

How to Freelance to Your First Million. It's been done. - nickb
http://bytes.com/forum/thread835227.html

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ojbyrne
Millionaire seems kind of a stretch, though the article linked to uses the
phrase "dollar millionaire." The first company says 200 employees, $2 million
revenue. The second one says $600k at $20/hour. So the first one is $10k per
employee, the second one works out to 30,000 hours billed. There are only 8760
hours in a year.

My point is, these aren't freelance workers, they're businesses with
employees. So "freelance" is misleading, and I suspect "million" is too.

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RobGR
I agree with ojbyrne's analysis of the numbers, that they seem less than
advertised - although keep in mind that you can bill more than 8760 hours a
year, especially on the internet where no one knows if you are a dog, or
working on a project versus asleep, and you can bill the same hour multiple
times if you get jobs that are similar. I agree with bdr that this sounds like
an ad for eLance.

But I think the idea of this article is a good one. Someone who isn't weeks
behind on all their deadlines (i.e., not me) should do a "Freakonomics" style
analysis of some of these outsourcing sites. If you sign up as a buyer, you
can usually see some type of statistics about past jobs that sellers did. If
you could work with the people running the site you could probably get access
to even more detailed analysis.

It would be interesting to know the average and median, as well as the top,
monthly earnings for individuals on some of these sites. The sites differ in
volume and nature of work, and some may be more suited to different skills.

Is it possible to pull off a North American level salary via internet
outsourcing ? Does it require a secretary or wife to handle all the jobs and
customer communications ?

I think this type of analysis has been done on ebay, but it would also be
interesting to know the numbers for etsy.com.

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bdr
This reads like an ad for eLance.

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rayzwell
They started as freelancers and grew their operation. Why is that a bad thing?

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ojbyrne
I personally didn't say it was a bad thing. Just that the title and the linked
page were misleading.

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tptacek
It's surprising that consulting companies make millions of dollars?

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ckinnan
A million rupees maybe.

