Ask HN: What's the best niche to choose for freelancers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the best niche to choose for freelancers?

How on earth do you choose a niche that will both be profitable and one that you'll enjoy?

I'm a successful freelancer making roughly $80,000 a year ($100 per hour) in the Mountain West. Yet I'd like to boost that so I can send my kids to private school and pay off some medical bills.

These bills are currently taped on my wall, and when I see them I think about branching out from my current skill-set (Full-stack LAMP apps (don't laugh, there's decent work out there with PHP)) to something more profitable.

So:

Niches: What niche would you recommend I choose to become more profitable, and that will be around for the next few years?

Languages: Should I focus on a new language like Golang? Or Start learning mobile development with iOS?

And thank you in advance for the mentorship. Sometimes I feel a little lost and don't know the best choice to make.

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Are you making $80,000 gross or net?

Either way, honestly, I would say you don't have a niche problem, you have a (potentially) marketing, sales, and rate problem.

As you point out there is plenty of work as a Full-stack LAMP engineer. It might not be exciting or the new kid on the block but there is plenty of it to go around. The problem is that you either:

A) Aren't doing enough business - If you are making $80,000 gross you are only working 800 hours a year. That could be good or bad, but right now I bet it doesn't feel like enough.

B) Aren't charging enough - $100 an hour is pretty inexpensive for a consultant of any sort.

C) All of the above!! This is the right answer by the way.

I will link to one of my favorite comments on this topic for you to read, it was by tptacek, and I keep it bookmarked [1]. But the long and short is, raise your rates, specialize in things your existing customer base needs, find new customers that also need those things, raise your rates, focus on business objectives for your customers, stop billing hourly, raise your rates, generalize, raise your rates. You probably should just keep on raising your rates.

So what does this mean for a full-stack LAMP engineer? Are you really good with Wordpress or Magento? Raise your rates and start selling wordpress and magento services. Are you exceptional at tuning MySQL? Raise your rates and start selling high scalability MySQL tuning. Are you an expert in making apps more stable and easier to deploy? ... You get the idea. Don't go away from what you are good at. Dive deeper into it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615

This is a good post, but as far as WordPress goes $100 an hour is almost unheard of.

Sure it is, if you are a "Wordpress Engineer", you are absolutely right. However, if you are a "Web Based Marketing, Strategy, and E-Commerce Consultancy", suddenly you are making $250+ on Wordpress stuff. I can name off more high end sites built on Wordpress than I would care to where the companies pay huge amounts up front plus on going fees to keep them up and running smoothly.

This right here is critically important advice and you should listen to it carefully. Calling yourself a "Wordpress Engineer" will help you get work on freelancing sites, but for your bill rate, it's like a boat anchor tied to another boat anchor tied to a that big ass flying rock from Deep Impact.

There is no easier way to position yourself away from the money and into cost-center accounting than to put the name of specific technologies into your title or branding. One thing almost every freelancer can do instantaneously to improve their business is to scour their branding, titles, and marketing copy for jargon and tech names. There's a place for that kind of stuff, but it's not the front page of your website, or on your consulting one-sheet.

If you're a "Wordpress Engineer", one thing that's very likely is that you have a bunch of clients. They're not paying you, well, anything really, but you do have a bunch of them. So take a few hours some time this week and call a bunch of them and ask what they did with your work, why they commissioned it, what they were hoping to get out of it, and whether that worked out.

Two things will happen:

* You will probably generate at least one new paying contract. Any time you mass-call a bunch of clients, you will get new contracts. My partner Dave and I twice had to call large groups of our clients to report that we may or may not have accidentally and stupidly destroyed the Internet. Each time, we got new gigs from the exercise.

* You will know a lot more about what you should be calling your service offerings, rather than "Wordpress Engineering".

Good point. It often comes down to labeling. For instance, if you call yourself a freelancer your clients might think "cheap, disposable, commodity", but if you call yourself a consultant and can show that you deliver, then you can charge a premium price.

I've got a fellow freelancer who charges $125 to build Wordpress websites, and he doesn't even make the design. But is good with layouts, and knows how to price by value.

see reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12205611

But now that I've run some more calculations it seems like I'll hit ~$85,000 USD gross this year.

