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by muzani
1205 days ago
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I did for about 5 years. By definition, I wouldn't be self-employed if I wasn't making a living wage; I'd just be unemployed. Contracting is easy. Just that 80% of the effort is marketing or collecting payment. People say Upwork is hard, but that's because with Upwork, you're competing with all the people who don't want to market or take higher risk projects. When contracting, you also have to charge more than you would at a FT job, which also raises the marketing effort needed. The problem with contracting isn't really the money, it's that you spend little time actually doing the work you're paid for and get rusty. So after a while I'd do teaching (which pays much worse). Then just ended up getting a full time job to be able to just focus on the coding. Doing product as a solopreneur is probably hard mode. It's actually easier to go the VC route, which is why people just do that. There are people out there whose full time jobs is to find someone who can build a product and give them a million dollars. If your odds of making a billion dollar app aren't very high, then you can try the million dollar route, but that's probably the niche of making well, apps around ChatGPT, selling diet products, and essential oils. Things that people would buy, but won't fund. |
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How does one handle collecting payments if the contract work is remote?
How do you even begin to market yourself for a contract/consulting project? Unlike a product, you can't place ads, or use traditional advertising, you would instead need to do things like beef up your linkedin/twitter/github?
I can see that thought where the actual coding work would only be a small part of it.. and I suppose that's something to think about.
The product route sounds very shiny and the one discussed most, but that puts me off. I do not enjoy the thought of writing twitter/linkedin posts to advertise stuff, nor do I enjoy hiring SEO and doing much marketing.
My hope is that avoiding the product route will allow me to get away with not having to worry about all this stuff, but I get the feeling there's no escaping it.
I'll copy paste some questions I posted to another comment here, if you feel like answering:
- how do you seek out new clients, are there job boards/discussion boards for these types of jobs? Or perhaps you just reach out to companies that seem to be doing interesting work?
- how do you prove to them that you can earn their contract?
- how do you even begin to match the project requirements and what you can bring to the table, and if needed, bring / integrate an additional member/team/contractor? Is that handled by the project manager at the company?