Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Like most marketplaces, they are only interested in making themselves profitable. Always remember that.

Working at freelancer.com or similar sites is saying:

"I should spend a large portion of my life to become an expert in my craft, and then I should agree to have my privacy stripped away from me while I race to the bottom and undercut my competition because I will actively place myself into situations where I have the highest competition to ensure I receive the lowest rates. Lastly, I will bust my butt and bend the world to satisfy clients who take advantage of me."

By the way, if anyone is interested in making $ on their own as a freelancer I wrote a mini-guide on how to get your first paying client by tomorrow at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-start-a-successful-fre....

View on HN

So after you take down the number on that ice cream truck you saw driving by, and get back home from your walk and decide to call them, what do you say? Just, "hi! Do you need any software developed"?

I've never tried, but it's a little hard for me to imagine ever getting a client this way.

Well you should try it next time because that's how I got one of my first clients on my own. A local food truck showed up to my uni quite often and I noticed their website wasn't great, so one day I walked up to them and asked if they were looking for a redesign. They eagerly said yes and I met with the whole family (it was a family business) 3 days later. It was a really unfulfilling contract but it illustrated to me how effective direct sales tactics can actually be.

Yeah, this is the type of stuff I'm talking about.

But you can take these things so much further if you branch away from "just development skills" too.

I never talked to a food truck person yet but I bet there's lots of ways you could have turned that unfulfilling contract into something more interesting.

No business owner really cares about a site redesign. They just care about "how do I get more customers?". If you shift your focus from website themes, to delivering business value then suddenly a $1,000 wordpress site turns into a $1,000/monthly retainer because you're creating funnels and pipelines to drive business to his truck.

Next thing you know, he's paying you $25,000 for some crazy custom food truck software that helps automate his business which he has no problem paying because he trusts you and everything you've done for him in the past was amazing.

Fast forward 2 years from now and you have a food truck SAAS that 12,000 other food truck owners are paying $79/month for. Your whole life is changed from 1 conversation and you get to write code (it just took a little exploring to get to that point).

I get what you're saying, but it's also clear that you haven't ever talked to a food truck person.

They're not paying you $1000 for a wordpress site, and they're never paying $1000 on retainer. The rest is also a total fantasy.

This is a misleading example because restaurants and food already operate on razor-thin margins; restaurant software is legendarily hard to break into and make money in.

Source: tried to start a "make websites for food trucks" business years and years ago, talked to hundreds of food truck owners, and learned that they're largely running food trucks because they like the hours, the freedom, the scale of the business. They can make decent cash without maintaining a space or even necessarily operating outside lunchtime. They don't really need to drive more business, and won't really anyway--their fortunes are tied to geography and the economy overall.

If you have an example from your own life, please use that instead of a fictitious one that is misleading and kinda wrong.

I hope it's clear I haven't talked to a food truck person because I lead off my reply literally saying I haven't heh. I used that as an example because the parent comment was talking about a food truck site he made for someone.

I can't force you into believing anything and that's fine but I don't think I need to defend myself here.

I have no agenda. I'm only bothering to share this stuff (along with the 100+ other posts on my blog) because I don't want to see other software developers go through the same mistakes I encountered along the way when freelancing for the last 20 years. I've been burned by marketplaces in the past.

Btw, what I described works (and has worked for me personally) with any of the niches I listed in my original comment and many more. No, I haven't created a super successful SAAS business from any of them but my idea wall has a dozen that could be made and would likely have some degree of success.

The problem is, I'd rather spend my limited time on creating software developer courses and building that up because unless you're passionate about what you do, you're very likely going to go no where in the long term and I'm not passionate about making SAAS apps related to industries I'm not personally involved with on a daily basis.

OK, but you're basically saying, "my techniques work, except the example I'm presenting is entirely fictitious" -- and I know that it is a totally nonsensical example that simply has nothing to do with reality.

My point is that, especially if you're offering courses or trying to teach people, stick to what you know about from experience, not what you imagine might work based on an extrapolation from first principles.

That thinking, that it works in theory and that's enough to sell, is dangerous, because it lets people go a long way down the wrong path, just trying to think things through.

OR, if that's not your intent, don't make up fake examples that are obvious nonsense to anyone who's tried it.

It sounds like your mind is made up.

Continue working on freelancer.com and I'll continue helping businesses grow while living my dream as a freelancer.

For reference I have been doing what I wrote for 2 decades and it certainly works. Good luck!

I think Frondo is saying you should just change your example niche from Food trucks to something like barber shops that are small businesses with the same problems but usually directly benefit more from software and internet presence. A website with booking calendar is a clearer benefit than "just" web presence.

That did sound weird to me too on the food truck side. Most of them seem to go from place to place almost on a whim, and the customers go to them because they're pretty good and right there. I don't think anything on the internet is ultimately going to do that much for them. Their customers either already see them because they see the truck, or they aren't going to bother travelling halfway across the city for it. I like food trucks all right, but I don't think anybody likes any particular food truck so much that they'd travel for 20 minutes to find a particular one.

Programmers are smart systems thinkers, or they can be.

And they (we) have a tendency to think, "here is a system that I have derived from first principles, and now I can apply it" ... which is, frustratingly, not how the world typically works.

No plan survives contact with the customer, but the kind of confidence that guy writes with can be dangerous because it can lead people down a long wrong path.

Frondo is 100% correct. No food truck is spending $1000 on a website to outsider and no food truck is spending $1000 a month on a retainer and no food truck is spending $25k/mo on a tracking software.

Watch the Great Food Truck race. Those are the margin. Those are the $$ amounts. It is hand to mouth.

The term is 'cold calling' and it's a pretty standard thing for most sales people to do. It sucks and it takes a lot of effort but it does pay off sometimes.

The tricky part for freelancers doing this is that most developers don't have that sales type mentality. It has worked for me in the past but it's definitely something I've recognized at not being good at

I wouldn't go after the ice cream man, but here's a couple of people I would (and have) contacted: locksmiths, plumbers, lawn maintenance teams, roofing companies, solar panel companies and the list goes on and on.

Then I would either talk to a worker directly if it looks like a decent opportunity. I'm not going to wave down a guy off the roof, but if he happens to be fiddling with something near his van and I naturally walk past, then sure.

If not, then I just call the number they have later. I'm not pitching them right away with "do you need any software developed?". All I do is ask them about their business. My goal here is to get a feel for how they are doing financially without directly asking.

Then I'll guide the call into casually offering them services that could help them grow. Sometimes it's a new website or setting up a landing page. There's honestly a TON of things that almost every business could benefit from and you can comfortably charge $2,000 to $20,000 for these things with monthly retainers on top. That's not even counting custom software gigs that come later.

Pretty much this. Lot's of people dont believe this approach works and miss out.

Thanks for the guide!

Btw,

>As long as you have the technical skills to do the job, you can have your first client tomorrow. Heck, you don’t even need the technical skills, but that’s a story for another day.

I'm curious, did you ever write that story?

No problem.

I have not written that story but it's kind of hidden in the original article.

The short version is to broaden your network and find dependable people who you can really trust.

At the end of the day someone needs to do the work and have technical skills. Basically you can outsource that to people in your network.

For example I'm not an illustrator guru or especially good at hardcore graphic design but I know enough to be dangerous. I typically have a friend in my network make logos for me and I pay him.

My direct client doesn't know this, because it's an unimportant implementation detail. All he knows is he gets a badass logo in the end and it comes part of a package I presented to him.

You can do this for almost anything. I like meetups for this because it's the fastest way to determine if someone is legit or not. I only want to surround myself with highly dependable people who I trust.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com