Got a few other contracts off that site, until one day I've asked one of my main clients to move out of that platform and work with me directly. Worked with them 2 years, until I got an offer in January to become a full time technical director and shareholder.
What I've learn contracting:
1. Increase your rates. Make them non-negotiable. There's people that are ready to pay for quality. If a client asks you to lower your rate, they probably aren't a good client in the first place.
2. Increase your rates every year, as you get more experience and technical knowledge.
3. Upwork was bad, and now is even worse. Move out of those kind of sites ASAP, when you can trust your client.
4. If you do good work, you'll have old clients pinging you once in a while with new opportunities. So, do outstanding work, and you won't have to look for new contracts as much.
5. Don't be afraid to learn. Try not to specialise too much. Generalists/full stack devs are very sought after. You'll start a contract as a web developer and soon you'll be doing DB optimisation and securing their infrastructure.
6. Increase your rates.
Nice tips but I don't agree with this point.
Being specialized makes you stand out from the crowd and being "the person who does <foo> in the <bar> industry using his extensive knowledge in <baz>". Otherwise you are just "the person who does <computer-stuff> for all industries".
I agree that it's simpler to not be picky at the beginning but later on you should specialize - not just in technology but also in an industry.
My personal goal and career path has always been to be a jack of all trades, I even entertained the idea of explicitly writing that in my resume.
One might prefer to specialise in something instead, and master it well. That's absolutely fine, I just happen to love to learn about anything, mostly because I easily get bored if I'm on the same thing too long.
It's suited me fine, but it's definitely not the Only Way to be a consultant.
What if you're mediocre, though?
And by "solutions provider," I mean take the time to deeply understand the root causes of your clients' problems, then help them find the actual solutions. Sometimes these solutions are not even technical, which is totally okay. Clients will love that you're helping them solve problems in addition to providing technical services.
I guess I'm mediocre in that it consistently seems to take me 8-10 hours to finish jobs that come with a 4 hour time estimate (my company is big on estimates). I'm also pretty sloppy - code reviewers routinely catch minor errors that I should have known better than to commit.
I have the experience, way too often, of using some feature that I pushed months or years ago and learning that it's, like, haunted or something. Doesn't work the way it's supposed to at all. Obvious failures that I should never have called "done".
When it comes to building a complete product, from start to finish, I mostly can't get past MVP stage (talking about personal projects in this case). And I once spent over a month trying to update the version of TinyMCE for a CMS that I was working on, and did not succeed. I literally got another job and left the company with that task unfinished. The new job pays double, and I still feel like a bit of a fraud.
And yeah, I'm writing "bog-standard PHP" as the other commenter put it. I've tried to get work in other languages to diversify my skillset, and haven't succeeded. At this point I'm starting to not care anymore - I like PHP just fine, loose typing be damned, and I'm starting to think I want to move out of technical roles rather than improve my language skills.
Basically, you start with the same clients that have been hiring you, then tell them you can assemble a team of developers to help get their project done, and all they have to do is work through you as the main point of contact.
This is easier said than done, of course. Starting with existing clients is a nice way to jump-start this kind of a business, but you'll need to find more clients eventually. There's also a whole arena of skills you'll need to develop in terms of recruiting, account management, and project management too.
This isn't for everyone. But someone with technical skills has a vast advantage in such a role over someone who doesn't, with all other skills being equal.
Just an option to consider as you think about moving out of a technical role.
There's a general focus in that book about building your personal brand in an organization so you basically have leverage to do what you want.
Beyond that, the short answer is to assume the role. Take on a PM-like presence amongst your team if you haven't already - ie. help any PMs you're currently working with on small tasks, ease their burden where you can - then have a candid discussion with your supervisor at some point about how you can see yourself in such a role.
If you want to do this as a remote contractor, then I think your options are:
1) Look for an existing dev agency that needs remote project managers.
2) Start your own dev agency.
0: https://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwe...
You see the irony? Appear weak and someone will own you. Appear strong, you'll own them. Simple.
