Comment by davidscolgan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidscolgan | Hacker News Reader

Something I wish I'd known when I started freelancing about 8 years ago: Being good at your craft (like programming) is assumed. In order to do well at freelancing, you also have to have some business sense.

There are all sorts of great resources about how to business online, but it didn't even cross my mind at the beginning that that would be important. Once I started learning how to business freelancing became waaay easier.

Things like how to invoice, how to negotiate, how to talk to a client, how to schedule your time, how to budget, how to market yourself, how to network, etc etc etc are not at all related to programming, but can make the difference between a happy freelancing existence and a miserable career.

I've been fortunate to have a pretty lovely freelance web development career. My key has been finding clients that are smaller companies and not full time, with a long ongoing project.

Smaller companies allow you to build a relationship with the owner of the business, and to position yourself as not just a pair of hands to write code, but a trusted advisor who takes the business's actual needs into account when writing code (which is how you compete with global talent).

Not full time means you can have multiple clients at once to give you a nice advantage over a full time job: if one source of income dries up, your income doesn't go to zero.

Most of my clients have been multi-year projects. I'll slowly build their webapp for around 10 hours a week at most. I've worked about 20 hours a week for the last 8 years, lived in lower cost of living areas, and spent the rest of my time on doing whatever I feel like.

Some resources I'd recommend:

* The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman - a nice overall summary of how to run a business

* The corpus of Kai Davis's material (https://kaidavis.com/), including his super valuable/highly entertaining podcast Make Money Online (https://makemoneyonline.exposed/)

* How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie - how to interface with fellow humans (freelancing/business is mostly a human activity)

Happy to help anyone who's interested in freelancing if I can, send me an email.

Oh, "How to Win Friends..." is eighty years old. That's the part I have the biggest problem (being on the near end of the autism spectrum). But even I managed to find a small client with a long-running project that I kept busy with for almost eight years until I needed a change. The point I regret a lot is not having sought and become part of a small team to handle to long-running projects better in every aspect. The folks around me I admire the most did just that, most of them working in a two-people team and they are very productive and inspiring..

Regarding the 20hrs/week, everybody should know: That's the productive time, for every human being. Charge accordingly.

I would avoid Dale Carnegie. It might have been valuable in the past, but right now to me it reads just like a bunch of out of time platituteds. Also, as a freelancer in Germany, I can tell you that those guidelines mostly apply to the American way of doing business--which definitely isn't the worldwide standard of dealing with business owners and managers.

What books / resources for you recommend instead?

The book "Impro" by Keith Johnstone is really kind of brilliant in this regard. It's technically about improv theater but universally applicable.

I found it's study of status quite good. So much can go wrong for people when they fail to maintain a harmonious exchange of status when interacting with others. This book describes how important status is in comedy and breaks down some old Marx brothers skit to analyses the humour in seeing somebody have their status diminished.

It's been a while since I read it, but it's stuck with me and I remember developing a new sort of awareness of my interactions with others.

The reason they’re platitudes is because they’re true. Taken out of context they sound trite and they are but they’re well explained and just as true as when originally written. They may apply more easily to America than Germany but greeting people, remembering their name, taking an interest in who they are and how they’re doing work on everybody. You should not smile like an American in Germany. People might think you’re developmentally delayed. Equally you should not pretend to be eberyone’s best friend first time you meet them as if you’re from Los Angeles. But almost all of the book is relevant cross culturally.

> as a freelancer in Germany, I can tell you that those guidelines mostly apply to the American way of doing business

American here. I’ve found that the friendly “American way” of doing business lets my team seal deals faster than their European competition. I initially got pushback from my UK team. “That isn’t how it’s done.” But human nature is human nature, and taking people’s personal aspirations into mind is never a bad strategy.

It's always funny to me to see people say "well we just don't do business the way it's done in [the largest economy the world has ever known]."

America is only 24% of world’s GDP — Most business in the world is not done ‘the American way’. Europe is 21%, their ways are just as valid. It just depends on the expectations from the other side.

