[jiggy2011]

Whilst I agree with the basic thesis of "charge more and compete by providing value". The difficult part for me seems to be finding people who have money they can part with in the first place, you can't really sell somebody on the benefits of something they can't afford.

I've recently been trying to pick up some part time freelance work to supplement my income and pick up a wider range of experience.

So first stop was elance.com/Guru.com and similar sites. Looking at the jobs it seems like around 90% of the bids were from individuals in India or the far east happy to work for $7 per hour. So I figured I could "compete on quality" , however a lot of the individuals I would be competing against had CS or design degrees (often from western universities) , 5+ years experience and portfolios full of slick looking corporate websites. Besides, at the rates on offer I figured I'd have to complete at least one fairly large project a week to match my current salary and I'm not confident about producing quality on those kind of deadlines.

Most of the project descriptions were also either extremely vague (I want a website), impossible (I want a website, must be #1 on google for <competitive search term>) or possibly illegal (I want a keylogger, must not show up on AVG).

It also seemed like a lot of the bids came from various outsourcing companies who had a bunch of different skills in house and providing 24 hour coverage which would kill my timezone advantage (besides a lot of buyers were in the US when I'm in the UK or were in India/Far East themselves).

Looking at the profiles of freelancers from the US/UK etc , most of them appeared to have never won a project despite being on the site for over a year often.

So I gave up on that and figured, "It's all about networking right?" so I attended a local business networking event for "entrepreneurs". First bad sign was after sitting down and introducing myself to the lady next to me, "what do you do?" , "I build websites , computer software and mobile apps" , "wow, you TOO".

Everyone there who wasn't a freelancer of some description desperate for business was either a recent university grad full of enthusiasm, bright ideas but no funds at all or some small mom and pop operation who were stressed out about meeting their mortgage payments that month and absolutely not looking to drop a chunk of change on any kind of bespoke software.

Now I'm sure there are people out there with money to spend, but they are probably hiding behind an army of secretaries etc. Besides even people with money are looking to save it, and there are plenty of monied businesses like investment banks etc who are still offshoring all of their dev work.

Any bright ideas on how to break through this firewall?

[patio11]

1) Don't use the freelancer sites. They're markets for lemons.

2) There are a variety of networking mechanisms besides networking events. Anything pitched as a "networking event", explicitly, is going to self-select for people who have nothing better to do than go to networking events. Successful businessmen largely don't go to that sort of place because they have networks. They go to places which promise value to them.

One specific example is e.g. focused presentations or conferences on a topic of immediate need to their business. For example, the Business of Software conference charges something like $2k a ticket, and is pretty much totally attended by people who own or work at software companies that can justify $2k a ticket and a half-week at a luxury hotel if it sells more software. That might be a good place to meet well-heeled software companies if you're in a mind to do that. (How to avoid paying an arm and a leg for conference tickets? One way is to get invited as a speaker. How to do that? a) Get really good at something. b) Reach out to conference organizers. c) Tell them that if you speak about your thing at their event it will receive high ratings and people will talk about it after the conference.)

Another hack: can't get invited to a party? Throw a party. Invite yourself. You must be a desirable person to meet at the party, after all, you're throwing it. Ryan Carson talks about this all the time. It takes absolutely nobody's permission and a budget in like the two to three figure range to say "October 22nd: SEO For Law Firms seminar, Community Center Conference Room A, 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM with reception to follow. Register now to reserve your ticket."

3) they are probably hiding behind an army of secretaries

Is this an obstacle that the world is presenting to jiggy2011 or an obstacle that jiggy2011 is presenting to jiggy2011?

I know at least 30 people who can greenlight 5 to 6 figure engagements. 25 of them have publicly routable telephone numbers... I assume, anyhow, because calling people scares the heck out of me. Every last one reads their own email. None has a bodyguard separating them from the hoi polloi at e.g. industry events.

You don't need to get the CEO of Bank of America on the phone to charge $1X0 an hour. A company the size of a BoA bank branch can be a great, great client to have -- one or two people in the decisionmaking loop, monthly payroll of $X00,000 to $Y million so your invoices won't threaten the ability of anyone to make their mortgages.