It's better to be excellent in one or two areas, especially ones your passionate about than solid across the board. If you suck at something and it's causing problems, that's a different story -- but don't get stuck on comparing yourself to others.
I wish I could downvote this comment. Please ignore it.
Where quality is important is in keeping your costs low. Having to revisit old code to fix bugs or trying to work with bad code to add features has very little impact on your client. It affects you. Strive to write good code for your own sake.
Plus, if you take on fixed price projects writing code you don't need to go back to really increases your profit.
You mean, ships on time.
If you land a job that you feel got a bit close for comfort, lower your rates and re-calibrate. But assess why before selling yourself cheap - was it really beyond your skill? Did you just need more time? Don't forget that if you charge more, you can better devote your time to those projects. If you charge less you have to spread yourself more thinly to remain solvent.
Your rate has almost nothing to do with how good a programmer you are. Sorry, excellent programmers who've had a hard time getting consultancies launched.
Your bill rate roughly† tracks how much value you provide to your client. "Value" is complicated and situational. For programming work, for most clients, extreme technical excellence is of marginal value. Clients that engage third party developers tend to see software as a cost center and/or are simply trying to solve a business problem. They care about how quickly that problem can be workably solved, and (please take notes:) how predictable the costs are.
You can be thoroughly mediocre at programming and an excellent business value, if your mediocre code solves business problems people will allocate budget for and if you can deliver it predictably. If you can deliver predictably and fast, you can ship bog-standard PHP code and charge integer multiples of what a much better developer might implement in Rust or Haskell.
The market tends to pay a premium for problem domain specialization, and less of a premium for elite skill.
None of this much matters for someone just getting their feet wet trying to get their first couple clients. Do whatever gets you started. But get out of the habit of convincing yourself that you have to qualify somehow to charge more money. Even the consultants who are constantly telling people to raise their rates are also not charging enough. I'm a varsity member of team "raise your rates" and I thought we were undercharging 4 years ago. Since then, FTE rates have gone through the ceiling and our rates have not scaled with them. It is very unlikely that any consultant chatting about consulting on HN is charging their real market rate.
I have one bit of bad news for you: if you want to make a career out of being a contractor or consultant, you need to get off freelancing sites ASAP. It's fine to get started there, but you're not developing your practice in any meaningful way as long as you're using them; you're just getting better at slinging code (which doesn't earn you better rates!), while radically undercharging clients. Getting off freelancing sites is rough, because freelancing sites tend to provide a comparatively stable revenue stream, and real consulting revenue is lumpy. If you've never experienced "lumpy" before: it's (a) terrifying and (b) really easy to screw up, by assuming you're flush with cash when really you've effectively just been pre-paid for the next N quarters.
Some people reasonably don't want to work under lumpy consulting conditions. Better you figure that problem out for yourself early rather than wasting your time pretending, or, worse, forgoing a fuckload of income by chaining yourself to freelance sites.
† Roughly because most serious clients allocate a budget that establishes a range of what they're willing to pay to solve a problem, and an invisible component of that budget is how much work they're willing to put in to sourcing a contractor --- the first credible contractor they talk to might win the deal, meaning there's no competition to aid price discovery. Corollary: one way to "provide value" and charge a premium is to be easy to source. Something that people who build consulting firms, the kind with lots of consultants, learn quickly: clients put a premium on firms that are always available.
How do you go (being completely remote) from nothing to have a high quality client (as in corp/high net startup).
Take these into consideration:
- Can live off savings for the next 2 years.
- Can expense 3/4 travel costs for US/EU/Asia.
- Can setup offshore US/HK company and bank accounts.
- Doesn't mind if the process take 2-4-6-8 months.
- Doesn't mind traveling, staying late, taking calls anytime, etc.. if it can give me an edge.
What are the steps to take to land the first whale. Also, I have the following skills: Cryptography/Security (still a beginner), Blockchain (somewhat good), DevOps (medium), Web Development (Pretty good experience).
Bear in mind pretty much most of my clients before were low quality clients (making wordpress sites for the average business, made me decent money but only for the cheapness of the country I live in).
Would appreciate any advice!
