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Why I’m Never Going to Freelance Again

4 points by Liriel 4y ago

hunglee2 4y ago
honest account of the challenges of both customer acquisition + service delivery. As a one person business, this is extremely difficult to balance, and most freelancers will end up doing way more on the acquisition side than they would prefer, basically becoming sales & marketing for themselves, rather than doing the work they want to do (service delivery). Ronald Coase wrote about this in the 1930's when he speculated about the Nature of the Firm, and why we were not already just a load of freelancers trading in the open market - it's the acquisition cost of customers
- goatsneez 4y ago
  Thanks for the Ronald Coase reference and reminder about the important paper about the Nature of the Firm. I think it is an exceptionally good model how to understand the substance of that article. It reminded me a long-ago reading of an essay by W. Durant on history of humanity. He eloquently (and non-persuasively) argues that we form groups, firms, societies, clubs, etc to increase our competitiveness (wrt. other such groups/individuals). In other words nature set the law of competition as the core, and we come to cooperate with others only when it increases our chances to become more competitive (clearly scale efficiency and cost-offset, division of labor, etc). In non-economics language I think it hits the main argument of Nature of the Firm paper, yet, Durant points out that this is due to our innate biological reality.
gregjor 4y ago
I have freelanced for 15 years and love it. I got several long-term clients and did work I found interesting and rewarding. Chasing short-term gigs leads to churn and that feeling of not making a difference, but that's not the only way to do it. "Boring" is not a quality of work, or of any activity. "Boring" describes a person's subjective reaction to what they're doing. If you find the work you're doing boring you can either find something else to do or change how you perceive the work.

4 points by Liriel 4y ago

honest account of the challenges of both customer acquisition + service delivery. As a one person business, this is extremely difficult to balance, and most freelancers will end up doing way more on the acquisition side than they would prefer, basically becoming sales & marketing for themselves, rather than doing the work they want to do (service delivery). Ronald Coase wrote about this in the 1930's when he speculated about the Nature of the Firm, and why we were not already just a load of freelancers trading in the open market - it's the acquisition cost of customers

goatsneez 4y ago
Thanks for the Ronald Coase reference and reminder about the important paper about the Nature of the Firm. I think it is an exceptionally good model how to understand the substance of that article. It reminded me a long-ago reading of an essay by W. Durant on history of humanity. He eloquently (and non-persuasively) argues that we form groups, firms, societies, clubs, etc to increase our competitiveness (wrt. other such groups/individuals). In other words nature set the law of competition as the core, and we come to cooperate with others only when it increases our chances to become more competitive (clearly scale efficiency and cost-offset, division of labor, etc). In non-economics language I think it hits the main argument of Nature of the Firm paper, yet, Durant points out that this is due to our innate biological reality.

gregjor 4y ago

I have freelanced for 15 years and love it. I got several long-term clients and did work I found interesting and rewarding. Chasing short-term gigs leads to churn and that feeling of not making a difference, but that's not the only way to do it. "Boring" is not a quality of work, or of any activity. "Boring" describes a person's subjective reaction to what they're doing. If you find the work you're doing boring you can either find something else to do or change how you perceive the work.