous past experience as a
freelancer for five years or so..

The most effective and long-term impact I saw in establishing my personal
brand was releasing or contributing to open-source software.

It's where I proved that I can produce value for a sizable userbase, write
documentation, maintain and keep improving it, overall doing professional
work. I had full control of the presentation and aesthetics, for my
personality to come across, and for people in the right places to notice my
work.

Some freelancers achieve similar effect with consistently producing quality
articles and blog posts, about niche topics they're interested in.

It depended on a lot of unpaid work, but I write software like I eat and
sleep, so I kept releasing more into the world. Mostly I was just lucky to
have made the right kind of software that a big enough market needed - which I
didn't know was in demand, but stumbled into it.

In retrospect, that was a way to market and advertise my brand, the skills I
can offer. There must be an easier way to do it, other than hard work and
luck, but I was inexperienced and had to pay my dues, until I had a regular
stream of clients.

The thing I did right, I believe, was to plug myself into a fairly niche
community (or marketplace), and make personal connections with owners and
decision-makers in the businesses.

------
poulsbohemian
I would humbly suggest that if you don't have answers to your questions, it is
not yet time to quit your day job.

As other folks in this thread have suggested, being a successful freelancer /
contractor / small-business owner, etc is all about dolla dolla bills. It all
starts and ends with sales. Your brand, the marketing associated to it -
everything is about building connections and making the cash register go ding.
Yes, ideally you want to also be competent and produce quality work, but a lot
of people who are really good at the tech part are not necessarily good at the
bringing-in-the-bacon part. Figure out how you are going to create your
pipeline and the actual steps of everything you said, IE: the mechanics of
what to do, will follow. Get all that going _before_ you jump into
freelancing.

------
kchoudhu
I'd start by not calling myself a freelancer.

You are a business solutions architect with heavy emphasis on technology.

~~~
chrisbennet
I bill myself as a "consultant".

------
raintrees
Happy clients are the best branding. I built my business almost exclusively on
referrals, which not only filters out clients that would not be a good fit,
but also provides reputational policing for agreements: The option of a client
considering not to complete their side of an agreement has additional
negatives due to the relationships involved. Likewise my service/product
reflects on the referer, as it were, providing me another incentive to deliver
massive value. And the referer gets the bonus of having been part of a
successful solution.

Win-win-win.

------
toshk
There's a lot of great advice to be found on this page. I'll just add one
thing: your location matters. If you are in places where there is a high
scarcity of engineers and good economic conditions (like western europe), it's
more the question of how do I select for something that's in line with my
wishes and ambitions. If you are in area where there is less of an fortunate
situation for engineers, the question would be more: is it possible to move or
find high quality remote clients.

------
davidajackson
By specializing. I develop mostly for mobile and also work on smart contract
architecture/servers for early stage startups. I don't do any "content-
marketing" on LinkedIn, but just reach out to early stage startups seeing if I
can help them. In my experience leads are best generated when you have a
previous experience that shows to the client that you can develop the
architecture/application. Then, if you sit down in an hour or two and hash out
what a basic MVP would look like for them, they're confident you can deliver
the product because you can explain how it would work on a technical level. Of
course, that architecture will most likely change/improve as the product moves
along but as long as you can show an iterative and constantly improving
approach that's what matters.

