Lessons from Freelancing | Hacker News Reader

Lessons from Freelancing

joelklettke.com

152 pointsfrouge56 comments

Funny how this made it to #1 on Hacker News only to get bashed. It falls into the class:

  1. I did something.
  2. I want to share my experience with you.
  3. This is about what I DID, not what I THINK.
  4. Take from this what you want.
  5. Hope it helps.

I'm a programmer, not a writer, so this advice isn't a perfect fit for me, but it's pretty damn close.

If one good idea from a 5 minute read is gold, then this post is platinum. Excellent advice, even more valuable because it comes from hard earned experience.

Thanks Joel for the bulletin board material. Keep it coming.

Hey - thank you! I'm okay with being bashed - I just think I'm being misread. I never intended this to be a prescriptive guide to success, just some reflection on what I, myself, have learned from the process.

Thank you for reading, and for being open to the idea that this is just my experience!

I can see that there are about an equal number of negative and positive comments to the post, and an even higher number of neutral ones.

Overall I definitely cannot see where the "bashing by HN community" is.

HN community also bashed Dropbox when it was new.

No it didn't. It gave some constructive criticism:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

So take what the HN community says with a grain of salt? Noted.

... and Slashdot bashed the iPod.

CmdrTaco / Rob Malda criticized it famously, but it appears the comments were pretty supportive.[1]

[1] http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip...

To be fair, Slashdot bashed the iPod (2001), not the iPod + iTunes w/ Store (2003).

I think that's a pretty big difference.

I apologise for not being positive about this article. But it's because of the way it was written. It is written like: this is what i did, and you should do the same.

The big figure was intended to do what it did: publicity. Congratulations to Joel on that! It worked out pretty well:)

The way you have read it is more like it was an advice. But to me it was not written like that.

You really don't have to apologize, I can see how it'd be read that way, and I'm culpable for that.

I know you say publicity like it's a dirty or cheap word - but, what writer doesn't want people to read their work? What person doesn't want their story to get traction?

Yes, it feels a bit cheap to throw numbers for attention. But my honest goal was not to wave a financial number like I've "made it", but use that as a means of opening the floor for discussion and sharing.

I appreciate that to many people, that's going to seem really insincere, but I hope that the rest of the piece made it worth your time.

"I know you say publicity like it's a dirty or cheap word"

No, I don't. You should not have read it like that ;-) I thought because you are a freelancer you were looking for publicity. The big number is a bit cheap, but if it works... So the congrats was actually a real congrats. Not that many people managed to get on top of HN.

Weird thing is, i received so many points on my initial "bashing" comment. I thought i would have ended up with -10 at least. I expected the comment above to receive 1 point but it ends up in the -. Ah well.

All in all it is quite amazing how differently the same thing can be interpreted.

Not saying you're wrong, but a useful trick in life is to always give the benefit of the doubt to others.

I think there are valuable things in that article, and I worry that you may have missed them because you didn't like the tone - which is a shame for the author, but possibly also a shame for you.

Im sorry to say: this is a piece of rubbish. Lots of open doors.. and lots of bold statements. Im sure this only made it to HN because the headline contains a large figure. And thats what the author intended to do.

"Yes, you can work in your underwear, wake up at 11:00pm and drink beer all day if you want to.

But you shouldn’t."

YES YOU SHOULD. But not every day and only at the right moments. It depends on what you think of what is important. What is worth more to you. Your undies, or a pay check.

Trust your gut feeling and do networking. And if your gut feeling sucks and you think you are bad at networking... know how to deal with it or stop freelancing. You cannot apply a 'guide' like this to yourself. There are many many examples of successful (=happy?) people who do not apply this guide to their selves. Like me. I'm quite successful and happy! And do work in my underwear sometimes. And like to go kitesurfing in the middle of the week (and work my ass off in the weekend if necessary). I can make more money if I want to, but I dont. I prefer having fun, broaden my mind and sure do enjoy the freedom of being a freelancer!

Author here - new to HackerNews, so forgive me if I stink of "n00b".

You are absolutely right in that your freelance experience might differ from mine - and I did try to say at the end of the piece that money is just one factor. If you can operate well on a job and work in your underwear (and not feel like a sub-human after 3 days), power to you - DO IT!

There's room for disagreement and I'm not trying to run anyone else's freelance life - just share what's worked for me.

