| I started w/ word of mouth and networking through people I already knew. I also started with a lower rate. I raised my rates anytime I had to much work to do. I discovered this technique from another friend. I was complaining one day about having WAY to many clients. He said and I'll never forget it, "if you have to much work to do, you're not charging enough." I started 2.5 years ago at $70/hr and am now at $135/hr after several rounds of raising rates. Sometimes I would lose a client when raising my rates, but that was ok and really was the goal. They were usually the most painful to deal w/ anyway. My best clients usually never even balked at it. Just said ok and kept on paying. I then got to the point where I needed to give myself a brand and bring on another developer because I started taking on very large green field projects(this was something my lawyer and accountants suggested for insurance/legal/protection reasons). At that point I got more advanced and started doing some content marketing, facebook ads, and google ads to keep the pipeline running. The hardest part was keeping clients lined up in the beginning. Because I would get a client, work the client and during that time stop looking for new clients. Which lead to a lot of down cycles with no work to be done while I looked for the next client. This is still an ongoing thing we're working on at this time to improve our client acquisition techniques. I also use a pretty unique billing structure that my clients seem to really love. You can read all about how and why we chose to do it this way here https://blog.grillwork.io/why-we-no-longer-use-fixed-price-c... My partner and I now do about 20-30hrs a week for clients pretty steady and spend the rest of the time working on projects we own fully that we hope can generate recurring revenue. It has been a really fantastic journey that I hope never ends. Every day get really inspired by the stories on indiehackers.com and just find this way of work extremely fascinating. Very rewarding both personally and financially so far and I don't think I'll ever stop doing what I'm doing if I have anything to say about it. |