Ask HN: What proficiency does one need to start freelancing?

In freelancing, your location doesn't matter. Your skills does. So if you are pretty damn good, you'll get $150/hour. If you suck, you'll get the basic $10/hour and loads of failures and problems with your clients.

I'm 19 and about to hit $1K freelancing (for two months) working around 2 hours a day. The secret is Hacker News. Learn how to talk with the client, how to invoice, how to use a version control, how much to bid.... You can learn these things on your own; but Hacker News discussions can be a valuable short-cut.

English matters a lot and unless you express clearly your ideas and spend time reading requirement and replying, you won't get freelance jobs.

Make sure also that you won't jump to $150/hour overnight. Work on Odesk hundred hours, create a blog with valuable resources, get on HN front-page a handful times, get linked back by other masters in the field, write a book... And you'll get high paying clients. Don't do that, no one will care about your 10 years experience in Amandada Software Packager.

I'm taking off and will be probably making the double (so $1k in one month) next month. Things change quickly on the Internet. Keep reading related topics on HN, some valuable ideas and comments are hidden somewhere in the 34th node. Print the discussion page if you don't bear the screen light.

Good Luck.

The fact that you read HN probably means you're more capable than most freelancers out there. We, as people, tend to overestimate the abilities of others and underestimate our own, it's just the way the brain works.

I once did a job where me and a friend had to design a new intranet and website for a client. I claimed that I was quite an expert on usability and intranet design despite the fact that I had never done either before. Basically I winged it. The intranet raised the companys productivity by 60% and the redesigned site ended up in a Jakob Nielsen report on well-done redesigns.

The moral? You're much more capable than you think.

I claimed that I was quite an expert on usability and intranet design despite the fact that I had never done either before. Basically I winged it.

I believe billionaire Mark Cuban said he did this with one of his first companies (MicroSolutions I think). He said people would ask if they did this or that, and he just said yes to everything, even if he had to stay up reading books all night.

Edit: I was trying to remember what his company did. I believe they were one of the first to start networking Macs together. Anyway, I found this quote from his blog which may also be relevant:

AT MicroSolutions [reading] gave me a huge advantage. A guy with little computer background could compete with far more experienced guys just because I put in the time to learn all I could.

I learned from magazines and books, but I also learned from watching what some of the up and coming technology companies of the day were doing. Its funny how the companies that I thought were brilliant then, are still racking it up today.

Josh James did the same thing. He would go to a client site and read and read on a particular subject. And when they said 'oh that's a stupid idea' - he'd be like 'well, Coke doesn't think so'.

If you have 60 minutes, this talk is inspiring.

http://byuebusiness.blogspot.com/2009/12/josh-james-december...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1164483

You are absolutely more capable than you think. I started freelancing with a decently sized startup based on the recommendation of a good friend who was an all out super star.

I was looking for freelancing work and failing miserably at it. Someone at this startup asked my friend if they knew anyone for "some short term CSS projects". He sent them to me.

I hadn't done CSS in over 2 years (and only then I barely knew enough to do squat) My friend reassured me that I could do it. He also encouragingly said "don't screw this up".

I started the same day of the recommendation. The "short term projects" they originally wanted turned into 2.5 years and over 125k in income for me - about 15 hours / week. I've now gone on to get strong recommendations from every person of the team I started working with at the startup, as well as a new contract with some of them after they'd moved on to a new place.

Something I believe strongly that helped me was I was totally obsessed with turning things around as fast as humanly possible. I responded to emails, calls, etc within an hour and would often complete a project in not much more time.

Usually, the problem for freelancers isn't the actual development part of the job; it's personal/job/client management.

You need to be very disciplined: 1.) Know how to create/hit your goals & estimates 2.) Know when/how to say NO 3.) How to cover-your-ass, etc.

If you can do that, and you're half-decent at the development (and finding development talent you lack), you'll be better than the majority of people out there.

2) Upvoted.

I started three years after my first full-time gig (I was 25 at the time). I got into more trouble because I didn't say no and then had to manage the client management.

Do you have any personal systems/software/client management philosophies you recommend? Basecamp works wonders for me, even though it is simple.