[jiggy2011]

Thanks for the reply, certainly some food for thought there.

I guess there are a few things at the crux of this.

Having worked on mainly typical "line of business" type software and CMS type systems I've tended to find myself on projects where the number of voices has meant that everything tends towards mediocrity and anything approaching an innovative idea gets shot down immediately.

In other words it's difficult to produce something that you feel proud of and would be happy to show people as an example of your skill.

Also as very much a generalist (everything from server admin to dev to SEO) it's difficult to find an area where I would feel confident speaking as an "expert" on any particular subject.

Perhaps, I would be better off using the time to develop things of my own that people might find useful/interesting and would give me something that I could talk about?

[patio11]

Also as very much a generalist (everything from server admin to dev to SEO) it's difficult to find an area where I would feel confident speaking as an "expert" on any particular subject.

This is a common worry in our field, even for people who are absolutely drop-dead world-class experts in things! You do not have to be absolutely drop-dead world-class expert in things to teach hugely valuable things to people, because the overwhelming majority of people are not experts at $FILL_IN_SUBJECT.

You do server admin? Hypothetical example: Have you ever administered a MySQL server? Have you written a backup strategy for one? Once? Jiggy2011, you know more than I do about a subject which very nearly cost me $$$$ and a heart attack last Thursday. Would I be listening to hear you talk about MySQL backup strategies? Heck yes. I burn with need for that right now. Are there other people who know it better than you? Yes. Do I know who they are? No. I know almost nothing about this field, which includes not knowing the straightforward paths to learning more about this field. You know this subject better than I do, maybe you could tell me who they are, but you can probably also tell me that they're busy building Facebook and since you aren't you're the one actually talking about this stuff.

[mechanical_fish]

In my last job I wrote several automated backup systems for MySQL servers, and they continue to run as part of a SaaS hosting service. Holy cow, I'm an expert! Thanks for reminding me! ;)

Of course, one never feels like an expert, because part of being an expert is that one knows the names of some real experts, who are better than you. In this case, some real experts in MySQL backup work at Percona. Hire them. Alternatively, buy the O'Reilly book High Performance MySQL, which is partly the work of Percona's founders and has chapters about backups.

(If you are the foremost expert in a field, of course, you probably don't feel like an expert either, because you're at the frontier, where everything is confused and all the other experts are most lost than you. I don't understand this field! The references are irrelevant and confused and make no sense! I don't know how to make progress and I can't find anyone else who does! I must be really stupid!)

[jiggy2011]

Mysql Backups:

Ghetto solution is to find a service that will allow you to rsync files to them and take care of offsite backups etc themselves. Once you have done that it's a simple case of setting up mysqldump to create timestamped .sql files and setting that up on a cron job to rsync to the remote server via SSH (you need to generate a key pair and copy the public key to the other end).

If you are using characters from weird character sets you definitely want to make sure all of your unicode settings are correct which may take some trial and error and I've never entirely trusted mysql in this regard.

If you are paranoid you should have a separate job that automatically downloads and restores your backups after a period of time and runs a few test queries on the data. Of course the hard part is knowing what the results of these queries should be.

Of course the problem here is that this will chew up increasing amounts of your remote storage over time, so it depends if you can afford to delete backups of over a certain age.

You can also enable binary logging in mysqld and do incremental backups by writing the binary log to the remote host at certain intervals (I think this only works properly with InnoDB databases), though I have no practical experience doing this because frankly I've never needed to. Nightly dumps were always good enough so my boss wouldn't want me spending any more time on it.

That's the crux of the problem with working for a non tech company, most of the time once the solution is "ok" it's time to move onto something else so you never get a chance to really kick ass which is what you need to do to justify a high rate.

These are really commodity skills though, you could have figured all of this out yourself by reading a few blogs (that's basically all I did). Alternatively if you had posted "Mysql backup solution needed" on eLance you would have probably had at least 20 offers to do the whole thing for $20 or so.

[patio11]

you could have figured all of this out yourself by reading a few blogs (that's basically all I did)

Could have. Didn't. Was too busy building my businesses to care to do the research. Many people are like me. Would listening to Jiggy teach me about MySQL in a nice, packaged, Jiggy-does-the-work-so-I-don't-have to format provide value? Yes, clearly. You already quintupled what I know about the subject with an HN post, think of how entertaining talking for an hour would be.

