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Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

Freelancing can be highly stressful and demoralizing, unless you take the steps to go into consulting or beyond. It's a ladder, just like your corporate gig, you gotta do the work to move up or suffer where you are stuck.

I have one sticking point I'd love to hear what the HN crowd does to deal with it.

I'm freelancing and I find gigs that are long-term via recruiters / LinkedIn. And never directly with companies. While the pay is high, the feeling is I'm just another employee, except temp.

How do you market your skills directly with firms, and where do you go, if you're not the 'social media broadcaster' type who's on Twitter / etc. all day? I DO have people skills, I DON'T spend any time doing presentations at tech conferences or blasting myself on Twitter / social media. Do you partner with a marketing type? Or become that type?

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Outsource this to a profiler/marketer to build yourself an identity Don't work under your name but create a brand even if it's just you ;)

I think the problem is that, in the U.S., recruiters have captured that market. Since they captured it, they also capture 20-40% + of the rate because of this "added value." And I say that with the maximum possible cynicism.

How do individuals compete against recruiters? Why would this marketing person take a few grand from me, when they can be a recruiter and take 20-40% + of my rate for doing nothing but the intro?

I'm a tech copywriter and have had a couple of developers reach out to me with similar needs. It was unexpected, but it's been interesting exploring the issue with them and I'm curious if other developers are interested in chatting about it too. If that's you, then please feel free to hit me up -- email is in my profile :)

Can somebody recommend a person or company that they like for this task? I have a company brand, good enough customer flow to stay afloat, but extra hours I could put towards more work.

We offer cybersecurity services and due diligence for financial institutions, healthcare and acquirers, so it's a pretty specialized target market.

This sounds like a really interesting idea, have you done this yourself or seen any good examples of it?

Yes, I know companies but do that very well, but they are in France and work only in French. Distinctive features to look for : small companies (2-3 is best for their focus on you, 10 max) but it's just my opinion. Once they grow, they tend to lose their initial verve. It doesn't seem to scale well.

You are describing that you want to want to get a job as a contractor. So apply for a job. Companies advertise that a lot, sometimes through an agency. You can't expect get the benefits of an agency without paying the fee or doing the work yourself.

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