5 ms·

Drawbacks of Freelance Web Development

114 points by altern8 11y ago

michaelbuckbee 11y ago
In the context of HN: a huge upside of freelancing is that it puts you into direct contact with the types of problems that would make great B2B and bootstrapped startups. I know a number of developers that were able to shift themselves from freelancing to running a SAAS via productizing their consulting work.
mhassaan 11y ago
I have been doing freelancing for last 3 years and i agree with you but i think you can avail opportunity to scale your business if you are lucky to get big clients because you become a business for others and as every business man wants to scale his business so i think its solely you who can show a big picture to a client. If his business grows following your picture so as you.Its my point of view though i am not that much experienced as you are but i think that should work in this way (mutual benefits). Above all i am happy to see a post in English by an Italian :p . Its my 2nd month here in Italy and its hard to find an english speaker here. :-(
- pmontra 11y ago
  In this kind of job is not so difficult to find people that speak English here in Italy, but most devs read and write (especially read) much better than they speak or understand.
  - mhassaan 11y ago
    You are quite right about this :) but i am sure developers somehow can understand each other no matter the language .
misiti3780 11y ago
I have been freelancing for 5 years and agree with most of this. Thinking about it all the time is absolutely true, and my clients call me at weird times also. I think you can make more money free-lancing than you can working for someone else if you are good at business development, and although it is difficult to scale, if you have talented friends, building a consulting business in a major metropolitan area (NYC,SF, Chicago) is probably easier than building a startup. It would be mucher harder to do from Italy because of the time difference and a lot of high-paying clients expect you to be on site at least some of the time.
pmontra 11y ago
In my freelancing experience it's possible to scale the job by creating teams of developers per project and coordinating them. The problem (if it's a problem) is that your not a real freelancer anymore: you have obligations to those developers and you have to care about them, so you're more like a company boss. You might also have to become a real company, if your country's fiscal legislation favors that. Still, you can't have more than a few projects at the same time. I didn't make so much extra money when I had a couple of loose teams over the Internet: the profit is linear with the number of the developers. I think one must go all in and become a real company with as many devs as possible, but that's a different life.
s3nnyy 11y ago
Switzerland is very close to Italy. I don't know if you are willing to move but if you are, you could easily work here 3-4 days a week (60%-80% emploment), make more than enough to live, have no clients who call you at night and build your own product/company in your spare time. At least this is what I am doing right now. If you look for a tech-job in Zurich, check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" on https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to-switzerland-to-work-in-it-c7ac18af4f90 https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t... or send me a mail to the address in my HN-profile.
- TheLogothete 11y ago
  What if I only know English? Do you have an idea how is the landscape looking for "data science"/marketing analyst folks?
EGreg 11y ago
Why not re-use software you made or others made. Use open source platforms like Wordpress. At our company, we didn't find any good platform for building modern social apps out of reusable components and have the whole thing be maintainable (Drupal came the closest) so we built our own. It has been open sourced so everyone is free to use it. Get a project, assemble it from pages and tools, collect the overhead :) http://qbix.com/platform http://qbix.com/platform
hayksaakian 11y ago
Another angle is to progressively fire your smallest clients and get referrals from your larger ones. You can scale to 880$ per hour or whatever it was using this strategy. It could be hard emotionally to fire nice clients, so keep a good list of devs handy who you can send your undesirable work. Last thing is to read patio11's guide about freelancing -- its a very relevant read.
- blue1 11y ago
  > patio11's guide about freelancing link?
  - jk4930 11y ago
    http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/
jakemor 11y ago
Awesome read, thanks so much for posting. Have you ever hired developers to work for you? How did that go if you did?
einarvollset 11y ago
The main drawback to freelancing is defining yourself as a "$$ by the hour" worker. It's very common to do so, but it invariably leads to burnout. It's not terribly hard to shift your mindset to do something different, but it's not necessarily obvious how to do so. The main things to do are: - understand that recurring revenue is unsurpassed in terms of LTV of your customers. - realize that it's easy to become a world expert in an extremely narrow field ..then combine the two: what niche thing (much narrower than you're thinking) can you become a world expert in and charge a recurring fee for?