~~~
chrstphrhrt
Do you track down their email or just send a message on LinkedIn? How
customized are the initial communications (e.g. common elements per type of
work or type of company)?

~~~
davidajackson
I don't cold email/message strangers, though I have heard that can work. I
just contact people I've worked with and ask them about opportunities. Only
exception is I do reach out to YC startups.

------
Ayesh
Freelancing and personal brand are not necessarily helping each other. You can
have an amazing personal brand with zero income, or vice versa too.

However, personal branding can help in other situations, both socially and
mentally.

\- Definitely not linkedin. Personal web site. Not on medium, not in some
random microblogging platform.

\- Blog posts can work wonders. My personal web site ranks quite well on
certain SEO keywords, and they generate quite good contracts. Don't focus on
SEO, and don't blog unless you know you'd enjoy it.

\- My own name. My business model is to work closely with the clients. Most of
my clients are quite friendly, and I buffer the technical stuff from them
(such as choosing the right stack, and even AWS billing sometimes), so we can
establish a good level of trust.

\- I suppose it depends the type of branding you want. Unless you are doing a
very nice thing, focusing onna specific trait makes you stand out and gives
you a leeway to set better rates.

I was freelancing for almost 10 years, and have never set foot in an office
with a regular job. I wish you all the best in your endeavors. I know first
hand how difficult it can be sometimes, specially when the market is
saturated. Trust takes time to build, so I would say your first few clients
will take a leap of faith, to which you need to do a wonderful job back.

------
anon1094
Clients want one thing only: A business-problem solved _right now_.

Clients aren't googling "JavaScript tutorial" to find a technical blog post
for their specific freelance project. Clients don't care if you're on UpWork,
on Toptal, or where you come from.

They usually post a job online and wait for freelancers to come to them,
instead of actively searching for the "best" applicant.

Also, most clients don't ever fully go through your portfolio anyway.

They're getting blasted with dozens (sometimes hundreds) of applications. They
just don't have the time.

So what can you do?

If your goal is to land a freelance project you want to quickly showcase to
the client what you’re capable of creating as soon as you contact them.

The best way that I’ve found to do that is to build a series of small,
understandable projects (bits of code hosted on Codepen, GitHub, JSBin, etc.)
that a client can look at without much effort.

And then presenting them in a way that the client can easily understand how it
helps them.

I put together a free email course of just a handful of lessons that teaches
freelance web developers exactly stuff like the above...

If you're interested check it out at
[https://remoteleads.io/course](https://remoteleads.io/course)

------
Briel
I would actually say personal branding is not as important early on as niche
specialization. For example, you're not just a Rails developer, you're a Rails
developer who specializes in building MVPs for SaaS products.

Also I wouldn't focus on content as much right now. It takes a long of time to
create and market content that gets meaningful traffic and unless you do
keyword research right (or get lucky), it may not even bring in people who
need your services.

Instead, you need to ask yourself: where can I find people who need my
services? Example: Angellist, accelerator programs, etc. And reach out to them
with an idea of what you can help them build. Here's a good template for this:
[https://artofemails.com/new-clients#developer](https://artofemails.com/new-
clients#developer)

Do not wait for them to find you because this is how the feast and famine
cycle happens.

~~~
ghaff
There's a flip side to be careful of though. I've known consultants who were
probably the world experts in, say, the performance of a now long-dead
computer architecture. You do want to specialize to at least some degree. But
even if you've found a nice niche, be aware it may not be there forever.

------
zerr
The followup question - how do you find _short term_ (and premium pay) gigs?
It seems most clients try to have you as a long term team member - with all
the processes and agile bullshit.

~~~
sokoloff
If they’re paying a premium rate, does that really matter? I also find that
premium pay partially solves the issue as no one wants the expensive
consultant to be wasting their time.

------
pocw
I get all of my work from personal referrals. (3 years freelance DevOps) If
you've worked as a CTO you probably know 200 people who know and respect your
work. Reach out to your network and tell them you're available and what you
want to focus on. I assure you, you'll be swimming in work before you know
what hit you.

I got started practicing my pitch by going to a conference and telling people
I met what I thought I was about. That got me ready for customer meetings.
I've never talked to a potential customer who said no. Once I started, every
customer has asked me to come on full-time, several customers have suggested
my rate is too low. (it's about what I'd make total comp + benefits if I went
back to a FAANG company full-time). I have now welcomed 4 different people to
work alongside me and we're still swimming in work.

I have a shitty website I stood up in an afternoon and zero marketing budget.
Forget branding, forget marketing. Use your network and practice describing
the things you're passionate about. And I suppose, be passionate about things
that actually create value. And then be excellent to your customers. It's a
small world out there. Word gets around.

~~~
kstromeiraos
I'm also a freelance DevOps that might embrace new projects. If you're still
swamped with work we could collaborate.

------
TheFullStack
I have been consulting full time for about 8 years, mostly with NYC and SV
startups. Here's what I use for branding:

\- LinkedIn \- Youtube channel \- Udemy courses

I work through an LLC structure but my clients view me as an individual
contractor, not an agency. I don't blog or incessantly tweet for exposure.

Like others mentioned, it's all about sales. I have gotten very attuned to
identifying warm leads, nurturing them and closing. Because of that, I don't
"spray and pray" either. Each month I contact maybe 3-5 outbound leads and on
average 2-3 get back to me. From that, I close 1-2 and sub out to junior devs.
Average contract value is around $40k.

You have to sell, there's no other way around it. Not only do you have to
sell, you cannot be afraid to sell otherwise it will show. I enjoy the selling
process, in particular the "close" \- that's like hitting a game winning shot.
I'm doing a sales call on Tuesday with another SV startup which I have no real
bandwidth to take on. I'm doing it mostly to stay sharp and to a degree, for
fun. The sales process is actually fun for me. That's how far you have to go
with sales if you want to thrive as a consultant.

------
hodgesrm
You didn't say what you would be doing as a freelancer. If it's something like
CTO-in-a-box, the easiest path to success is a network of people who already
want to employ you before you leave. In this case "personal branding" is just
a good reputation with people you already know.

For example, being good friends with a few VCs may be all you need to have a
very successful consulting career.