1) Produce publicly visible artifacts which demonstrate that you're able to apply technology to impact business outcomes. You do not need many of these; ~3 is fine. You do not need to block on the other steps. You do need to plausibly connect the technology to a business outcome; blockchain and beginner-level cryptography probably do not get you there.
2) Begin getting into conversations with people who either a) have purchasing authority or b) talk to people with purchasing authority, at your target clients or firms very similar to them. This can be as simple as bonding over technical things with technical people. You want to become Internet buddies with e.g. senior engineers / team leads / etc at software companies.
3) Walk the network of your new friends to engagements, either at their firms or peer firms. Do not make another WordPress site for the average business; make something for a software company.
4) For every engagement you land, attempt to get referrals to more clients, attempt to land follow-on work with the same client, and attempt to land ongoing maintenance/retainer/etc agreements with the client.
2) How do I get into conversations with decision makers? Cold approaches? I know I'm a decision maker for buying a sofa for my living room. But I get to discuss with the seller because I'm in his shop? How do I get to discuss with him if he doesn't have that shop to trap me there.
One recent Indie Hackers episode had Nathan Barry on. He swore by the tactic of doing presentations on a topic that would be useful to small business owners at chamber of commerce meetings, collecting emails and adding people to a mailing list. Apparently most of the leads he got didn’t convert themselves but they referred other people who did. All for the price of free coffee and donuts, a presentation and time.
Rates have much more to do with how in-demand the provider is relative to their ability to deliver. And a big part of "in-demand" has to do with how you market yourself, the quality of your network, and other non-work product factors.
Increase your rates.
Market has information asymmetry baked in. Not everyone is informed, that's where you earn your bucks.
40 dollar for a small task seems to be a magical cutoff point where any task less has a checklist of dozens of smaller tasks bundled in.
800 seems to be the level where above that you can expect some professional-ness
But for a new contractor what to charge seems to be the struggle. I exited contracting when the .com bubble burst. These days I'd want to charge double my previous rate, possibly more.
Ewwwwwwwwww!
Therefore upwork directly improves equality of opportunity in the world.
I can only hope the transfer of wealth accomplishes some greater flourishing of human rights across the world as well.
2) what could they possibly go about it?
It looks like you've submitted a few proposals - unfortunately, half of the jobs stopped before selecting a developer. If we had more posts on the site, getting declined would be more of a numbers game and less noticeable. Still, keep at it - looks like you have two open matches right now!
The good news is that, among people who get selected for jobs, they often get rehired again and again by the same client.
Whereas a serious amount of networking locally yielded me a 10% pay increase and a 6 month contract.
I think this is why you get all of this advice saying that these kinds of sites are a race to the bottom and not worth investing too much time into.
Reminds me of that friends episode when Chandler tries to quit the gym LOL.
The Problem at freelancer.com (currently testing that) is that it is hard to differentiate yourself as a good contractor it seems more like quantity then quality. However isn't that just the result from getting big?
Maybe there is an inherent stochastic process in freelancing platforms that lowers the average rate as more people get on it. So your main challenge should be to avoid that but that seems like a hard problem.
Toptal does screening, which does not scale, Upwork and Freelancer do nothing (or do upselling via courses, bid-boosts, etc.).
I have a moral opposition to Paypal after using it personally, but we are looking at solutions such as Payoneer to expand country support!
It's worth pointing out that you can incorporate in Estonia or the USA (e.g. through Stripe Atlas) to get access to Stripe.
Signing up, to give it a try. I've got a FT day job but have been wanting to try to crack the nut of how to land a contracting position on the side for a while now.
- impeccably written emails detailing everything about every project and keeping everyone in the loop
- documenting every issue, question, and plan of action via email, letting nothing fall through the cracks
- status reports like clockwork
- precision on requirements and specs, spelling everything out, leaving nothing to chance
- a great attitude and team player (barf barf) in writing
Do these things and insist that others do (along with all you other dazzling work) and they'll have no excuses not to keep you when you decide to go remote. They'll already know you're a "professional".