These are really commodity skills though... do the whole thing for $20 or so.

You are no longer a commodity after you've successfully convinced me that you are the expert who can e.g. listen to my particularized needs and tell me a solution which will work for them. In fact, even if I were non-technical and stark-raving insane and thought that $20 was a reasonable price to pay for this, the fact of having read the above would convince me that eLancelot wouldn't have his uni-codes sorted on the cronSyncServer or whatever that was, so I should entrust the future of my business to the guy who seems to know what he's talking about who is quoting numbers closer to what I pay for e.g. insurance than what I pay for toilet paper.

[mechanical_fish]

Something about this exchange reminds me of the old Monty Python "Motor Insurance" sketch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO2R_DDZPCM

Well, Reverend Morrison, in your policy… [pause to remove wadded-up document from the inside pocket of an old tweed jacket] …in your policy it states quite clearly that no claim you make will be paid. You see, you unfortunately plumped for our "never-pay" policy, which if you never claim is very worthwhile!

(Incidentally, it's fun how well this sketch holds up today if you imagine that Michael Palin's character is playing the role of the Internet.)

Anyway, the point is that it's not buying the insurance that's hard: It's ensuring that you can collect when the emergency happens. The same is true for backups. When you try to restore the backup, and you can't find the guy who set it up in the first place, and the second guy you hire for $20 from eLance tells you that the first guy messed up the Unicorn settings or whatever, or that his script broke four months ago and nobody noticed, now you're screwed, and you don't even know which of your two $20 minions made the mistake.

How much will someone pay, as a monthly retainer, to avoid that nightmare? Well, how much is their data worth? How quickly will they want to restore it when disaster strikes, and do they already have a full-time employee with a pager who knows how to perform the restore?

[thenomad]

As a side note to this - being a generalist can be valuable too, because you can see cross-overs between disciplines.

My entire online presence is pretty much built on this - being knowledgeable about storytelling and the birth of the 3D gaming world at the same time led to me leaping in whole-heartedly at the inception of "Machinima", the technique of using 3D gaming technology to make films. There are a lot of people who are better at making films than I am - but very few of them were also competent at editing Quake levels.

But more trivially, there are dozens of times when you can cross over your skills to achieve results a specialist couldn't. Patrick has referred to one of his in the past - if you're knowledgeable about both advertising best practise and Web programming, you can create landing pages which are generated programatically to appeal to the inbound traffic from your PPC ads.

That's a nice bit of synergy which I believe has netted him a non-trivial amount of money in the past. If you're a programmer and an ad guy, it probably seems like an obvious thing to do - but if you're just one or the other, I can assure you it's not.

Look at two fields you know, preferably both valuable ones, and see if you can figure out things you can teach from your knowledge of both that most people wouldn't be able to.

(Another more trivial example: I've recently done some consulting work on PPC ads for a Pilates instructor friend of mine, considerably assisted by actually knowing a reasonable amount about Pilates. There are a lot of PPC ad people out there. There are a lot of people who know Pilates out there. The number of people in the intersection of the two sets, however, is small enough that I'm considering spinning the area out as a specialised consultancy.)

[danielweber]

First time I tried to get a consulting gig, it was a group of college or just-out-of-college kids trying to sell what we today call Incognito mode.

IIRC I mentioned a price of $5000, and the eyes nearly bugged out of one guy's head. Clear sticker shock. They wanted to spend about $500.

As the podcast is saying now, it was a very very good thing that I did not end up doing anything for them. People who want cheap are to be avoided.

To date I have yet to successfully get a contract gig, but I have succeeded tremendously in not getting bad clients, and that's something good.

[lotharbot]

My wife has been working through vworker.com for a little over a year, makes enough to pay the bills, and has never lost a contract she set out to win. Sites like that can be viable if you use certain strategies:

1) Communicate a lot, before even thinking about bidding. Many project descriptions are extremely vague, but by asking questions, you can often get the detail you need to put in a sensible bid that will actually meet the client's needs. This has two side effects:

- it weeds out toxic clients. Those who have unrealistic expectations, or simply don't know what they want, will make that obvious during this phase.