- timpiele 11y ago
  Yup, bill by value not the hour. Look at a Project and say that'll be $10,000 and knock it out in two weeks.
  - pmontra 11y ago
    I usually do fixed cost projects unless projects are so ill defined to require by the hour billing. Your advice is my advice but unfortunately customers are not so out of touch with reality. If they expect the project to be done in 2 weeks they'll start negotiating from 2,000 and If I can do it in two weeks they won't expect more than one month.
  - patkai 11y ago
    I agree with you, but this is a really bad advice for most people reading this. Billing by value - as a consultant/freelancer - will get you in endless discussions about what value actually is and you will have problems estimating the project.
timpiele 11y ago
I've been a freelancer since 1996. I've made $5,000 a year and $200,000 a year. You scale by charging more, using retainers writing books etc. To fight boredom I'm selling my home in Seattle in 2016 and moving to Ireland for 3 months, then Sweden then New Zealand etc.
old-gregg 11y ago
Another disadvantage of freelancing is generally lower bar of requirements and less interesting work. There are always exceptions, of course, but it's usually mind-destroying disposable CRUD work or building iOS clones of existing web apps, don't expect to eat "rich programmer food" [1] as a freelancer. Besides, you will rarely have an opportunity to learn from other/smarter people, so growing professionally will be a challenge. I may even go as far as to say it's very easy to see your programming skills deteriorate unless you apply a conscious effort to mentally stay in shape. There are always exceptions of course (especially for a specialist vs generalist) but this has been my experience being on both sides of the table. [1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com.tr/2007/06/rich-programmer-food.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com.tr/2007/06/rich-programmer-f...
- CM30 11y ago
  On the other hand, I would point out that sometimes the opposite is true. Working alone (or perhaps in a place where you might be one of the best in the room) means you learn more about programming and how to solve problems than you would otherwise. Why? Because if you're the only one working on something, you have to be the one to solve all the difficult problems. On the other hand, if you work with other/smarter people, it's also possible to end up not really doing as much challenging work, as they'll take over anything you see as too 'difficult' or too much effort to learn. It's definitely recommended to learn from others, but you have to make sure you're not just letting them do all the work.
- michaelbuddy 11y ago
  you can definitely get some weak projects but if you like for example to see small businesses grow and you do web / graphics / marketing you can take them and see them through a campaign that is above what they've ever had and get results that they only hoped for. I've seen from my work a company go from a low / medium player in their market to near top dog because they became more visible. It wasn't just marketing of course, their service was always good just they didn't stand out amongst the clutter. I've also had a lot of uninteresting work at companies too. Because the areas I consider fun, planning, strategy, communicating with the clients are handled by account managers and designer devs get 2nd hand info after the meetings. In a lot of ways the luster or shine of the project is gone and it quickly turns into a digital todo list.
CM30 11y ago
I agree with much of the article, but I also sort of question the idea you'll automatically make money being a freelancer. Because you see, a lot of small companies and individuals don't really respect freelancers and single developers as much as they do companies, and often see them as a cheap way to get things done. An awful lot of them think you can pay someone a couple of hundred quid for a clone of Facebook or the likes. Agencies may pay their employees less individually, but they tend to be able to negotiate prices better, since there's a certain perception of 'leigitimacy' that individuals don't have. The same company that pays them ten or so grand for a site might think they can pay the random freelancer a couple of hundred quid with a few extra beers thrown in. This gets even worse if it's someone you know (like say, a friend of a friend) asking for a site done, since the price usually ends up dropping even further (from a couple of hundred quid to less than a hundred quid or free). Working freelance is an easy way to make people think you'll help them with their 'world changing million app' for nothing.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Agreed; never market yourself as a freelancer. Become a design house - even if its only you. That image flies much better.
- michaelbuddy 11y ago
  I too question automatically making money. I mean you can charge what you want, but you have to go after all the work, when it comes in you're on your own to complete it, even the most challenging stuff. Scope creep, customer service, complexity start eating away at your best estimates. Freelancing can be hard and you can easily fail every day just from having bad or less than perfect habits.