I guess it can work if you work alone and with high autonomy.
For many jobs just having someone say "yeah fine" is not good enough for success.
I recommend screening company with Glassdoor (WFH hints etc.) and at interview asking about communication/collaboration tools in use, remote teams etc.
Nowadays there is a large middle ground of companies which have globaly distributed offices. They may ask you to show up for some initial period to gain trust and mix into culture - definitely important for a long-term cooperation. Afterwards switching to remote is like relocating to different office but staying in the same project, which is pretty common practice. Tested myself several times.
I'd always negotiated remote work upfront, but doing it this way is clever.
If you have no plan b, this tactic loses all of it's teeth.
At a high level how it works is: You put availability on your calendar; we schedule you for interviews in those slots. You can set as much or as little availability as you want week to week, at any time of day. The interviewing is all online, so you can do it from wherever you want as long as you've got a quiet location and a reliable high-bandwidth internet connection.
All we look for are solid technical chops and interpersonal skills, though prior interviewing experience is great. We train you on how to conduct interviews (generally takes about 25 hours including mentoring and practice interviews); training is paid and again on your own schedule. The only real restriction is that we ask that you be able to interview 10 hours a week on average, just because otherwise the time investment and ongoing training stop making sense.
If that sounds interesting you can apply here: https://jobs.lever.co/karat/d44ab283-c7c0-4bbd-b8c3-4dc0ced6...
Also happy to answer any questions about it here or via email: josh@karat.io
As for the 10 hours, we spend a lot of time onboarding and then continuously training our interviewers. Between that and the overhead of managing the relationship with the interviewer, we find things work best with interviewers above a certain activity level. Put another way, it's easier to work with 10 interviewers doing 10 hours a week each than 100 interviewers doing 1 hour a week each.
Does that make sense?
(Of course, they're no use to me, as I'm very happy as a mostly-remote startup CTO, but these opportunities are out there.)
Contracting tends to be something that's hard to break into but easier once you're there - what people want to see on a CV is previous contracting experience. So even if your first gigs aren't remote, they may help you in the long run.
1. They take a cut, a very big cut, of your hourly or daily rate. Thus, to the client, you seem very expensive, and to you, you seem cheaper than you should be. It becomes a new effort to maneuver a proper rate.
2. Recruiters suffer from the fact that they are salespeople, and salespeople often intuitively omit information for fear they'd lose the deal. So they operate the same way as they do for employee recs. Here's a concrete example: several times in the last several months, I received offers of "contract to hire" even though the recruiter told me it was contract only. They failed to tell the client I was contract-only, and they failed to tell me it was a contract-to-hire. Believe me, they knew. Then the inevitable question, where I have to be careful not to be too mean in the response, "Can I ask you why you want to stay as a contractor? It's a really exciting company and there's stock opt... yadda yadda." For a contractor doing it right, every invoice is a bonus or an opportunity to purchase stocks with no vesting and no strings. :-)
reminds me of the real estate agent trick of posting a listing for a home that's too good to be true. when a potential buyer calls that agent, the agent says the home is no longer available, but asks "are you currently working with an agent?"
On a side note— with Toronto salaries we can’t afford a dog anyway outside of getting to come home midday to walk it. Walker fees run close to $500 a month. I’m in love with the rescue Korean Jindos though. They’re like goofier huskies. I just can’t help but look.
Of course, in the world of sales, those relationships can form quickly. Even if you've never heard of me and my staffing firm, I can present you tickets to a concert or golf tournament, or something similar, and win (buy) favor fairly easily.
Most of these middleman staffing firms are not really differentiated from one another. They find a client and leech on to it.
Happy to advise on specifics but in general here’s how we did it:
Build up a portfolio of content (since we develop content) that shows we know what we’re doing.
Go on speaking circuit for your niche and give lectures on your expertise.
Take whatever comes your way for first few deals. Always get a solid statement of work & contract.
Rinse and repeat. If you’re ok with going slower this works well. I manage a team of 9 now and after some serious time spent training them I mostly just approve work and put out fires with clients.
