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1. Stay away from those websites 2. Identify your specialties and craft a pitch for how you can use them to generate value for a company. Ideally these special
by chatmasta 9y ago
1. Stay away from those websites
2. Identify your specialties and craft a pitch for how you can use them to generate value for a company. Ideally these specialties will result in measurable value. Examples: saving money on AWS costs; generating sales leads; optimizing marketing funnels.
3. Focus on “push, not pull.” Find companies who could benefit from your specialties, and reach out to them directly. Set up phone calls, video chats, and face to face meetings. Learn to sell yourself as a product.
4. If you’re a senior developer, you should have a fairly extensive network of people who know your work quality, all working at different companies. Reach out to these people first.
5. Charge by the day, week or month. Do not charge by the hour. Start with your market-rate salary for a year, divide it by 50, and then multiply it by 1.5-2.0 to get your weekly rate. [EDIT: Just realized you have a full time job, so this might not be possible. In that case you’re going to struggle to compete against full time consultants, unless you’re working primarily on piecemeal work. The real money is in full time consulting, not moonlighting by the hour.]
6. Focus on companies that either have VC funding or revenue, and preferably 3+ full time employees working at market-rate salaries. They will not flinch at your price.
7. Increase your rates with each new contract.
- ChrisAntaki 9y agoNice advice, though my experience doesn't resonate with #5. I always priced by the hour, but charged by the minute. Tools like Harvest made this easy. If there was a chance to reduce billable time spent by changing the spec a bit, I'd let clients know. Clients seemed to really appreciated this, and I was making enough to buy a house in California, a couple hours away from SF.
- chatmasta 9y agoHow complex are the projects you’re working on? Do you work on multiple projects for different clients within the same day? I personally look for greenfield projects of at least a month in duration, and commit my full attention to them for that time. I treat the project like a temporary full time job. I’ve never tried charging by the hour, but my intuition is it could lead to micromanagement from clients, and also create stress/overhead for me in accounting for each hour. I also worry it would make clients uncomfortable to know I’m constantly context switching into different projects throughout the day. What if I spend an hour of the day researching a solution? Does the client need to know the details of all 8 hours of my day? I prefer to keep a “work log” spreadsheet, with a row for each day explaining at a high level what I accomplished, and also keep in daily communication with the client to make sure we are on the same page. How much information do you give your clients as to what you did each hour? Have you ever tried billing in larger blocks? If so, how did that method differ from charging hourly?
- imron 9y agoI bill by the hour too. It's the only sane way to do it, and contra to your intuition it stops micromanagement and makes clients respectful of your time. Clients don't know or care about context switching for other clients, they care about the quality of the work provided, so take care of that and you'll be ok. It's not like you'll be constantly switching anyway. Usually I'll work all day or all half a day on one specific thing anyway. In terms of accounting for each hour, there are software tools to help with that. Just click when you're working and click when you stop and the software tallies up the time. I don't provide clients with hourly breakdowns of everything I worked on, I just send a bill at the end of the month that includes total hours worked that month. Regular video calls and email, plus delivered results are sufficient proof of work.