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Comment by Sargis | Hacker News Reader

How do you know your skills are good enough to take on a $XXXX project? I've never done freelance work, but I would love to start doing some work after school and earn a few bucks along the way.

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One way: have you ever delivered something which someone would pay $X,000 for? If so, then you are good enough to deliver something someone would pay $X,000 for.

I think many people get hung up on skill though. Clients pay for many, many things. Skill is only one of those things, and it doesn't dominate, either. Clients can also pay for:

  criticality of work
  urgency of work
  guaranteed availability
  hard-to-find expertise
  communication skills
  perceived attentiveness to needs
  lower perceived risk
  corporate politics
  measurable results
  warm fuzzy feeling

Of these, if you could only have one, I'd probably go with the ability to give clients the warm fuzzy feeling. You will never go hungry if clients get the warm fuzzy feeling from working with you.

Hat tip to tptacek, who taught me the importance of some of the above.

This is totally in line with my experience (own a web design/dev shop). We talk about the "warm fuzzy feeling" in terms of making other people look good.

- make your clients look good to their stakeholders

- make someone look good to their manager

- make an exec look good to their board

- make the firm subcontracting to you look good to the end-client

- make your teammates/collaborators look good (and help them save face when they screw up)

Also, ask someone else how much they'd pay for your work. I found that since I make websites myself, I tend to value the work a lot less because it seems easier to me. In reality, the work is very valuable to people who are not capable of doing it themselves, so they're usually willing to pay more for it than you are. And as usual patio11 is spot on in regards to those qualities, having strength in those areas can give you a powerful edge in winning over clients.

I want to learn the arts of warm fuzzy feeling. Please elaborate :)

A good place to start would be this article: http://unixwiz.net/techtips/be-consultant.html

For me, I know my ability to learn whatever I need to in order to complete the project. Most of the time, a client will approach me and say "Can you do x, y, and z for this project?" While I can do x and y just fine, I know full well that I haven't the slightest idea about z -- but I still say "yes." I then do a little bit of research on the topic and get back to them with an estimate. I then have a strong motivation to learn 'z' to be able to complete the project and get paid, and will also have gained a valuable skill that I'll be able to leverage in the future.

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