Cannot emphasize this enough. I started a database blog years ago, and built it up into a 5-person remote consulting firm. Inbound marketing is king: build up your brand and people will bring you exactly the projects you want, for life (rather than you having to seek out work and settle for stuff you don't really want to begin with.)
It seems to be there: https://www.brentozar.com/blog/
Bam. Inbound marketing seems to go well, a HNer just linked to the blog by inspecting the HN profile the consultant put on HN ... ;)
8 employees are spread across world.
HN - http://hnhiring.me/
Remote OK - https://remoteok.io/
Stack Overflow - https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs?allowsremote=True
LiquidTalent - http://www.liquidtalent.com/
Working Not Working - http://workingnotworking.com
Hired - https://hired.com/contract-jobs
Gigster - https://gigster.com/
Mirror - http://mirrorplacement.com/
Metova - http://metova.com/
Mokriya - http://mokriya.com/
HappyFunCorp - http://happyfuncorp.com
Savvy Apps - http://savvyapps.com/
Clevertech - http://www.clevertech.biz/
Workstate - http://www.workstate.com/
AngelList - https://angel.co/jobs
Authentic Jobs: http://www.authenticjobs.com/
Github Jobs: https://jobs.github.com/
- https://www.workingnomads.co/jobs
- https://remoteworkhub.com/remote-jobs/
- https://remote.co/remote-jobs/
- https://remotive.io/find-a-job/
- https://www.skipthedrive.com/
- https://www.outsourcely.com/remote-business-services-jobs
- https://www.remotelyawesomejobs.com/
Crew: https://crew.co/
NoDesk - https://nodesk.co
FreelanceDevLeads: https://freelancedevleads.com/
FlexJobs: https://www.flexjobs.com/
I thought the same thing. Perhaps it is because I work for someone else instead of for myself, but since I've been full time remote for the last 2 years, I've had 0 free time for anything. I rarely leave the house. Pretty much everything I need comes from online purchases or grocery delivery as I don't even have time to do that.
Before I worked remotely, I thought that working remotely would allow me time to exercise and eat better. I had dreams of going on a daily bicycle ride, instead of being stuck in my car.
The reality is that working remotely just allows me to put in insane amounts of hours. About once or twice a week I'll start my workday at three in the morning due to insomnia, and just work 12-16 hours straight.
I think this is particularly prevalent when the entire team is working remotely, because ALL of us are wrapped up in this crazy schedule.
tl;dr; you have to actively work to develop these habits because it's easy to just sit and work the entire day
You pretty much have to do it at some point unless you think you can happily spend the rest of your life like this. I'm working with a primarily remote working people, and yes - due to flexibility sometimes people get caught up in something and work later. But mostly we're telling each other that things can wait and to go offline. Normally we all still save time since there's no commuting.
I told my clients that the largest number of productive hours you'll get out of a developer in a day is six (which I believe to be largely true) and that's how many I worked. Start at 9am, you're finished by 4; most of the places I worked the commute was a 15 minute scooter ride and I'd have the rest of the day for swimming, learning guitar, doing my own projects, etc.
I actually moved back to London for a short time because I worried I was getting too relaxed.
Second are you sure you're compensated sufficiently? You should be able to take time off with that money you earned?
There are a few job boards dedicated to digital nomads, but the volume there is surprisingly low.
To put in context, we, at Idea To Startup (https://ideatostartup.org/), have helped startups from 5 different continents around the world create the best remote team in the shortest time.
Let's discuss this over chat. What's the best way to contact you?
Thanks, Nikhil
Also, huge veins of money run through these places you just need to stick in a needle. Cutting a check for $150k means absolutely nothing to them. I've seen million dollar budgets burned with absolutely nothing to show in the end and the business team just shrugs and moves on.
Those are the gigs you want.
They were so desperate for skilled engineers in Scotland when it was suggested I could keep working remotely they jumped straight on it. I'm now working 100% remotely for them in Canada.
As others have suggested getting yourself into the contracting market in London and then going remotely can work if you're a developer with the right skills though it may be slightly slower then trying to find remote work first.