Honestly, I'm not freelancer, but I know a lot of them. However, my startup has a lot of the same elements. I use pretty primitive tools: gCal, gTasks, gDoc for a "ghetto-CRM" & other customer/leads lists, etc.

I don't think it's really a tools issue; it's really a personal discipline one. It's very difficult to keep it all straight, but a lot of it is really just being anal and working habits into your lifestyle.

I'm still trying to perfect my habits, but a big part is discipline - even though it's not as easy as a just changing "tools". However, I'd have to say that having a smartphone changed my life for better this way. I can use my impulsiveness to check my tasks/calendar/docs from anywhere so it's at the front of my mind.

One way to set these expectations up front is to think of possible scope changes before the client does -- list those items as "excluded" in your contract or estimate. If the client then decides to add any excluded items, you can raise the price or extend the deadline accordingly.

I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I wrote a fairly successful blogpost about what I've learned doing full-time freelancing this summer: http://sealedabstract.com/rants/5-lessons-learned-while-bein...

I think you're on the wrong track focusing on the technical side. If you read HN, you're at least an okay coder. Focus on improving your business skills:

* Figure out where your potential clients hang out. Capturing Google searches is a good place to start

* Filter out the really dumb people in some sort of automated fashion. Every minute you spend figuring out if a client is even serious is a minute where you could be productive.

* Learn to write clearly. Either that or talk on the phone. Master at least one communication skill, and try not to suck at the other.

* Get some pretty templates for doing estimates, invoices and such

* Read a book or two on contracts. Write out your terms in a bulleted list, but hand it to a lawyer to enlegalize.

* You don't need a signed contract on every project--just the ones for which you want to be paid.

* The most important thing is to get 3 projects in your portfolio. Even if you have to be your own client.

* Deals fall through. Always talk to 3x as many people as you can actually do work for. If you're turning away business and people get angry with you, you're doing it right.

Here's how I got to $45/HR on oDesk. Its admittedly a low rate, but its about double the average.

- Be a good communicator. This means speaking and writing well, giving timely updates, and being clear about the spec.

- Be honest. Buyers are expecting you to blow smoke. If you don't, they'll be shocked. This means sometimes saying, "I don't know how to do that, but I can learn."

- Follow through. I've had one client pay me to learn something just because he knows I will do what I say I will.

I'm sure there's more tips, and I do a lot wrong (like not say "No"). But doing the basics will put you above the crowd, even if your skills aren't top 10%.

I've read a lot of interesting comments on here, but what is everyone's stand point on support. Do you offer free support? Do you charge? Do your clients ask for it? Obviously a change request is chargeable, but what about a bug?

I used to do freelance work face to face, I made a nice chunk of money from it - but in the end the support I had to give was exhausting. Most of it was neither a bug to be fixed or a request requiring a change, often in fact the support query was completely unrelated to my freelance work.

This is one problem with freelancing in general. At the start it is easy, fun, creative and you are printing money. However, the more clients you have, the more work you do and the more money you make, is counter balanced by the increase in support duties.

I decided to join a software consultancy instead, doing roughly the same role as when I was freelancing. The only difference is, now I get paid a salary (which is a lot less) and our support team handle the support of clients. (Something which many clients actually are happy to pay a premium / service fee for).

This said, I see how much money things cost clients compared to my salary (for my work) and get the temptation to just go freelance again.

So HN freelancers, what is your standpoint on ongoing support?

I did web design (but no application development) all though high school and college, part time, at from $7 to $15/hr. I got a CS degree, did freelance PHP web development for one client for a year, lived with my parents (don't remember my rate... probably something depressing like $25/hr). Then I went to grad school, got a masters and a couple years of Ph.D. Then I dropped out and screwed around and bootstrapped a startup (great portfolio piece) for two years.

All the while I've been eating up as much web development knowledge as possible, and hacking on silly side projects.

A month ago I put myself on the market as a Rails developer and within a few days landed a $75/hr 20hr/wk job. No one I quoted that rate to blinked an eye. The folks I'm working for are very happy with my work.

Just one data point.