These are MY lessons. They're not meant to be absolutes for anybody. I couldn't have dreamed this would wind up on Hacker News - I wrote it for my (small) community and I'm thrilled to see it get traction, but I didn't try to game any system and get on here.

Joel: don't listen to that post. Your blog is golden advice.

Love the piece Joel - keep publishing more like it!

Interesting how you said money was the goal but then when you get the success there's always someone doing better...even though you might have a fat bank account.

Thanks, article is great! :-)

Welcome to HN - where the trolls are loud and proud...

I don't necessarily think this is accurate. I've observed a strong and useful pattern here where posts are deconstructed in the comments in a logical fashion which I believe is, and should be seen as constructive.

Even if you come down strongly on one side or the other of a topic, it's a good discipline to look for logical weaknesses, edge cases and other potential holes in any given argument.

HN is great for this because for any given post you can typically find well thought out rebuttals which may or may not sway your opinion, but will in many cases be instructive in the very least.

Of course, the other option is to simply attack the commenter directly and fail to learn anything at all.

I agree completely. Honing that gut instinct and learning to market (as painful as it can be) seem to be the biggest things involved. I find that compared to a day job, one of the best things about freelancing is that if there's the sort of issue that would make me want to stay indoors and idle all day, I can actually spend that day working it out and get back on the horse the next day rather than spinning my wheels in an office all week.

Judging by some of your comments, I may have walked right by you on the strand with my wife a couple weeks ago. That was only made possible by understanding my priorities, even when giving myself permission to follow them can be scary.

Absolutely - the post wasn't meant to say "money over everything". One of the big reasons I'm freelancing is for the freedom and flexibility that comes with it.

But I still treat it like a job. A job I can take vacations from, or a hiatus from, or whatever - but still something that takes some discipline to succeed at.

I never intended it to sound like freelancing should be un-fun slave labor. That would entirely miss the point.

I was more agreeing with the parent comment than disagreeing with you. Money, marketing, and discipline probably should be bigger parts of my life (definitely in the case of marketing). Getting to see your thoughts and that front has contributed to the gears turning there, and I already sent the article to some of my copywriting/editing freelance friends.

I liked the "giving myself permission" part of your comment. It feels the same to me too haha. I guess the freedom I wrote about does not feel like freedom somehow. So everybody can bash my comment now ;)

Your entire rebuttal consists of one infrequent exception to just one of OP's statements, which was not meant to be absolute anyway.

I second your words. Me, being freelancer for years, on my own and doing also for more then a year work in office showed only that I am way more productive in my own environment, on my own schedule. I don't chase money, but life, and having good life makes me more happy, thus more productive and then again company benefits more from me, so more money and success for them too.

Irresponsible person and/or unhappy worker will be less productive no matter where he works but I do think that remote work is the future if we want to have a sustainable life and don't have a new age slavery that is dominating in today's capitalism.

One thing which really stood out for me was about focus. Trying too many things at once - write a blog, freelancing, create a source might pull you in so many directions that achieving the first dream might become difficult.

What really does interest me though is - talk about subcontractors. This is one aspect I have been struggling on a bit. how does one find good subcontractors or outsource work properly.

> how does one find good subcontractors or outsource work properly.

If you do that, you're not a freelancer ... you're an agency. Different conversation.

yea maybe but then if you look at his work, he does talk about sub-contracting, so does that make him an agency of sorts? Then where does freelancing come in. Just trying to understand that part.

Happy to clear this up:

I did subcontract a very small portion of work, which I did eliminate from the number I crunched. On the whole, it contributed less than $10,000 to the total, and as I mentioned, the time I invested trying to make it work actually made it such that I more or less came out even, but not at a profit.

Right now, I'm handling all the work I'm sent personally. I do plan to scale up in the future, at which point, I don't think it would be fair to call myself "freelance" any more.

Here's my lesson: you can think it's "eek out" and still make that much money as a writer these days. Advertising is hilarious!

Thanks for the catch. I'm certainly not immune to typos or malapropisms - especially when writing for myself and not a client :)

Also, random bold, underline and italics all over the place.

Hey - it's copywriting.

EXPECT CAPITAL LETTERS!

I think it makes some good points, especially about marketing. (See also EL James, who is now a multi-millionaire because of a very clever marketing campaign, and certainly not because of her literary ability.)