I have found that there is not a huge amount of remote work for companies based out of Scotland.
I started contracting on-site for a Federal government department (leaving a salaried state government position for it), through an agency, then moved onto more on-site contracting for a telco, through a different agency (in a different state), before finally starting to take on clients directly.
For several years I worked primarily with a single company, effectively as a regular staff member, but paid based on invoiced hours.
I moved overseas while still working for them, started a new company ( I operated as a sole-trader before ) to allow me to invoice from my new country, and then started working with companies initially through word-of-mouth from existing acquaintances/former colleagues, and more recently through HN's "Seeking Freelancer" threads.
If you just want to travel but dont want the hassle of finding new clients, I'd suggest looking into a company like X-Team (https://x-team.com) - the company I was working for/with when I moved overseas - as they're 100% remote, and have (or had) a number of nomad-ish staff already.
It's not all roses, internet connectivity and being available is a must. Travel is incredibly stressful as you need to be always online, so that means always having batteries, cables multiple phones, tools and travel SIM cards. You cannot leave anything to chance.
Get ready to be cut out of the office politick, which is great, but also means I didn't know our SVP walked out as he was signed onto the online collaboration tool for another 3 months after he stormed out. And it didn't help that he would ignore me from time to time.
Devops has more opertunity just because of the following the sun model.
So yeah, be flexible, add value and just ask, create the crissis and the solution. If only people were fully awake and always available and knew the infastructure@3am....
1. Get yourself an account on Transferwise.com so you can accept all currencies. It then works well to bill people in their local currency as they pay quicker.
2. We use Xero for all accounting and invoicing. It works and saves time at end of year.
3. Slack. I am on 9 different teams. I binned off email a long time ago.
4. Write content on a blog and blog posts, this is the single best way we get new clients.
5. Keep your prices high. We work with Google, Amazon, Warner Brothers and we got that through recommendations. High prices = top quality.What kind of work do you do for Google/Amazon?
My basic advice is: become a visible expert in the space by starting a blog, posting articles, and go to meetups and speak. Then, start with your network (old jobs and coworkers) to look for work, and expand out from there.
The good news is there is a ton of work for javascript developers right now, so that’s one advantage you have.
That's what I did, I took a job with a great _local_ agency who is actually remote first. It has allowed me to spend more time with my family and plan actual world travel.
Freelancing is hard to start - -you need to be part marketer, you don't get paid for the time finding new clients, but AFTER you have a steady stream of good business, it gets a bit easier to keep filling your pipeline with jobs through word of mouth / etc.
My thinking is you need to start low till you build rep/reviews then you can start charging more per hour.
Edit: Also there's a lot of people who want u.s. or english native speakers. I'm in u.s. not planning on traveling much but I like working out of my basement and not wasting time commuting.
If you are an experienced engineer with more sophisticated skills and don't live in India and Pakistan just don't bother.
If only there were like a global dev Union or something so the price of devs was standard everywhere or at least had a minimum wage of like $20-30 per hour.
Tell them, oh it's dirty code - it's unmaintainable crap. I quoted you the wrong rate, to deal with this I'll need $500 per hour I've other contracts waiting for me. But yeaa this is something which I had done last month for a different client. Now, I am busy, so just drop me a line on whatsapp if you don't find anyone else to do it. Leave this, "Anyone who can really do, will charge at-least 2x of what I am quoting"
2. Wait
3. Wait
4. You get the contract.
Don't regret for the ones who never get back to you, you'll make plenty from the one who tickle you the second time!
At $500/hr even if you are not the expert of the task you are undertaking, you'll find plenty of people on upwork to do it for 100-200/hr. Why? Those people just want to talk with a technical person who has clearly defined the scope of work! Most of those people are technically good from Russia.
You sound like the type who makes contracting and consulting so much harder for everyone else, because you exploit your clients ignorance and trust for your own personal gain.
Ironically, you'd make a lot more in the long run if you had a more long-term outlook instead of being so transactional.
Most people end up with less money, not because they lack skill but because they've not used their skill at the right place at right time.
