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I started out my career building these sorts of websites, making $3000 Wordpress custom themes. The secret sauce was my lead source who had super developed bus

I started out my career building these sorts of websites, making $3000 Wordpress custom themes. The secret sauce was my lead source who had super developed business sense and social skills, and went out and wined and dined clients and sold them these sites. He went on to build an agency and I was the first freelancer he hired. I'm pretty sure he was pitching wide reaching marketing and strategy help to these clients, and a website was just one part of that. If a business just wants to make a simple website themselves, I see absolutely no reason not to just use Squarespace or equivalent. I agree with others in this thread that this kind of website has become completely commoditized when taken in a vacuum. I've done much better as a solo freelance software developer doing webapp development - Django/Vue is my current stack of choice but any full stack can work. The advantage this has over building design-heavy sites for small businesses is that this kind of dev still has a long way to go before being commoditized, and in general is worth north of $100/hr.

namanyayg 8y ago
I've been doing something similar with Express / Vue. Glad to see a lot of comments here concurring with webapp development, the same thing that I naturally ended up doing. I'm always for the look out for more such clients, do you have any advice on how to do that better?
gremlinsinc 8y ago
I'm pretty frustrated lately, I've got one client and looking to replace them or at least fill my pipeline with higher paying ones and back burner the other client unless we can renegotiate rates (current is $40/hr -- all parties live in USA), I would kill for a $100/hr contract, but I have no clue how to land/pitch one. My primary stack: Laravel / Vue, though I've been playing with node (Feathers/express backends) as well a lot lately. I've also been playing around w/ react quite a bit. I think if I had $100/hr I could put more in the bank... this feast/famine cycle is killing my sanity.
- CosmicShadow 8y ago
  Dude, just don't charge hourly and don't do hourly work. Only charge by the project. Estimate how long it would take, times by $100-$200/hour, then set that as your fixed rate. Just make sure you estimate 2-3x the time you think it would take just in case.

namanyayg 8y ago

I've been doing something similar with Express / Vue. Glad to see a lot of comments here concurring with webapp development, the same thing that I naturally ended up doing. I'm always for the look out for more such clients, do you have any advice on how to do that better?

gremlinsinc 8y ago

I'm pretty frustrated lately, I've got one client and looking to replace them or at least fill my pipeline with higher paying ones and back burner the other client unless we can renegotiate rates (current is $40/hr -- all parties live in USA), I would kill for a $100/hr contract, but I have no clue how to land/pitch one. My primary stack: Laravel / Vue, though I've been playing with node (Feathers/express backends) as well a lot lately. I've also been playing around w/ react quite a bit. I think if I had $100/hr I could put more in the bank... this feast/famine cycle is killing my sanity.

CosmicShadow 8y ago
Dude, just don't charge hourly and don't do hourly work. Only charge by the project. Estimate how long it would take, times by $100-$200/hour, then set that as your fixed rate. Just make sure you estimate 2-3x the time you think it would take just in case.