- it sets you apart from other bidders. Many of them will simply read the (vague) project description and then put in a bid, without sending so much as a "hello". Whereas, by asking questions and seeking feedback, you've convinced the client that you're capable and focused on getting them the product they want.

2) When you're just starting out and therefore have no ratings/history, it's hard to win a big project. Consider offering to do a small sub-project with quick turnaround, as a proof of ability. My wife's first client had a fairly large project; she offered to do a small bugfix with a quick turnaround for $50, which allowed her to win the larger contract with minimal risk to either her or the client. Once she had one large contract under her belt, other contracts came much more easily, including lots of repeat business.

3) Look for other things you can do to minimize perceived risk. If the site has built in certification tests, take them. If you have your own profile pieces, post them. This both sets you apart from the $7/hour firms, and puts you at least not too far behind the slick looking portfolio guys.

4) Pick up skills to fill in your biggest weaknesses (for example, learn rudimentary design if you haven't yet), and pick up skills to compete with others' big weaknesses (how many freelancers know how to write an in-app billing module on Android? My wife gets a ton of work because she knows how to do that, and seemingly nobody else does.)

...

There are definitely people out there with money to spend, who are willing to spend it on you if you can convince them you're the best option. This is the approach that worked for us, though I realize it's unpopular among part of the HN crowd.

A word of caution: this strategy has paid the bills, but we live a fairly low-key lifestyle. We're still one rate hike behind the previous BigCo salary.

[thenomad]

Thank you. Several friends of mine will find this advice very valuable.

[adrianhoward]

I build websites , computer software and mobile apps

too.... do what?

My top tip would be to stop talking about building web sites or mobile apps.

Instead talk about what those web sites and mobile apps are doing for the businesses you built them for.

When you have that mom and pop operation who are stressed out about meeting their mortgage payments you need to sell them something that will reduce their stress.

You're 100% correct they're not looking to "drop a chunk of change on any kind of bespoke software".

They might be looking for something that's going to regularly remind their existing customers of the great service they had last time, with almost no effort on their part, bringing old customers back into the store so they can focus on new sales. How much did that run of paper leaflets cost them to print and deliver? How many of them do they do a year? How much time and money would they save by trying an electronic newsletter / customer reminder service?

People don't want software. They want solutions to their problems. Sell those.

(This does involve doing lots of "talking to and understanding customers". This is not writing software. However - if you want to have a business writing software you, or somebody else, needs to do it.)

[jiggy2011]

Sure, there are plenty of solutions I could build that would help these people in some way.

The issue really is that you can't charge high rates to these people simply because they probably don't have that kind of money sitting in the bank.

In reality most of the gains you could give to these people by improving their online marketing through various means are going to provide more benefits in the long term than the short term.

That's a difficult sell to businesses that are worried about short term survival.

[adrianhoward]

The issue really is that you can't charge high rates to these people simply because they probably don't have that kind of money sitting in the bank.

You may be surprised if you dig a bit.

One of the problems with selling software solutions is that so many companies don't understand that they need software solutions - because they don't understand what software can do.

To pick some examples from when I was dealing with that sort of client I've seen folk: * spending days every week manually copy/pasting email addresses into spreadsheets * manually adding name/address info to a 1k+ paper mail out campaigns * spending a monthly four digit amount to a print shop to do layout work that a basic template in Pages/Word could do.

... and none of those people understood that the addition of a piece of software - even an off the shelf piece of kit that just needs configuring - could take that pain away. It could save them hundreds, sometime thousands, of dollars a week - every week.

That's a difficult sell to businesses that are worried about short term survival.

Those clients really understand the value of their time. The tedious stuff that you can automate away is usually the stuff that is stopping them doing what they want to do. If you can show them ways for them to stop wasting time on things they are not making them money, and back that up with case studies / references, they will happily find ways to pay you.

But you have to show them the value first.

Back in 1999 when I started my first business my idea of sales was something like "I do X. I need to get really good at X. I need to find people who want X. Ideally rich people who can afford to pay more for X". Much like you this ended up with me wandering around various places going "Hi - I do X".