Buffet advise doesn't work for everyone.
You're entering into an agreement in bad faith, intending to alter the terms of the agreement once they're more committed and at a disadvantage.
Additionally, you're blatantly lying about your skill level, how long something will take, and the state of the market, in the hopes that you can find a sucker every now and then who will believe you.
This is fraud, pure and simple.
Imagine you hire a contractor to remodel your bathroom for $10k. As soon as they demo the bathroom, they lie and say they found a bunch of unexpected issues that will cost $50k to fix, and that anyone else who knows what they're doing will cost at least $100k, when the reality is that anyone honest would be able to just do the original job for $10k.
Sure, many people see through this ruse and will tell them to get lost and hire someone else (or at least get more bids), but some won't, and that's what the bottom-feeders who pull this shit are counting on.
Most people end up with less money, not because they lack skill but because they've not used their skill at the right place at right time.
Of course, and I regularly advise freelancers and contractors to charge more and to charge for value, not for time.
But that's distinct from lying to your clients and finding ways to put them in disadvantageous positions where you can exploit them. That's short-term scammer thinking.
For the record, I regularly make an effective hourly rate of more than $500 / hr, although I never charge hourly.
Here's the ethical win-win way to get to the same (or better result) vs. what you're doing:
1. First, establish some expertise and credibility in a particular space. You don't have to be the best in the world, but you need some results to show how you can solve a client's business problems in a particular area. The more expensive / valuable those problems are, the better.
2. Find clients who have that problem and give them a quote based on the value that you're adding, not the time that you're investing.
3. Over time, you can optimize, outsource, automate, and eliminate the work that you need to do in order to deliver that value, while simultaneously charging more as your expertise and credibility grows. This drives your effective hourly rate up on two factors.
The end result is that you can get a client who will hire you for $50k to do something worth $250k to them that will take you 100 hours ($500 / hr effective) and at the end, you'll both walk away happy, increasing the likelihood that you'll work together again in the future.
It's more work, but pays off better in the long run. Plus the side benefit of making you seem and feel like less of a scummy fraudster.
People at exon, large banking companies, stock brokers can make promises and a consultant/contractor can't change his mind?
No body cares about building sustainable business, most just want enough cash to retire peacefully.
Nor have you. Feel free to post your results and the amazing, rich, fulfilling lifestyle you've built for yourself.
It's telling that you had to post this from a throwaway. I don't blame you; I certainly wouldn't want my clients knowing I was defrauding them the way that you are.
I'm actually skeptical that you've even gotten this to work to any degree. I'm sure you've fooled a few people, but the jump to $500/hr is so huge and transparently exploitative that only the most naive of clients would be fooled. My guess is that you're struggling to make this work but you think it's the only way, which is sad.
People at exon, large banking companies, stock brokers can make promises and a consultant/contractor can't change his mind?
Unclear on what you're trying to say here, but the bottom line is that you're not changing your mind. You're lying to the client upfront so you can exploit them later.
No body cares about building sustainable business, most just want enough cash to retire peacefully.
Not true at all, and it's sad that you see the world this way, as a battle between success and ethics. Many (but not all) of the most successful people I know have a very high standard of integrity for themselves and others. None of them engage in the kind of fraud that you're espousing.
> I (re)started my tech blog after several years and made it more active and discussed things which were kind of like a "niche" that is web scraping and automation. I wrote posts how things are done and put the code on Github. At one side I was building my Github and in other hands, my SEO optimized posts attracted Google and eventually developers and..site/business owners too that helped me to get contractual work.
The biggest issue with us, techies, is that we don't know how to sell ourselves. Blogging could be pretty effective to get consulting work.
You’ll have to go through a technical interview process but most jobs are seeking JS developers, especially Node, React-Redux and React Native devs.
Hopefully we’re one more resource to help devs like yourself who want to travel and work.
https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/how-to-have-clients-find-you...
It has world-famous daily rates even for generalistic sectors like JS/React.
Try to save some money, so you can afford the luxury of choosing clients later.
Saw them on www.indiehackers.com, think that might help you!