I also think the fact that it's all about marketing and not ability is kind of sad. And the fact that it's hard hard hard to make $$$$ doing cool artistic work that isn't about selling stupid shit for someone else is even sadder.

But still. There we are.

He corrected it quickly, at least.

Freelancing is a job just like any other except that you're wearing more hats so you have the opportunity to be compensated at higher rates. In a corporate job you're giving up potential income because other team players are doing the marketing, accounting, networking.

If you really want to wake up every day at 11pm and drink beer all day you have to separate income from hours worked. A really successful freelancer might be able to increase project/hourly rates to the point where they don't need to work that often but residual/passive income is a better long term strategy. Create technology and license it, create copyrighted materials and publish, write a song and collect royalties, purchase income generating real estate and find someone to manage it.

Hmm, I had thought the upside of freelancing was to make more money, at the expense of doing all the stuff listed here. The same amount of money plus all that is not really an appealing prospect. Though I suppose you could argue it's a better position overall because your name is "in the market" so to speak. But for me I would feel dumb if I busted my ass a lot harder than I do now just to make the same money.

> Hmm, I had thought the upside of freelancing was to make more money, at the expense of doing all the stuff listed here.

No, absolutely not. You won't make more money.

You'll only make more money if you bring other people into the picture, but at that point, you're not a freelancer ... you're an agency.

You have the freedom to work how you want, on what you want, when you want, with who you want, and how much you want. You'll never have that at a job.

YMMV of course but, no, by and large freelancers (freelance writers at any rate) don't generally make more money than those who have more or less equivalent jobs at companies. They're either freelancers because that's increasingly the way markets are organized (good full-time paid gigs are relatively hard to come by) or they just like being their own boss.

Sure, definitely understandable. Just seems like so much extra work on top of your work-work, though.

"Barely eek out a living" is my favorite malapropism of 2015. "Eek! A living!"

Also: someone did get a home run from a bunt, in MLB no less.

Technically nobody in the MLB has ever gotten a home run on a bunt. Steven Souza Jr rounded the bases on a bunt, but that was a bunt single, then advanced three bases on two errors.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/WAS/WAS201506170.sht...

I'm shocked that the Phillies were not involved.

Lots of great insights in this article! I especially liked the part where he advises us to treat freelancing as a business.

Surprised anyone freelancing would need that advice in the first place...

Data point: most freelancers I've been coaching during the last years do /not/ realize they are running a real business. It usually takes a life changing event (birth, or a big tax issue) for them to change their way of doing it, if this changes at all.

Based on various people I've known, that's a great if surprising point. It's actually pretty easy for many to just sort of drift along on the edge for a long time and essentially pretend that everything is good--until it's not. Maybe the client that's 50% of their business up and leaves for whatever reason or, as you say, something happens in their life that makes no savings and no real plan suddenly untenable.

I'm no longer surprised by the disconnect between a great dev/writer/artist/musician and a good business sense. Most freelancers I meet have a great talent in one area - but talent in that area doesn't always mean they know how to market or manage it as a business. It seems so obvious, I agree - but it's a big stumbling point, at least with those I come in contact with.

What else would it be?

For some more down-to earth lessons from freelancing, check my post on the topic:

http://www.developingandrails.com/2015/06/freelancing-with-f...

Interesting, some similar lessons like here: https://medium.com/@RecurVoice/how-i-made-100k-freelancing-a...

I enjoyed this post, and it's not like we can say "you made that up" or "you're just trying to get fake Internet points" because it's been tried and tested. Joel's telling us exactly what he did and his awesome results. Thanks for sharing!

Cheers and thank you, Rachel :)

Nicely written and inspiring. I like how it shares his failures and how he recovered from them, putting the needle back on the record. I also like it how it defines success to the individual with only comparing to other people for inspiration but not validation.

Thank you very much for the kind words. There are more failures I could have mentioned - failures to properly qualify clients, failures in overbooking, failures in trying to scale up, failures in time management..

But at the risk of running a cliche, if I'm not failing, I'm not learning. And that's all this post is - sharing what I've learned.

Appreciate your kind response :)

Prefer these lessons: How I made 100k freelancing and absolutely loved it

https://medium.com/@RecurVoice/how-i-made-100k-freelancing-a...

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