Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

8 months into my first year of freelancing in the UI space:

* Closing in on $250k revenue

* 2 major clients, 4 smaller, short-term engagements

* 100% utilization rate (no downtime between clients)

* Successfully raised rates with all client projects (avg: 19% / engagement)

* Closed via a sales funnel of: 5 new prospect outreach / day, 2 proposal follow-ups / day, 1 existing (or prior) client referral / month

What worked:

* Networking aggressively (see sales funnel)

* Setting up a 3-prong presence of blog + personal site + consulting site

* Pruning and refining available code/assets for portfolio

* Pricing / week & value-based, fixed-cost pricing

* 100% money-back guarantee (no one has asked for it)

* Having an accountant

What did not work:

* Thorough proposal / contract documentation. I figured having detailed, in-depth scope of work showing I had knowledge of their industry, problems, etc, would help close deals. The teams that closed the fastest already knew they wanted to work with me, but the ones that weren't sold couldn't even be sold with excellent SOWs and proposal documentation.

* Having a lawyer. For a one-man consulting shop, you really don't need one. Most standard SOW/Contract/IP documents are easy enough to generate/find yourself.

* Toptal / Upwork / any of those race-to-the-bottom sites. There's great arbitrage if you're international like OP. But I'm in the US, and it's not worth the effort for US rates.

* Meetups. I just didn't invest time in them (yet). I think the next leap in rates will come from becoming more "well known" through blogging and speaking engagements, which this is a key area to invest in.

* All this "double your rate" business. Sure, I imagine this works if you're used to pulling in $50/hr, and I imagine Brennan Dunn and the sort are marketing themselves at more commoditized development. But trust me, people ran away when I doubled my rates. I had to find a sweet spot and build up my rates slowly per client rather than just assume I was wildly undervalued.

This is incredibly impressive.

You also built one of my favorite unique sites (share latex).

I’m curious and have a few questions:

- how did you manage 5 prospects per day? That seems like an incredible amount of work that would break up my flow. Is this more like one day a week of hitting up 30 leads? Where did you find all of these prospects?

- why did you choose a 3 pronged approach of blog post, personal site AND consulting site? What’s the incremental value of the other two given one?

- can you describe, or give any links about value based fixed cost pricing?

> You also built one of my favorite unique sites (share latex).

Credit where credit is due: Henry and James built ShareLatex. I simply re-skinned it. They are the real heroes.

> how did you manage 5 prospects per day? That seems like an incredible amount of work that would break up my flow. Is this more like one day a week of hitting up 30 leads? Where did you find all of these prospects?

I aggressively sought opportunities. I recently posted about the collection of remote job sites I found [1], trust me, I was doing a lot of outreach and taking meetings. The advice I got from a dear friend was I should be networking at least 2 hours a day. I was doing that on top of the 8ish hours I was billing to clients.

> why did you choose a 3 pronged approach of blog post, personal site AND consulting site? What’s the incremental value of the other two given one?

Good question. I came to this conclusion after months of torturing myself over trying to master my personal brand. Here's why - your personal site serves to drive an audience of people who google your name. Those may not be the same kinds of people who are looking for consulting. Plus, if I every sold my consulting business or pivoted, it's not tied to my name. Same with my blog. Better to name your blog in relation to the vertical you are pursuing, rather than have it be yourname.com/blog. No one is googling the topics I'm interested hoping to read about my opinion. They just want an opinion/content from an authority. I write about front-end/development/UIs, so UserInterfacing as my blog is much more relevant than simply my name. Does that make sense?

> can you describe, or give any links about value based fixed cost pricing?

Guys like Brennan Dunn and Jonathan Stark are all about this. Check their stuff out, they're really much better at it than I am.

[1] https://userinterfacing.com/here-is-the-full-list-of-my-50-r...

Thank you Adam,

> networking at least 2 hours a day. I was doing that on top of the 8ish hours I was billing to clients.

I have to say that sounds like a brutal schedule. On top of being a very smart guy, you seem like a very hard worker. I'm glad you've enjoyed so much success.

> ["3 prong approach explanation"]. Does that make sense?

Yes, thank you for this explanation. It is well reasoned and stated.

I cannot speak about Toptal, but Upwork works pretty good. You just have to avoid silly jobs,be focused and perservere.

