Love the honesty on your http://labs.im/ page. But you might be underselling yourself. You are saying you are willing to work cheaply because you are young and a risk.
You are capable of using node.js, you use phantomJS, you seem to have good product and ux thinking and you are able to use github. Just the last one alone puts you on the upper 50% of the worldwide freelance market. Not to speak of the first three things i mentioned.
As somebody living in UK i appreciate your modesty and i wish you all the best for your jobhunt. Projects like this are genius thing to do, continue until you find something :)
You're absolutely right, but I think you're understating the issue. DavidChouinard and csomar also have good points.
There are clients who want to hire good developers for a lot of money and those who want to hire good developers at university who don't know how much they're worth yet for peanuts. That's not always bad, I've had at least one great client in that category, but it's not lucrative—granted you may have to take what you can get.
Nonetheless, OP: I urge you to aim higher than "work for cheap" and please please please reword your acquisition letter to sound more like "I'm a good developer but I didn't have a portfolio so I made these things," rather than, "it will be a big risk taking me on"—maybe to them it will seem like a risk, but you know better!
As somebody living in Argentina and born in the US, I should have no appreciation whatever for your modesty :P but I do, since I think my first cold emails to potential clients went something like yours: honest, but embarrassingly modest. But I soon learned that toning down the modesty is a great way to get more clients and charge them more (seriously, you'd be surprised how high your rate can get, even as a relatively untried uni kid).
I agree, this is top-notch work. I would drop the beatup negative attitude, it's a big turnoff. You could easily get a remote part-time job in the Valley for 100+$/hour — think of it, that's only 40 hours of work to pay off your tuition.
Really? Easily? I've yet to see anyone willing to hire someone to do off site work with a US company, in the Valley or elsewhere. At least not development work, or anything in the range of 100 USD/hour.
I've always found that a bit strange, but maybe you know something I don't?
For the record I'm based in Norway, and English is my second, not first language -- but even if it was just to recommend friends and acquaintances that are in a similar position as op -- I would really like to hear how you would suggest going about looking for such work?
Stop and think. Suppose that you have have a $120k full-time dev. (This is by no means the top of the dev market.) Once you get through benefits, office space, HR, etc, at a typical company you cost 2x your salary, so that dev is costing you $240k/year. If that person works 50 weeks a year, 5 days a week, 6 hours a day (just because a person is present 8 hours does not mean that they worked 8 hours) the cost of that full-time dev is $160/hour. Day in. Day out.
Contractors avoid many of those costs in return for higher direct pay. And you only hire that contractor when there is a good fit between what you need and what that contractor can do. A smart contractor who knows what to ask for is therefore able to get surprisingly good rates.
And step #1 is knowing what you are worth. Step #2 is knowing how to negotiate. There are a lot of good books you can pick up on the topic. I personally picked up Start With No and Bargaining For Advantage a few years back. A 2 digit investment in materials, and a 2 digit expenditure in hours has easily been worth over 6 figures to my bank account. I expect it to have paid off 7 figures before I retire. Can you think of anything else with an equivalent ROI?
Really? Easily? I've yet to see anyone willing to hire someone to do off site work with a US company, in the Valley or elsewhere. At least not development work, or anything in the range of 100 USD/hour.
I won't discuss my rates in public, but I have clients in the States and UK. I'm a British guy based in Poland, and only one of those clients has been via a direct contact. All others have come to my. As briefly touched on in another comment, I'm also not a cheap option.
The work's definitely out there - just look in the HN "who's hiring" threads. I've also had some enquiries via my various SaaS apps, which double as a nice side income and an advertisement of sorts.
Edit: I'm willing to concede that this isn't easy per se; I'm highly competent at what I do, and I'm also happy to do lots of chatting over Skype or via email first. Without my talent or willingness to chat, I'm not sure that this would be as successful as it is for me.
Let me clarify what I meant with "At least not development work, or anything in the range of 100 USD/hour".
I didn't want to imply that was a high rate, but rather that I wasn't aware of any serious US offers for serious work to telecommuters/off site workers.
I've seen what appeared to be serious companies looking for on-site full time employees, and I've seen companies wanting grunt workers that are off site -- but I hadn't seen anyone actually willing to accept working with someone off site in any kind of interesting/core role before.
I'm happy to see at least the workers wanted posts here on HN appear more reasonable and in line with what I would expect. I've been worrying that the entire outsourcing marked was dominated by short sighted dumping (both from buyers and sellers) -- and poor management founded on the myth of man hours/months as a way to scale/accelerate development.
(On a side note, 100 USD/hour is lower than what I charge my customers for freelance work. And, as others have mentioned, short term project pay, with a lot of risk, is different from employee with benefits, reduced risk and a predictable yearly income).
The kid demonstrates a specific valuable set of capabilities in living color - but the decision still has to do with "turnoff," as if this were a hookup and not a rational assessment of capability.
Moral: hiring is more like a hookup than a rational assessment of capability.
Love the honesty on your http://labs.im/ page. But you might be underselling yourself. You are saying you are willing to work cheaply because you are young and a risk.
You are capable of using node.js, you use phantomJS, you seem to have good product and ux thinking and you are able to use github. Just the last one alone puts you on the upper 50% of the worldwide freelance market. Not to speak of the first three things i mentioned.
As somebody living in UK i appreciate your modesty and i wish you all the best for your jobhunt. Projects like this are genius thing to do, continue until you find something :)