I'm 20 (almost 21), have about three years of real world experience, one in the niche I'm working in (Rails), and I started freelancing via elance a little over a month ago. I've made, so far, $2350 working 20 or so hours a week, and I've already started getting contacted for work instead of actively seeking it. I also made an extra grand through a personal contact, but those may or may not be an option for you. Freelancing isn't hard, and the barrier to entry is surprisingly low.

I'm honest with clients, and that may or may not have helped me succeed. I have yet to make a promise I was unable to deliver. Make sure you give yourself a little bit of breathing room. If something is probably going to take me a week, I'll tell the client it will take me a week and a half. It might be easy to promise you'll have something done by some date to please the client, but I'd rather have a few repeat clients than a ton of people I've only worked with once.

I'm not charging a lot ($25/hour, which I'll probably raise soon), but I'm still charging double or triple what some foreign providers are charging. I don't know where you're from, but if you're a native English speaker (bonus if you're in the US), you have an advantage already. The people I've worked with are willing to pay extra to have people in a similar timezone that natively speak English.

It's not all roses, though. Some people expect you to work for pennies, or they grossly underestimate what goes into building something. You just have to walk away from those clients. You'll also see a lot of people wanting x for y built, where x is some popular social network and y is some (apparently) under served market. You might have some issue building something you know is likely going to fail, but they're usually happy to pay.

Some people suggest becoming a master of some niche field. Doing so will apparently cause people to seek you out. That might work, but, honestly, I've found it to be unnecessary. I'm already in the top 5% of Rails providers on elance, and I'm not the most experienced Rails developer. Again, the barrier to entry is surprisingly low.

It also makes me feel better to go through a freelancing site. Fixed price jobs on elance, for instance, are usually escrow type where the client sends the funds into escrow and elance hangs on to them until they mark the job complete. At least, that way, you know that the client is good for it.

Edit: To expand on my argument that you don't need to be a master of some niche, I will suggest that you target a niche, even if you aren't a master at it. You'll compete a lot less being a Rails developer than a Ruby developer. It seems me to you'll also have better luck if you pick something that hasn't been commoditized by overseas companies (say, picking Ruby or Python over Java or PHP).

Very good advice for such a young person. Your post makes clear that age != experience.

To the OP, I think it depends strongly on your client whether you have to have a big portfolio with big names in it or don't have to have a portfolio at all. My advice: Charge a little less (ahlatimer does this, too), but deliver quality and learn on the go as much as you can. I think every customer is looking for quality & honesty, so when you deliver, you will be able to charge a little more the next time. Good luck!

Expertise is mostly just a way to reassure clients that you will be able to do the work that you promise to do and that after they have cut the check the system will actually function.

The single easiest way to reassure someone that you're capable of doing X is to have done X before. (Or even better, to have someone trusted say you have done X before.)

You need to be competent enough to know which jobs you can't manage in a timely manner and turn them down. Practically speaking, that means you should be able to write a simple crud app in your sleep. You should be able to sprinkle some fancy JavaScript ui here and there, and you should be comfortable working with APIs. I'd say you should be familiar with payments, but services like Chargify make that so easy, it's no harder than working with Twitter, for example.

If you can do all that without wasting too much time learning, you're more than qualified to freelance.

Note that I said nothing about scaling and other back end magic. Most clients don't need scale. They need front end development.

Be selective at first, and don't take on anything that you can't do well. Referrals are gold, and you get them by doing a great job, not be stretching yourself. That's what side projects are for.

And I would say, always work for full price - period. Again, free is for side projects.

I have been freelancing since I graduated college 8 years ago. I've been self employed so long I wouldn't even know what to do with a fulltime job.

I routinely accept projects that are well outside of my programming abilities or have unreasonable deadlines or budgets and always land on my feet.

In my experience you can get away with a lot less competence as a freelancer. Since clients have no access to your methods, freelancers can sometimes get away with awful code as long as they finish the job to spec and on time. I've seen it done many times.

The big difference here is managing yourself. If you're the kind of person that needs a lot of structure and a manager around, then it will be difficult. If you're pretty independent and can live with occasional cash shortages and work overloads, then you're good to go.

The nature of programming jobs is usually not to know in advance everything you have to do. You just need to know how to figure out what to do.

