Comment by ekidd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekidd | Hacker News Reader

I've worked as a consultant several times in my career, focusing on helping startups build an MVP and find their market. I've also done one-off projects for larger businesses, mostly trying to fix a long-standing internal technical issue and open up new possibilities.

A few tips:

1. Don't work for people unless you can help them make a lot of money.

2. Avoid freelancing marketplaces. These tend to have terrible rates, small projects and some of the worst clients. Most of these clients are beyond help, and you will never be able to help them earn a lot of money.

3. Do not charge an hourly rate. You do not want hourly jobs. Charge either a daily rate, a weekly rate, or a project rate. If you have a good client who regularly needs small tweaks, charge a monthly retainer instead of an hourly rate. I'm told that some really smart consultants charge a percentage of the of the improvement they make for the business.

4. Require half payment up front, or for longer projects, a milestone-sized payment up front. This will immediately eliminate all the clients who are allergic to writing checks, and I've never seen anybody serious reject this.

5. When setting your daily or weekly rates, plan on charging at least 2x what you would receive as salary, or up to 3x in some cases. This depends partly on the average size of your projects. If you charge less than this, your annual income will wind up much lower than you'd think. You will have lots of downtime and non-billable hours.

EDIT: 6. This should be obvious, but always write down the project deliverables and agreed-upon payment, even if it's only in an email for smaller projects. Even if you totally trust the people you're doing business with, they will forget what they agreed to. (Ideally, you should have a standard contract where additional work items can be attached as an Exhibit A.)

Aside from all that, one big challenge is balancing your pipeline. You'll have 2 months of no work, followed 3 simultaneous offers for highly-paid jobs. You need to find a way to manage this that's fair to the client and sustainable for you.

> 2. Avoid freelancing marketplaces.

The idea of a freelancing marketplace is nice, but holy cow how terrible they actually are.

I tried to hire someone through one for some graphic work for a generous rate (compared to what I generally saw on the site). I picked one well-reviewed user with hundreds (or maybe thousands?) of 5-stars and... they just Googled for an image.

I looked through some of the "jobs" there and the "employers" seemed just as incompetent as the freelancers themselves. "Need an app for $100"

https://www.yunojuno.com is a good marketplace. I believe each freelancer is vetted.

I'm on there and I've never been vetted. I'm not sure what shape that would take.

They are trying to disintermediate agents, without ending up in a race to the bottom, IMO.

>Require half payment up front, or for longer projects, a milestone-sized payment up front. This will immediately eliminate all the clients who are allergic to writing checks, and I've never seen anybody serious reject this.

The one time I did this that was a mistake was for a university. It was dumb, and just delayed the whole project by 6 weeks while finance processed it. There was never any risk of the university not paying, so I shouldn't have bothered.

Business with the government, religion and academic institutions IMO is a completely separate category.

Yup. Universities, government agencies and giant multinationals will all pay according to their standard vendor policies. This may be 3+ months after you submit the invoice in some cases. But most of these institutions will pay, so you just have to let them do their thing.

Basically, beyond a certain size, it's more trouble for an organization to cheat a vendor than it is for them to pay as agreed. Non-payment may require getting their lawyers involved, pulling in higher management, etc. (This is based on experience in the US. Things may be different elsewhere.)

I'm curious why you say don't charge hourly. I've been charging per half hour (with half/full day for meetings) and it's worked fine for me. I tend to work about 1-4 hours/day and I think it's fairer to the client because the variation is so big.

With MVPs I like hourly charges because it gives them a lot of freedom to pivot, and it helps to justify why we should put aside a few days early on to design UI/UX rather than go with the flow.

Also what I do is kind of a prepaid thing. They put in 10 hours into my bank account and I'll do 10 hours. After they gain confidence, they start putting a month in advance. It doesn't necessarily stop when the money runs out, but it doesn't start until the first paycheck. It also helps a lot with international projects, where payment can take a week to go through and might be held up by money laundering laws, etc.

> Require half payment up front, or for longer projects, a milestone-sized payment up front.

I like splitting work-pay-cycles into thirds or sixths, because it's easier for a client to buy into and helps to keep the ball rolling with overlapping plan / review / work / pay cycles.

It gives more room to prove the work / track progress, and it incentives iteration and client involvement, while also being small enough increments that there doesn't need to be a delay if one partner needs more time to think about something while the other continues fulfilling on their end.

And, it helps build trust, for example when a client can see things rolling well and makes an upcoming payment in advance, raising the work prepaid buffer ratio(?).

I think tau might have something to do with these ratios:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/visualizedmath/comments/7nyclx/grap...

- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/ComplexS...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/comments/22f22j/gif_the_re...

- https://d2w9rnfcy7mm78.cloudfront.net/688961/original_ee19f1...

Re #6, Mike Monteiro has a great talk entitled F*ck You, Pay Me on the importance of having a contract and responding to "forgetful" clients. Pardon the profanity in the talk. https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1

> If you have a good client who regularly needs small tweaks, charge a monthly retainer instead of an hourly rate.

I like this idea, how does that work? I have worked with clients who would (after completion of project)contact me few times a month for minor tweaks which require less than 30-40mins of work and I am unable to bill them logically for it until it accumulates to actually charge them in total.

The second I saw "followed (by) 3 simultaneous offers for highly-paid jobs". My thought was that's money left on the table. This person should be working with others as a team

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