Ask HN: Freelancers, are you crazy dry these days? or is it just me?

Consulting is high variance, particularly when consultants underinvest in marketing/sales. It's absolutely nothing to be ashamed of; we're all in business here (some more straightforwardly than others). There is nothing wrong with making customers being hard; it's the fun, necessary hard that, combined with making customers happy, is why business drives the world forward.

Since consulting is high variance, at any given time some people perceive "the market" as being on fire and some perceive it as being in a slump, but for small consulting firms, your kite flies in basically all weather conditions.

what's the best thing to do when you have long stretches without solid work?

Do more sales and marketing.

Not kidding.

Take every happy client you have from the last two years. Send them each an email asking them how business is going and whether $FOO is still working up to their expectations. Follow up gracefully if they don't respond. After reconnecting, get them on a call to talk about their plans over next 3~6 months. Talk yourself into those plans. If you cannot talk yourself into those plans, ask if they will introduce you to 2~3 people who should have something like $FOO in their own business.

I've been working a lot lately on Raspberry Pi, off-grid tech, power monitoring, etc.

Awesome projects. I mean nothing untoward with the following observation: generally, when you're solving problems for customers who are not plugged into the power grid, you're solving problems for people who don't exactly have signing authority for a $20k engagement starting next week. (I can imagine there are industrial applications for which this is not true! If you've got those leads, ignore this observation.) I might consider, if you're looking for technical skills to expand your business opportunity, whether these are the skills you want to develop or whether you want to develop ones which select for clients who have expensive problems that they'll happily pay to solve.

> when you're solving problems for customers who are not plugged into the power grid, you're solving problems for people who don't exactly have signing authority for a $20k engagement starting next week

Yeah, exactly. And of course I knew that going in. I had hoped (and still hope) to diversify into a completely new space, secure in the belief that web stack / python / ops / deployment / etc is reasonably stable.

Obviously off-grid tech speaks to a totally different market (and heck, maybe a totally different society), and that is very much the point.

And as for sales and marketing: I've tried the basic tactics you describe to generate more leads. My happy clients generally report that all is well and that they don't know anybody else in need at the moment.

On the other hand: since about 2013, all but one gig has been a referral from a friend or happy client. So maybe I need to tap into different social circles (ie, find work from sources other than people I already know).

Take every happy client you have from the last two years. Send them each an email...

Brilliant! This falls into the 'Get Out of The Building' category of client discovery/relationship management. The best guy I've seen do this has a rotation list of 100 individuals he regularly pings for coffee/lunch meetings throughout the course of the year. The upshot, he's gets to select the projects takes on.

I posted about this in a thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13872807.

I think freelancing is dead. To sum it up, employers, including startups that'd dry up their runway in 1 to 3 years, are demanding developers go full time and onsite.

As if they really could give job security. That's the frustrating thing. They're making you jump through hoops for work that, save them being acquired, won't last.

Yes, exceptions exist. But the new norm is that. And norm means being able to have some sense of reliability, not some person's luck. Yes, I ask recruiters to look around for remote opportunities and they try to help, but the good paying jobs are back in SF and want me in the office. Full time.

Nope, no gigs. No one wants 3 months, 6 months.

Yeah, I've heard all the talk about consulting. To me, it's just more growth hack / NLP talk about value that doesn't represent the realities of being a developer in our market these days. Startups shun the thought of outside experts or opinions, unless it's a SAAS tool. These CTO's, even if they don't know better, see advice from an outside expert as losing control. I think this is because they want employees who they can mold in their image, rather than someone who could help them in a pinch.

The other thing is hiring happens a lot slower. A lot of these places keep passing over qualified candidates because they feel they have so many options.

And no, employers aren't winning either with the lack of flexibility they have. Going remote opens up yourself to a ton of candidates. They're ultimately isolating themselves from skilled workers with experience. It's completely understandable to not want to be in SF and to accommodate working remote if you're a seasoned programmer.

The software development world is more than just startups. I work as a consultant in the B2B / enterprise segment. There absolutely is no shortage of work to be done in these areas and these companies are very open to working with freelancers and consultant.

How do you break into that world? And is there room for serious engineering, not just consulting?

Recruiters are one way, not necessarily the best in the long run but a good short-term stopgap approach if you need to quickly find clients.

In my opinion the preferable long-term sustainable path is pretty much like in most businesses: Become useful and become noticeable. Create solutions and talk about it. A company website, blog, conference talks, networking events testimonials for instance are useful components of a marketing plan for a consultant.

As for the second question I'm not sure this is the right attitude. For example analysing a company's software creation process and pointing out ways to improve it is serious engineering but it doesn't involve writing a single line of code and often is more about human communication than hard engineering facts.

Value creation starts when you first talk to a prospective client not just when you write the first line of code.

Most large companies have vendors. You can typically become a vendor via their supply chain management system. They usually have a web page where you can register your company, provide a list of services, and such. You also need to qualify by submitting liability insurance documents and such.

This is the best way to route around recruiters. It is hard work though. They usually have vendor fairs where you have a booth and give out brochures, advertise, network with internal managers...

It sounds like you're approaching this from the wrong. Do marketing / sales / networking first (and do it a lot, consulting is as much about talking to people as it is about implementing solutions). Try to find out about the problems people and companies are having. Only then ask yourself how you can apply your expertise to that area.

6000 dollars a week !?

Just curious. What kind of work do you usually do for that kind of money?

$6000 a week is $150 an hour and seems to be a pretty reasonable rate.

What you are missing is: not every week will be booked.

I've billed 10-20k in rare weeks. It's because it's a one-off project that they want you to work 40-60 hours on that week: so you can't do anything else with your business.

Rates drop a lot for maintenance and service plans where they'd like to have you on retainer month over month for years (hopefully).

This is just web development.