Disclaimer: I'm italian, working remote, strong focus on nodeJS and fintech, estimated revenue for 2018 (first year of freelancing full-time, not fully from Upwork): 360K$, working 220 days per year

Would love to connect and learn more about your experience. My email is in my profile (I dont' see one for you in yours), please reach out. My experience with Upwork is it was a lot of noise and you had to work your way up doing a lot of low-rate jobs first which was mostly beneficial if you got on the network early.

As a freelancer with clients, are you generally on deadlines? Or is it work when you want? Essentially I would like to work somewhere around 3 days a week but I am not sure that projects would be able to meet deadlines that clients want. In digital agencies I have worked for, I have had to shown work done every week. And the amount of work given to me was such that I had to work the full week. If I were to do that freelancing I would certainly make more money, but I am hoping that there are jobs where deadlines are based on average around 3 days work...

Either charge a fraction of your weekly price, position yourself as part-time, or prove you can hustle. If you can get 5 days worth of what they think of a week's worth of work in 3 days, you've arbitraged the effort

Admirable, where are most of your clients located?

$1500 a day sustained seems like an incredible rate in Europe.

UK, US, Malaysia, even India pays well (if you look carefully).

You should not care about the rate, but the value of your work. In other words, it's about trading in value, not time

What I teach is largely about repositioning yourself and focusing on the value you create vs just the tech. Not surprisingly, few freelancers focus on business outcomes. Higher budgets and pay are a natural side effect of doing that.

Great job, seems you're doing really well!

Full disclosure: you absolutely have had a positive impact on my business. The double your rates thing was the only part that didn't work because I think I started at a pretty decent rate to begin with. I listened and studied your podcast episode with Patrick Mackenzie at least 5 times. I've read plenty of your posts and studied your HN comments extremely carefully. So very much, thank you for that!

Also, it means quite a lot for you to say that you think I am doing well. I still feel like I haven't nailed positioning yet (any ideas: https://anonconsulting.com), and I'm always looking for feedback. Nonetheless, I'm still extremely grateful for the work you put out.

Interesting sites. FYI your profile link on the blog is 404:

https://userinterfacing.com/author/acconrad

Thank you - fixed! You can no longer access that link from the site, it should now just go to the about page

I'm assuming you transitioned into consulting from a corporate role. Were there any steps you took in preparation for that transition as well as any "exit criteria" before making the transition?

I took on part time gigs to build my portfolio while I was working full time. Then one day a client wanted a 1 year full time contract (turned out to only be 6 months) and that was my stepping off point!

> Successfully raised rates with all client projects (avg: 19% / engagement)

Interesting, does that mean you raised rates during the project or as you switched to a new one?

Well done, that's a very impressive first year.

With each new engagement, my rates went up by, on average, 19%. Thanks!

> Closed via a sales funnel of: 5 new prospect outreach / day, 2 proposal follow-ups / day, 1 existing (or prior) client referral / month

How did you find new prospects outside of upwork?

Networking the old fashioned way. Ask my friends who needs help. If they don't need help, ask them if they can think of 3 friends who might. Email/text those 3 people. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Impressive! Where do you look for new clients/projects? Do you contact possible clients and offer them your services or do the contact you based on your blog/consulting page?

That is really impressive!

Do you have any resources like blog posts sharing more details on some of those strategies? I would be interested in reading about your experience.

* Study everything that bdunn and patio11 have to say on here. They get it.

* Read Million Dollar Consulting. There's a whole blueprint in there to turn yourself from an everyday freelancer to a pro consultant mindset.

* SimpleProgrammer was okay. Read it if you want, but it's a bit gimmicky.

* * * H U S T L E * * *

I cannot stress this enough. At the end of the day, the only reason I got here is because I do what everyone else is not willing to do. I work my ass off and I still don't feel like a success at all. I'm a charlatan and an unknown quantity. That desire to improve and work harder is the only thing that has gotten me to where I am. Everything else is just the cherry on top.

When you network, where exactly are you networking at? I'm going to guess you live in the bay or a big city?

Start by asking if your friends need work (email, text, phone call). If they don't, ask them if they know anyone that does. Wash, rinse, repeat. That landed me in a few VC offices, which landed me meetings with startups and some other agencies. I'm in Boston :)

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