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Made more money as a contractor than as a freelance developer. Help!
29 points by openbasic on Jan 26, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 33 comments
I'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'm a full-time senior software engineer, 8+ years of experience, proficient in both backend and frontend development.

Unfortunately, my adventures through sites like Freelancer.com, Gun.io, and UpWork have been hard: most developers win projects with rates like $7/hr or $10/hr. That's pretty much impossible to beat, specially for someone living in the US.

As a matter of fact, since I haven't been able to find quality dev freelance work, I've been making some money as a contractor. I'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/hr and my nights are full (I think people who work like my schedule?).

How do you guys find good projects to work with? Is there a secret circle somewhere or something? Like a Freemasonry of software development?



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.


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.


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?


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.


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.


> 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.


Thanks! Joining events from the local Chamber of Commerce is something I haven't tried yet. I'll try to print some stuff on Vistaprint and see what happens.


My general advice from these previous comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910781

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.)


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".


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.


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


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.


I remember I applied and after emailing team@domain ~1 year ago and didn't get back a single response. Hell, I even found a github profile who said he worked there and emailed him too and no response. Still have the emails, you can search your inbox with the email in my profile


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


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


120K is not a lot at all if op lives in a coastal city (NY/SF/Boston/LA). Especially if OP is the sole provider of the family.


You could also consider asking for a raise. Your boss might be more comfortable giving you a raise than having you distracted by and spending energy on projects outside of work.


Oh. Sorry, I interpreted it that you were a full-time freelance developer.


I'd read some of the material on here as well: https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/

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


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.


Didn't know about this thread, thanks.


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


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.


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/


Send your resume at https://automattic.com/work-with-us/ and let them know about your Node.js and React experience.

Since the release of Calypso which is a React app for Wordpress.com, they need more and more developers to work on it.

If you get hired, buy me a beer ;)


Probably? IDK. I know a few other contractors that make $50~60/hr. And they have a very steady clientele. If you do things right, without bullshitting people, you can easily bump your prices because no one trusts contractors. At least not here in FL.


[dead]


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