And really, you gave great advice.

In terms of technologies, JavaScript is here to stay for many years and depending on the industry can be very profitable, too. A LAMP background lends itself to branching out to other web-based technologies. JavaScript will be a natural extension to your current skill set.

However, I'd advise against focussing on a technological niche alone. I'd suggest focussing on a business niche (industry, specific business problem) and additional skills that are complementary to coding (teaching, consulting). Try to position yourself as a business problem solver rather than someone who turns requirements into computer code.

Learning something completely new such as Golang or mobile development only makes sense business-wise if you already have customers who might be interested in that.

There's nothing wrong with learning new skills but in terms of business success learning a new technology - especially if it's a relatively new one such as Golang - is equivalent to developing a polished product before having the first customer or in other words: The exact opposite of the Lean Startup / MVP way of doing business.

I make $80,000 gross, not net. And I think you are right about the positioning issue. If I can figure out some sort of business niche, it doesn't matter half as much as what tools I use. Maybe I'm looking at this as "I can do woodwork, so what brand of tool should I use?" where I should be looking at this like "I can do woodwork. Should I make cabinets, fine furniture, or custom handcrafted toys?"

So thanks trcollinson and BjoernKW. I think that once I figure out how to position myself, the rates will naturally increase (I'm not shy of asking for $150 per hour if I know I'm worth it).

In short, it's time to Niche!

If you liked Thomas's (tptacek) advice, look up Patrick McKenzie's blog (http://www.kalzumeus.com/), particularly the post titled "Don't call yourself a programmer":

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...

He also has an e-mail list, and other training:

https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...

I believe there are several other resources focused on the non-technical side, I'm not sure how to separate the signal from the noise however :)

* tptaceck advice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12207015

thanks for the heads up!

Universal rule on best niches, find Good Clients.

Guys who pay your 'modest' fee in a timely fashion, are cool to work with, no mean emails late at night.

Who is the ideal Economic Buyer for your services? Industry/Vertical/Segment/Geography?

If you can define target client, you can go prospecting for them. Suggest reading New Sales. Simplified.: The Essential Handbook for Prospecting and New Business Development >http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15863998-new-sales-simpli...

Thanks. I'll check it out next time I'm at the library.

Languages:

If you're not using it already check out the Laravel (php) framework.

It's growing fast, similar to Rails, easy to use, lots of great tools and the hourly rate on Laravel projects is comparable to the rate on Rails projects.

Check out Vue.js as well.

You'll be integrating in to a great community of developers and leveling up your skills, opening up yourself to new opportunities.

Laracasts.com will get you started.

Niches:

Web Applications for businesses is a good niche, higher rates, more interesting projects, longer term development + maintenance.

I'm a little confused. If you're working 40+ hours a week at $100/hour, you should be making > $200k per year gross. If you're only grossing $80k, then you're only working like 2 days a week. If that's the case, I think you're doing great! Just keep doing what you're doing, and add on a few more days a week (maybe take on another client).

But I'm not working 40 hours a week. At least not billable hours. Usually, freelancers can clock in 25-30 billable hours max, because the rest of the time is spent on admin, sales, outreach, learning, etc...

The biggest thing is finding clients, but I think that is an easier task once I figure out my positioning.

Sure, I get that. But even at 25 hours, you're grossing over 10k per month, no?

If it's an issue of finding clients, that, in my experience, has little to do with the technology choice. I freelanced in PHP for over 5 years, and I rarely (if ever) talked "tech" with clients. I kept discussions much more high-level than that. They didn't care how exactly I was building their projects.

Definitely check out RFP's (requests for proposals). Government agencies, universities, etc put them out. Start replying to them, and you should find plenty of work.

How and where are you getting clients now?

One company had a site that was down. I called them up, said I knew how to fix it (there was some extra characters after the php closing tag), and so I fixed it, and they had me do more work. Another client called me when I was looking for a job and had my resume on a job board. Another client was through networking. Another client was through a fellow freelancer who was overworked.

To get clients there are two main paths: 1. Hang out where clients hang out (networking events, business luncheons, etc), and talk to them about their problems. 2. Talk with other techies and see if they have work they can't or don't want to do.

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