Ask YC: What's the best way and place to start freelancing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: What's the best way and place to start freelancing?

27 pointsvineet7kumar26 comments

Hi, I am planning to start freelance coding but don't have an idea which is the best place and best way to start. Any help towards this will be great.

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Don't. :)

Seriously... Free-lancing is harder work than any job you've ever had. You have to be able to handle the work you take on as well as doing the accounting and bringing in the sales. It's just not feasible for most people without really working your ass off.

And then what do you get? You certainly don't have a business, because it's unsellable as such, and it doesn't exist if you walk away. What you have is the most time-consuming job possible. You didn't even get rid of your boss... In fact now you've got more bosses.

Speaking from almost a decade of freelance experience, I'd suggest you either get some partners or get a job.

Alright... In case you're going to do this anyway (I probably wouldn't have listened to me either): Assuming you're doing web development, market yourself to web-design shops as a way to enhance their client-offerings. They get all kinds of coding jobs that they can't do and routinely turn down. If you get in good with a few of those, they'll effectively do all your marketing for you after that, as well as manage the end-clients.

yeah + don't even think of taking work you won't be able to finish on time. Its just plain rude and you are going to piss off whomever you deal with.

I wasted almost a year with my last freelancer because he took on a project, and never finished. Thankfully I had a late fee stipulation in the contract, so after new year's, I get to sue the guy for breach of contract to get the money he owes me. (Good thing I worked at a lawfirm during college, so I know exactly who to talk to, instead of going to the yellow pages and getting someone mediocre)

The messed up part, is that the guy could have finished the whole thing within 1 month if he tried...but instead he chose to waste everyone's time.

I'd second that. If you are going out on your own, be a contractor, not a freelancer... i.e. find big companies who will pay you $80+/hr for 40h a week on an ongoing basis. The overhead and "bench time" (time between jobs) is more expensive than you think.

Or go the other way & be service provider. Saleable business, clients etc.

Find one client at a low rate and please the hell out of them. Then find another client, but increase your rates. Do the same; do anything it takes to get the job done ahead of schedule and to make the client as impressed as possible.

Eventually you'll find the ceiling in terms of how much you can charge per hour, but you'll have an entire mountain of reputation built by being fast, dedicated, and reliable.

I'm a student and due to a family lawsuit (dad's business partners ran off with the company's bonding money, fitting him with the bill) I can't get student loans so I freelance to pay my bills and to fund my own projects. My main philosophy when I'm working with a client (and I tell them this) is "the sooner I get in and out with this project, the sooner you do too" and I then sit down with them if they are available and work on it until it is done. It's not as feasible for programming as it is for designing, but the same focus on speed is killer as a freelancer.

I'm still finding work at $100/hr as a 22 year old freelancer, so soon I can finally begin leveraging my personal brand equity and my time to creating more passive sources of income, (i.e.: services and products).

Hope this helped a bit.

And on a side note: ALWAYS take the blame when something goes wrong, even if it's not your fault. A good client will appreciate that you have the balls to claim the fault is yours which will actually improve your relationship, and bad clients will show their true colors and give you an opportunity to send them to someone more desperate for work.

Unfortunately it is more about who you know than what you know.

So start networking...

I have freelanced a little, and now my best offers come from previous clients, or people who have found me by reputation. For example, on eLance, I was recently invited to a job which took me four hours but paid $1000. It was invite-only (they did not list it publically), and such a bid would never fly by usual eLance (i.e., Indian outsourcing) standards.

Fortunately, I have a regular income (and besides that am still young enough to mooch off my parents), so I can afford to only take nuggets like that. :)

EDIT: Come to think of it...I never look for a freelancing offer anymore, last I did was months ago. Now I simply accept the 5% or so of offers actually worth doing. Of course, doing those creates satisfaction in my new clients, which provide me more offers!

If you want to get serious fast, go to tech-related conferences. Take a stack of business cards. Shake hands. Constantly. Arrive early, don't eat lunch, stay late.

Be focused on how you can help people's business, even if you can't help them directly. (Don't make it all about "me, me, me". God, I hate when people are like.) You aren't trying to make a sale, you are building a relationship one handshake at a time. Directly or indirectly, you'll find plenty of business.

I'll second this. Conferences might seem expensive, but by giving you good business leads they often pay for themselves (and then some).

Please only consider this as a last resort (which it may be, in this economy).

Here are some notes from my own experience here:

1. Small, manageable deliverables. Always error on caution and honesty, instead of optimism and salesmanship.

2. If your customer (who you should just call your boss, if there's only 1) isn't technical, you'll hate life. You may as well be selling corn futures to a martian.

3. Two new phrases which will dominate your life: Requirements Management, Customer Expectations Management.

4. Find customers by going to user groups/mailing lists for the technologies you're good at.

5. If you have to integrate with any other software system, make sure you have access to enough information/support to handle hard-to-track bugs. The worst place to be is a remote freelancer guessing at what's going on, billing by the hour.

Create a blog and start building a reputation. Interact on forums. You really don't need to go to elance or other such sites.

I second this. I like to hire freelancers and their blog is the most important thing I look for. Use your blog to give an honest representation of what you're interested in and how you think. It's much more important to focus on the world of people that you could work well with, rather than the world of people you could convince to do one project with you. That's because freelancing is driven by repeat business and references.

100% agree. You seem to be writing from India, so conferences and networking may be less of an option for you. If you are truly skilled at doing website design, if you establish a nice online portfolio, you will eventually be able to secure recurring work. But thats only if you are good, you can't fake it, it won't work.

If you are in a country where cost of living is low, then elance.com and other similar sites are an option. Competition there is extremely fierce, don't get into underbidding wars. Much better would be to work on projects where you do get some face time with the client.

his profile says he is in India

Most of the time with freelance coding potential clients want to see evidence of previous projects, or personal projects So to extend on what others have stated here... network --> work on personal projects --> practice --> ??? --> profit!

I actually do have a "secret" method: Datacenters. If you're a programmer/network/system guy there is no faster way to get lots of clients than meeting people in datacenters. They're the most qualified leads you'll ever find.

How do you find them? What do you do? Look up datacenter locations online and then go hang out there to see if you can hang out with a techie? Or are you talking about contacts you make through your job?

I second two things, the blog, and the previous projects. People want to see that you get things done. So if you can whip up an amazing project, then they'll know you can get their stuff done as well.The blog/website is the place to showcase that.

For example, if you design webpages and want to attract people looking for you to design their Wordpress sites, create a really great free theme. The better your work, the more people will notice it.

IRC is your friend. I have gotten almost all my best jobs from corporations/people on an IRC channel looking for a contract for assistance doing X.

Replace X with your specialty, and find the associated Freenode channel.

Depending on your field, mailing lists may be useful as well.

What language? What niche? What sort of development? The tactics will vary a lot based on the answers to those questions.

check job postings in http://craigslist.com

try contracting with former managers / employers who already know you can deliver.

blog (to market yourself) and be able to show people what you've already done (to show your credentials / expertise / authority on some technology)

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