Comment by balfirevic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by balfirevic | Hacker News Reader

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> In order to get projects, you have to leave your house and meet other local business owners.

And so we come to one thing that rarely gets explicitly discussed in articles like this - the location. I don't blame authors for that, your environment is usually something you take for granted.

But if I were to go and talk to local business owners where I live (eastern Europe) they would invariably fall in the category of extremely-and-then-some-price-sensitive.

So most of the contracting around these parts is done under the umbrella of various agencies or Toptal. These have ongoing relationships with foreign clients and take advantage of the fact that local market prices for IT folk are nothing compared to western Europe and (especially) US. Not a bad deal, but not as good as fostering relationships with the clients yourself (and these clients are usually at least moderately price sensitive, as otherwise they would probably hire contractors at their location).

I'm sure there are plenty of people that freelance without middlemen where I live, it just seems a lot less prominent than in better developed economies. I know maybe one or two.

>> In order to get projects, you have to leave your house and meet other local business owners.

> And so we come to one thing that rarely gets explicitly discussed in articles like this - the location. I don't blame authors for that, your environment is usually something you take for granted.

Isn’t that what conferences are for? Or content marketing? Patio11 went from not consulting to charging $10,000 a week while living in the Japanese equivalent of Iowa by writing blog posts but IIRC the best channel for his particular consulting was Microconf followed at some distance by cold emailing.

If you live in Romania you can afford to attend a Western European conference once a quarter, right? You can definitely afford to blog.

Sure, I did not mean to imply that it's impossible. I was kind of thinking out loud about how it's whole different kind of game when you have access to good clients locally compared to situation when you don't.

I personally haven't tried to seriously make a jump to freelancing but I have been thinking about it lately, so these kinds of considerations are on my mind.

Sure, the article is applicable primarily to US-based freelancers. YMMV in other places.

If it's any consolation, I live in a tiny town in the US and have rarely met my clients in person. Many of them have no idea where I work from or that I occasionally wear pajama pants on video calls, because my webcam is from the waist up.

> I live in a tiny town in the US and have rarely met my clients in person

This is awesome. I feel like it's more of the exception than the rule though. Just out of curiosity, I assume you primarily work off of referrals now, but how did you get your first few clients? Or I guess a better way of asking is how did you get enough clients to where you had enough referrals coming in?

2 places:

1. Premium job boards. AuthenticJobs used to carry much more freelance work, but basically I'd find places where people had paid to post a job, and I'd do my darndest to impress them with my opening email.

2. My professional network. A couple of old contacts referred me to excellent agencies. Those connections still pay dividends today.

Hope that helps. These comments are giving me ideas for "Everything I know, part 2".

'Everything I didn't realise I knew' :)

Just chiming in to add a similar but different experience. Been freelance for nearly 20 years and I've always lived in major US cities but very rarely do I take on local clients. This is absolutely intentional. I don't care if the client is on the other side of the planet or 6 blocks away, I work when and where I want with no expectation of "on-site".

Of course, if I happen to like the client personally, that's another story. But those visits are off the clock.

That's cool to hear :)

Thanks for the good article in any case, and best of luck!

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