114 points by altern8 11y ago

In the context of HN: a huge upside of freelancing is that it puts you into direct contact with the types of problems that would make great B2B and bootstrapped startups. I know a number of developers that were able to shift themselves from freelancing to running a SAAS via productizing their consulting work.

mhassaan 11y ago

I have been doing freelancing for last 3 years and i agree with you but i think you can avail opportunity to scale your business if you are lucky to get big clients because you become a business for others and as every business man wants to scale his business so i think its solely you who can show a big picture to a client. If his business grows following your picture so as you.Its my point of view though i am not that much experienced as you are but i think that should work in this way (mutual benefits). Above all i am happy to see a post in English by an Italian :p . Its my 2nd month here in Italy and its hard to find an english speaker here. :-(

pmontra 11y ago
In this kind of job is not so difficult to find people that speak English here in Italy, but most devs read and write (especially read) much better than they speak or understand.
- mhassaan 11y ago
  You are quite right about this :) but i am sure developers somehow can understand each other no matter the language .

misiti3780 11y ago

I have been freelancing for 5 years and agree with most of this. Thinking about it all the time is absolutely true, and my clients call me at weird times also. I think you can make more money free-lancing than you can working for someone else if you are good at business development, and although it is difficult to scale, if you have talented friends, building a consulting business in a major metropolitan area (NYC,SF, Chicago) is probably easier than building a startup. It would be mucher harder to do from Italy because of the time difference and a lot of high-paying clients expect you to be on site at least some of the time.

pmontra 11y ago

In my freelancing experience it's possible to scale the job by creating teams of developers per project and coordinating them. The problem (if it's a problem) is that your not a real freelancer anymore: you have obligations to those developers and you have to care about them, so you're more like a company boss. You might also have to become a real company, if your country's fiscal legislation favors that. Still, you can't have more than a few projects at the same time. I didn't make so much extra money when I had a couple of loose teams over the Internet: the profit is linear with the number of the developers. I think one must go all in and become a real company with as many devs as possible, but that's a different life.

s3nnyy 11y ago

Switzerland is very close to Italy. I don't know if you are willing to move but if you are, you could easily work here 3-4 days a week (60%-80% emploment), make more than enough to live, have no clients who call you at night and build your own product/company in your spare time. At least this is what I am doing right now. If you look for a tech-job in Zurich, check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" on https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to-switzerland-to-work-in-it-c7ac18af4f90 https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t... or send me a mail to the address in my HN-profile.

TheLogothete 11y ago
What if I only know English? Do you have an idea how is the landscape looking for "data science"/marketing analyst folks?

EGreg 11y ago

Why not re-use software you made or others made. Use open source platforms like Wordpress. At our company, we didn't find any good platform for building modern social apps out of reusable components and have the whole thing be maintainable (Drupal came the closest) so we built our own. It has been open sourced so everyone is free to use it. Get a project, assemble it from pages and tools, collect the overhead :) http://qbix.com/platform http://qbix.com/platform

hayksaakian 11y ago

Another angle is to progressively fire your smallest clients and get referrals from your larger ones. You can scale to 880$ per hour or whatever it was using this strategy. It could be hard emotionally to fire nice clients, so keep a good list of devs handy who you can send your undesirable work. Last thing is to read patio11's guide about freelancing -- its a very relevant read.

blue1 11y ago
> patio11's guide about freelancing link?
- jk4930 11y ago
  http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/

jakemor 11y ago

Awesome read, thanks so much for posting. Have you ever hired developers to work for you? How did that go if you did?

einarvollset 11y ago

The main drawback to freelancing is defining yourself as a "$$ by the hour" worker. It's very common to do so, but it invariably leads to burnout. It's not terribly hard to shift your mindset to do something different, but it's not necessarily obvious how to do so. The main things to do are: - understand that recurring revenue is unsurpassed in terms of LTV of your customers. - realize that it's easy to become a world expert in an extremely narrow field ..then combine the two: what niche thing (much narrower than you're thinking) can you become a world expert in and charge a recurring fee for?