Having gone through.... some learning experiences... since then - and having seen some excellent sales folk do their thang I finally figured out that this is totally arse-backwards way of going about finding work.

You start by looking for people who have problems that you can solve. Ideally big problems that cost them lots of money/pain. Then you figure out how to get yourself to the same place as the people with that problem. Then you then sell them their life without that problem (and incidentally that you do X that can make that problem go away).

You don't network to let folk know that you're a developer looking for work. You network to understand other peoples problems, and to help them understand that they're solvable.

[jwwest]

This is extremely common. Since I was recently in the same situation as yourself, I thought I'd share what has been working for me and might work for you too.

The number one thing you have to understand is that your first few clients will be hard to get. There's no way around this. The good news is that once you start to have a history of successful projects, more and more people will start to come to you. This will happen, trust me.

Secondly, unless you're patio11, don't expect to be immune from the normal sales cycle. As engineers, we understand code and servers but not always business side of things. Business moves at its own pace: some companies move extremely quickly, some slower. The key is to manage your pipeline by continuously talking to potential clients and following up with them regularly and often. These companies have their own budgets and timelines to worry about.

"1/3 of projects you bid on you will never get, 1/3 you may get, and 1/3 you will always get." This is a saying that has kept me motivated through rough patches. The important thing is not to get discouraged and quit.

You will talk to a ton of people in your work. Don't be discouraged if you talk to 10 people and only 1 shows interest in potentially hiring you. You want to find the right clients, not land every client.

Don't work without a contract or MSA and SOW. This looks amateurish and can throw some potential clients off. Clients that don't want to hire you because of this are clients you really don't want.

Speaking of the above statement, never estimate "off the cuff". Always take the time to provide a thorough estimate with plenty of examples of what the client can expect. This reduces the amount of "sticker shock" a client can experience when you quote something off the top of your head. This is true in both email and phone/in-person conversations. I always redirect the conversation to what I can do for the company, rather than what I think something would cost if a client asks:

Client: '...so, how much do you think that'll cost?'

Me: 'Well, the Foobaz piece is a pretty good chunk of functionality and having that work fast and reliably is really important to keep your XYZ going. I'll also have to do some research on ABC so that we're both clear on exactly how this can help you out. Did you have any ideas on that?'

Finally, actionable advice: get out there and hustle. Pick an industry that regularly hires freelancers/consultants (creative agencies are huge in this space) and contact them directly. Email is usually fine, just make sure that you're brief, don't sound like you're mass emailing, and never ever email a bunch of people the same messages (ie send out individual emails). I use a combination of Rapportive (helps me guess email addresses for important individuals at a company) and Boomerang (lets me schedule outgoing messages).

Never ever email [e-mail] or use their 'contact us' email form, always try to find a decision maker at the company to contact. LinkedIn is great for this.

Remember that you're not begging for work. You offer solutions to business problems and you're reaching to see if you can form a business relationship with them. Present what you do and how you can help what they're dealing with -right now-.

[bdunn]

I think the problem is that you're looking at yourself as an expense. What if you marketed yourself as a money multiplier? Someone who can take the money clients invest in you and create a positive ROI?

A huge amount of people who want what you have to offer aren't actively looking for "X Developers". I'm working on a $200/hr, 6 month contract now for a client that wasn't even looking for custom software.

I'm really against the marketplace / elance / odesk model. Go into the world, talk to business owners, discover their problems, and then see if there's any overlap between your abilities to solve their problems and their pains.

Check out the bottom of this post (http://planscope.io/blog/my-most-effective-newsletter-to-dat...) for a real life conversation I had at a networking mixer that landed me the contract I described above.

[adrianhoward]

Any bright ideas on how to break through this firewall?

One trick that worked for me.

I created a description of my ideal client. In fact I created a few descriptions of different ideal clients.

(If you've a UX background - I basically researched and created personas for my clients http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(marketing) )

I then figured out where those clients hung out.

Then I hung out there and listened to their problems.

(For example - there are reasons I am now very happy to spend multiple thousands of pounds attending some conferences - outside of the personal development stuff I get from attending :-)