Same comment I put on the blog, but keen to hear HN responses. Why do so many freelancers gravitate to small(er) clients? It seems to lead to direct competition with platforms such as freelancer.com, odesk, elance, etc which is impossible for a local freelancer.
Clients like digital and creative agencies, funded startups and corporates (managers that don't have access to internal dev resources, but still have dev needs). They use freelancers and they don't come with a lot of issues small clients have.
Interested to hear from freelancers as to how and why they work for smaller clients.
Maybe because you spread the risk? Many small will allow you to do a lot of small projects ; when a client leaves it doesn't matter, while if you have a bigger client (who will have bigger wishes), you are usually suddenly stuck for month in a project and if that client leaves you are done?
That was my reasoning at least when I was a freelancer; that's why I didn't continue doing that and started hiring people quite soon; the risk of losing a big client is too stressful. YOU depend on it; you feel it immediately. Funded startups; I would never do that anymore as freelancer. I had a few; cases in point here. Working on a project for 3-4 months only to see the funding had run out and the company was broke => no money. Funded startups are horrible to work with/for if you cannot peek into their reserves and financial situation. They will play nice weather until the very last moment (they have to of course) when you receive an official letter that they are gone and you can call some lawyer to get in line for your money (which you will never get).
If you don't want to 'work from home', I would say corporates (at least in north EU) are your very best bet at stability. I know guys who have held stable freelance jobs for decades at huge corporations. It's like having a job though, so I don't really see the point.
I guess because if you have one large enough client they become your defacto employer but without any of the benefits of salaried employment.
It can also make you complacent so you won't bother marketing yourself so much. That means that if they do decide to ditch you then you are in trouble.
Perhaps the answer is to provide smaller niche services (performance optimisation , pen-testing, UX design) to larger clients and charging a higher hourly rate so you don't end up becoming their general purpose code monkey.
I just like small projects because I get bored quickly. Three months is about ideal. Projects for larger clients also have a tendency to go nowhere, that is they never make it into production. It is easier to get good rates from larger clients, though.
Couldn't agree more, part of the fun of Freelance work for me is getting to work on a range of projects with a range of differing technologies. Might just be my attention span but more than three - five months full time on a project which isn't my own and start getting itchy feet.
Having more smaller clients means that my status as a freelancer increases due to there being more people who can vouch for me. There also is the people factor. I like to work with startups and help get their MVPs out of the door. Which means that I'm not only coding, but helping people follow their dreams. You don't get that big personal sense of accompishment when some big-Co. is succesful with something that you helped build. When the smaller client hits it big with your code it is a very good feeling. Nothing like helping the little guy get his dreams.
Another point is that smaller clients are more straightforward with me. They just want to get their project done. Big-Co. usually has a list of stupid requirements and proposals that make me waste too much time. In my experience, smaller clients have always paid in time. Big-Co, not so much.
It's easy to get started with smaller clients, with more manageable scope (for newbie) and to built up the portfolios.
Many local clients (especially from non-IT companies) are not sophisticated enough to use services such as elance, thus they are fairly happy to found a programmer which they could work with locally (my customer still expect face-to-face communication).
Eventually I did landed on a semi-government job, where they pay is probably 3x more lucrative than smaller clients, but longer duration + more politics + more stress to handle the human side of things.
The worst is "uneducated" clients, meaning they don't know how custom software development works, and asking why you charge 10x more than off-the-shelve accounting software and still deliver a product "full of bugs" (you should have tested vigorously and solve all the bugs, right?).
It is just hard to get freelance work from large employers, IMHO is just not on their comfort area.
I came from years as a contractor for large Fortune 100's who pretty much beg me to come back as a contractor but won't/can't send me projects as a remote freelancer. It is to radical for their business culture.
Clients like digital and creative agencies, funded startups and corporates (managers that don't have access to internal dev resources, but still have dev needs). They use freelancers and they don't come with a lot of issues small clients have.
Interested to hear from freelancers as to how and why they work for smaller clients.