Uh, you just need to be able to sell.

Ok so add to the question that repeat business is something that I want to strive for.

Sell, yes. And if you build excellent client relationships (LOTS of communication and honesty is good) then your clients should keep coming back to you for ongoing work.

Additionally you want your clients to be your biggest cheerleaders and talk you up and recommend you to their associates and friends for work.

You can even offer a referral fee, I've done this, but generally if people like you, they're happy to make referrals without even being asked.

So far all of the advice here is really good.

I'd like to add that you have to inspire confidence to your clients. You have to be sure about your area of expertise or appear to be sure.

I think the most important idea in your head should be "I can do this." or "I can figure out how to do this."

That's a good way to go and sell your services.

I'm not sure why "you just need to be able to sell" was down-voted. At this time, his comment was the only one mentioning the obviously most important part of "freelancing."

Yes, all those other things mentioned here are important as well but I don't think anything is more important than being able to sell.

You need to be able to find clients and sell to them, but that's not all there is to selling. Selling is also important in being able to set good rates or project fees.

It wasn't me, but probably because you need to be able to produce as well, at least if you want to get paid.

Producing and getting paid don't go hand in hand in the freelancing world. For every bad freelancer, there's a bad customer.

You need to know more than the person you're freelancing to...

Since you've had a few years in a related field and built up some contacts you should be good to go (as long as you have a good rep with them). Let them know you are offering a new service, and get some info up. No matter what you're going to be learning new stuff the whole time, so you may as well just start now!

I have this image in my mind about most freelancers being people who went to their 9-5 software development job for 10 years before they started to freelance.

I got my first freelance "project" on rentacoder.com in 9th grade. It earned me a whole $5.00. Few months later, I was winning bigger projects. I know lots of folks who have followed similar paths.

Depending on the level of clients you plan to have, you may need to learn to be ruthless.

I think there's books written on just answering your question, I'll try and hit the highlights. To give you some background, my biz partners and I started our consulting firm as a side job in college, then when we graduated and basically said to ourselves "why the hell not? it's been working so far." The first 6 months or so were the hardest as we figured out what bootstrapping a full-time business meant, as compared to moonlighting from your dorm room. For example, paying your employees first means your monthly paycheck may need to wait until that next invoice is paid in a few weeks. Within 2 years our rates had increased by 5x (and not from $5->$25 either), there were 10 of us, 2.5 offices, a non-profit in Peru and we got all of our business through client referrals. However, I was also very stressed and constantly working

Overall: Honestly, technical skill is only half of doing good freelancing. Even more so as you become successful and find that you're doing more managing than technical work. And obviously, technical skill is the foundation of your freelance ability. Still, let's assume you have good technical skills.

If there's one thing I wish I'd learned much more about early on in my consulting firm, it is how to manage your client's expectations along the entire way- from quote -> negotiation -> project -> deliverables. I don't have any horror stories, but I feel like that was the biggest squeaky wheel as we were getting started. That, and don't worry about looking too professional. You won't be, it'll probably show in ways you don't know, and instead treat as much as you can as a learning experience rather than trying to hide your lack of knowledge. However, watch out for predatory clients who confuse naivete with lack of business expertise and try to take advantage of you or tell you "how things are done"... to their advantage.

1. Clients do expect a certain level of expertise, but your rate, portfolio and past referrals should go a long ways in setting your client's expectations. Specs, even highly technical ones imo, are a fickle thing in freelance work- a phrase I've repeatedly heard from very successful freelancers is "under-sell, over deliver." But that's just one approach.

2. To be honest, there are many freelancers/firms who are not honest about their rates/development process/billable hours and they still pay the bills. On the flip side, my biz partners and I try to run our firm by the Golden Rule* and it's worked exceptionally well for us.

3. Yes, that is a good general rule, but you should decide early on if you want to do speculative work or not (different from pro bono work). Many firms feel that speculative work is damaging unless you are just starting out and need to establish a portfolio/set of client referrals (in which case, you're still being "compensated" with something of value, just not cash...). Also, you may find that you're willing to work at different rates for different clients.

Hope that helps!