You won’t be able to run a business the American way in Germany, not would you be able to it vice versa.

Nor you should be able to be.

(There is nothing historic about being able to capture 20-25% of the world’s GDP either — England (1800s), Turkey (1600-1700) and China (European dark age through Middle Ages) has all achieved the same economic power US enjoys as of today.

> You won’t be able to run a business the American way in Germany, not would you be able to it vice versa.

This thread is incredibly vague. I bet there is significant if not majority overlap between the two.

Back to Dale Carnegie, his advice about not telling people "you are wrong" and getting to know them is some of the best and simplest advice I've ever received, and transcends time and space.

My personal experience is that Germans take 'doing it by the book' to a whole another extreme. It's paperwork until the end of time. (I have no affiliation with either, but I've worked with both)

The biggest takeaway I got from How to Win Friends and Influence People is simply this: Think about things from the other person's perspective. Instead of talking about yourself, let them talk about themself. Instead of boasting about your own accomplishments, ask about theirs.

The exact way you do these things depend on the culture for sure, and the book is written by an American. From what I understand Germany is less directly "friendly" than the US so the pleasantries may not carry over, but I have to imagine that considering the other person more than yourself does carry over.

Do you have any advice in how to deal with medical insurance? It's by far the most scary part when I think about becoming a freelancer in the US, more than the business and self-management aspect of it.

you go to heathcare.gov and you fill out the forms and then when something goes wrong you call the number and then you wait and then you fill out some more forms and call another number or two and then you jump through some terrible payment interface hoops and wait some more and about a month later your insurance card arrives.

I picked a middle-of-the-pack "silver" option in new jersey with no subsidy, its costing me ~450/month.

Medical insurance in the US is for sure a big consideration for doing freelance here.

It's gotten better with the beginning of the federal marketplace, but it still is true that better coverage is gotten from a full time job. Though, I guess it depends on what you are looking for. I pay $350 a month for a decent plan in Chicago. But, I'm a mostly healthy 30 year old so YMMV.

Some options you might consider for further coverage:

1. Have a spouse that has insurance. Easy mode, but seems to be an option for some people.

2. Part time job that has benefits. I have a friend doing exactly this - 20 hours a week working at a university and the rest of the time freelancing. Provides a little human interaction too.

3. Medical tourism? I only half joke that I may up and go to Lithuania if I ever need not urgent major surgery (though I might do that even with good insurance). Being freelance opens up that option.

But as more and more people become freelancers, I have to imagine this situation will change. I really hope that in the next 10 years we'll get more options, whether full fledged socialized healthcare or even just the ability to get the same plans as employees. If you were needing a reason to vote in the upcoming elections this is probably the one that most directly impacts freelancers.

Oh definitely, and the business sense can be boiled down to prospecting and sales. Something I've tried that does work, if you provide a lot of value upfront, is proactively reaching out to people who can offer long-term projects.

So for example, let's say you're a web developer reaching out to owner of an ecommerce store. "Value upfront" could be giving them ideas of how they can capture and recover more purchases: cart abandonment, loyalty points, etc. so they want to hire you to build it for them.

Some good templates I came across for this sort of outreach: https://artofemails.com/sales-freelancer

Also useful, how to go from hour based pricing to value based pricing: https://www.freshbooks.com/assets/other/Breaking-the-Time-Ba...

> I've worked about 20 hours a week for the last 8 years

Congrats! If everybody did that we would be halfway through solving the climate problem.

Maybe we wouldn't have a climate problem to start with.

The biggest reason I wanted to be a freelancer was to gain control of my own time. If you charge enough and do valuable enough work, along with having lower costs of living, it's completely doable to make a good living working part time. In the rest of my time I've been able to:

* Be a digital nomad

* Experiment with building apps and products

* Think and make better decisions

* Actually get 8 hours of sleep without hurry

* Save my body from RSI and go to the gym

Etc, etc. It's especially doable as a programmer since that is a very much in-demand service right now.

I'd love to see everyone have 20 hours a week to do whatever they wanted with.

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