------
maruthisandeep
I would ask the question why is brand important? I'm assuming it is to get
sales.

I cannot imagine a World without sales. I see that sales have been portrayed
as some form of trickery performed by a person wearing a suit. Forget wolf of
wall street. Forget the jargon. Forget Jerry Maguire for a moment. Forget
psychological tricks. Let's get to basics.

Sales is an art and science of transferring feelings and solving problems.

Make Sales the centerpiece of everything in building a brand. It has a multi-
fold impact.

are some key pointers:

1\. Share your authentic story (this is your brand), this will help you build
a brand 2\. Share your unique point of view form your experiences in the past
3\. Help people by solving their problems 4\. Write as you speak & concise
emails 5\. Focus & follow-up are key to win 80% of the sales 6\. Get
comfortable on the phone or talking to strangers 7\. Listen as much as you
speak 8\. Learn and iterate from every interaction

Again no tricks, no jargon. Just keep it simple. Hope this is helpful.

Good luck.

------
ipnon
My friends in photography seem to consider this a solved problem. Granted I
have no idea what the details are, but you may be able to find suitable
answers by searching for what is considered a good portfolio as a
photographer.

------
hizxy
I freelanced for 5 years. No personal brand. Old website. Referrals are
everything.

~~~
juliend2
As much as I like having a nice website and maintaining an up-to-date Linkedin
profile, I have to admit that it's very true.

Word of mouth does 90-95% of the work. 5% might be related to me having a
linkedin profile.

I've been freelancing during most of my dev career since I started in 2008.

------
mark_l_watson
I recommend writing a technical book on whatever subject that most fascinates
you. Choose a topic based on where your passion is, and don't worry too much
about sales.

~~~
dan_can_code
I'm just curious, but why do you recommend this? Is it so you can have a name
for yourself in your chosen passion? Is it to show you are competent?

~~~
ghaff
Not the parent but the pro argument would be along the lines of a lot of
people still assigning (a probably outsized) degree of credibility because
you've written a book on a topic. And, secondarily, it does show you can take
on and complete a significant project.

The con speaks to the other comment about selling. Writing a book takes a
_lot_ of time which could be spent on other things more directly related to
building a business. (And the book itself probably won't make much money.) A
website/blog with even a modest amount of good content may go almost as far as
a book for a lot less time.

Don't get me wrong. Being published, especially through more credible
publishers, can be good for one's career. I'm pretty sure it has for me. But,
on the other hand, I haven't had to trade-off revenue vs. writing time.

------
alvis
I once strapped in this branding game, and though I gain something out of it,
the biggest gain is that I rediscovered myself — what I do actually really
like and expert in my heart and what I think I like or being an expert.

Banding is an interesting game. But don’t start with how. Start with what. Ask
yourself why you do you need to brand, and then what you can brand, and then
what you really want to brand.

------
pryelluw
Persinal branding means shit next to sales skills.

Can you sell? If not, dont quit just yet. Go learn sales first.

How?

Start by reading the sales book Jordan Belfort wrote.

Then practice.

~~~
Cactus2018
The Wolf of Wall Street? Perfect time for a favorite parody - "The Wolf of
Buzz Feed"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1EiKys_Uk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1EiKys_Uk)

~~~
pryelluw
Yes, the very same guy. He is not a role model in any way but the guy knows
how to sell and how to explain how to sell in plain words.

His book really helped me improve my sales skills. Other books like Jeffrey
Gitomers red sales book are too wishy washy. Even classics written by Zig
Ziglar pale in comparison to Belfort's book.

------
chiefalchemist
ExCTO? You're not a freelancer. You're a consultant. Full stop.

However you position yourself it comes down to trust. Can they trust you? Can
they trust you'll get the job done. Use your previous work history as
validation.

------
k__
Write a blog, do podcasts, videos, books, something like that.

Put yourself out there.

Otherwise you will be at recruiters mercy and they usually just have crappy
jobs to offer.

------
sbfeibish
Maybe the same headhunter firms that can get you a permanent (higher level
management) position, can get you a temporary position.

------
hhw3h
Focus on:

1) Dialing in a profitable offer 2) Building a predictable source of leads 3)
Building a repeatable sales process

1 offer, 1 channel, 1 sales process

Good luck!

------
franze
hi, for the Freelancer Meetup Vienna (Austria) I gave a talk about that topic.
Later turned it into an article.
[https://medium.com/@franz.enzenhofer/positioning-for-
freelan...](https://medium.com/@franz.enzenhofer/positioning-for-
freelancers-c07d5bc542a6?source=friends_link&sk=393b26c8b3b7e2c31c5bb93b7d5d4ee9)
(Medium non-paywall link). Feedback very welcome. Maybe it's the start of a
book.