timpiele 11y ago
Yup, bill by value not the hour. Look at a Project and say that'll be $10,000 and knock it out in two weeks.
- pmontra 11y ago
  I usually do fixed cost projects unless projects are so ill defined to require by the hour billing. Your advice is my advice but unfortunately customers are not so out of touch with reality. If they expect the project to be done in 2 weeks they'll start negotiating from 2,000 and If I can do it in two weeks they won't expect more than one month.
- patkai 11y ago
  I agree with you, but this is a really bad advice for most people reading this. Billing by value - as a consultant/freelancer - will get you in endless discussions about what value actually is and you will have problems estimating the project.

timpiele 11y ago

I've been a freelancer since 1996. I've made $5,000 a year and $200,000 a year. You scale by charging more, using retainers writing books etc. To fight boredom I'm selling my home in Seattle in 2016 and moving to Ireland for 3 months, then Sweden then New Zealand etc.

old-gregg 11y ago

Another disadvantage of freelancing is generally lower bar of requirements and less interesting work. There are always exceptions, of course, but it's usually mind-destroying disposable CRUD work or building iOS clones of existing web apps, don't expect to eat "rich programmer food" [1] as a freelancer. Besides, you will rarely have an opportunity to learn from other/smarter people, so growing professionally will be a challenge. I may even go as far as to say it's very easy to see your programming skills deteriorate unless you apply a conscious effort to mentally stay in shape. There are always exceptions of course (especially for a specialist vs generalist) but this has been my experience being on both sides of the table. [1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com.tr/2007/06/rich-programmer-food.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com.tr/2007/06/rich-programmer-f...

CM30 11y ago
On the other hand, I would point out that sometimes the opposite is true. Working alone (or perhaps in a place where you might be one of the best in the room) means you learn more about programming and how to solve problems than you would otherwise. Why? Because if you're the only one working on something, you have to be the one to solve all the difficult problems. On the other hand, if you work with other/smarter people, it's also possible to end up not really doing as much challenging work, as they'll take over anything you see as too 'difficult' or too much effort to learn. It's definitely recommended to learn from others, but you have to make sure you're not just letting them do all the work.
michaelbuddy 11y ago
you can definitely get some weak projects but if you like for example to see small businesses grow and you do web / graphics / marketing you can take them and see them through a campaign that is above what they've ever had and get results that they only hoped for. I've seen from my work a company go from a low / medium player in their market to near top dog because they became more visible. It wasn't just marketing of course, their service was always good just they didn't stand out amongst the clutter. I've also had a lot of uninteresting work at companies too. Because the areas I consider fun, planning, strategy, communicating with the clients are handled by account managers and designer devs get 2nd hand info after the meetings. In a lot of ways the luster or shine of the project is gone and it quickly turns into a digital todo list.

CM30 11y ago

I agree with much of the article, but I also sort of question the idea you'll automatically make money being a freelancer. Because you see, a lot of small companies and individuals don't really respect freelancers and single developers as much as they do companies, and often see them as a cheap way to get things done. An awful lot of them think you can pay someone a couple of hundred quid for a clone of Facebook or the likes. Agencies may pay their employees less individually, but they tend to be able to negotiate prices better, since there's a certain perception of 'leigitimacy' that individuals don't have. The same company that pays them ten or so grand for a site might think they can pay the random freelancer a couple of hundred quid with a few extra beers thrown in. This gets even worse if it's someone you know (like say, a friend of a friend) asking for a site done, since the price usually ends up dropping even further (from a couple of hundred quid to less than a hundred quid or free). Working freelance is an easy way to make people think you'll help them with their 'world changing million app' for nothing.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Agreed; never market yourself as a freelancer. Become a design house - even if its only you. That image flies much better.
michaelbuddy 11y ago
I too question automatically making money. I mean you can charge what you want, but you have to go after all the work, when it comes in you're on your own to complete it, even the most challenging stuff. Scope creep, customer service, complexity start eating away at your best estimates. Freelancing can be hard and you can easily fail every day just from having bad or less than perfect habits.