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Every freelancer starts out undervaluing their work

167 points by philipmorg 11y ago

Svenstaro 11y ago
Please don't fuck around with the scroll behavior.
- mcdougle 11y ago
  What did they do? I don't notice anything different.
  - Svenstaro 11y ago
    Smooth scrolling but that interferes with my scroll rate and vimium which also optionally does smooth scrolling. Generally, web designers really shouldn't touch scroll behavior at all, it's rather bad practice.
    - bshimmin 11y ago
      I noticed this and was instantly aggravated by it (it's especially obvious on a Mac because it doesn't do the "rubber-band" bounce at the top and bottom). What purpose does it even serve on this page?
jayshahtx 11y ago
> pass on the cheap, low-value projects. Hold out for the clients that have budgets and value your time. Every second you spend with clients that don’t have money and don’t value your time is another second you have wasted. I just finished my first 8 months of consulting work and while this is true, it is so difficult to actualize. When we had zero projects, I would take any meetings I could get. A part of me would hope that during the meeting, the client would realize where I could add value and increase their willingness to pay. In reality, however, it was the client who tried to push down our rate time after time. A hard lesson for a novice, but I lost hundreds of hours to clients that I knew, deep down, didn't have the budget. With that being said, this is dangerous advice to internalize pre-maturely. Without underpricing yourself in the beginning, it's difficult to derive self-worth (IE: confidence) and increase your rate later on. And the last thing you want is an early freelancer to turn down work because they think they are worth more. TLDR; Underpaid work might just be a rite of passage in freelancing. It was for me.
- Swizec 11y ago
  The other problem with not taking undervalued work is that your runway is not infinite, while the market's is. So you might just run out of money before you land that client you're holding out for. And when the end of runway is approaching, you will become desperate, and you will take on a terrible project. Then it will take a really long time before you build up your runway again to the point where you can hold out for better projects. Basically, hold out, but don't wait too long.
- sanderjd 11y ago
  This is why the word "underpriced" always seems wrong to me in this context. Your price at the beginning has to be lower because your profile is lower, which means you have a weaker negotiating position. "Underpriced" only becomes the right word if your rates aren't rising in conjunction with your profile, which does happen for sure, but isn't the case right at the beginning.
  - tertius 11y ago
    "Your price at the beginning has to be lower because your profile is lower" This is the sentiment that makes you justify charging too little.
    - mcintyre1994 11y ago
      So what is the alternative? If you don't have any cheap clients (cheap labour) or portfolio (free labour), how do you convince clients what you're worth?
      - mgkimsal 11y ago
        Arguably, you can invest some of your time in your own portfolio projects that demonstrate the particular skills and value you want to promote. It's not an exact science, and harder in some industries than others, but not impossible, and it's something that too many folks (me included) tend to gloss over or ignore. Keeping a relevant industry-related blog won't necessarily convince every single client, but it's one of those things that can swing someone's mind to committing to you when there's not a lot of other obvious signals.
buckbova 11y ago
Isn't the title "12 Gurus Got 5 Questions About How They Set Their Rate"?
- pmjordan 11y ago
  HN has some form of "no numbers in titles" policy. I'm not even sure list articles are allowed at all.
  - SilasX 11y ago
    Right, but not against the numbers per se (or else it could just be machine-filtered), but about titles artificially framed in the listicle format: >If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
soft_dev_person 11y ago
> No one is paying you for your “time,” they are paying you for a result, so stop charging for your “time.” I wish regular employers would adopt this more as well. My value is what I do/produce, not how much time I spent doing it. Some days I produce massive amounts of value, while others I barely get anything valuable done. I'd like a work place that would encourage me to go home and enjoy myself on the bad days and stay as long as I want on the good days, instead of expecting a regular 40 hour work week every week (I have flex, but on average...). On the other hand, I guess my employer has this issue too. We usually have an upper (money or time) limit on a contract but charge by the hour. And this is pretty much the standard in my industry and a requirement from our clients. How did we end up this way? It makes no sense!
- nightski 11y ago
  Value of items produced isn't always so easy to measure.
  - soft_dev_person 11y ago
    Which is probably exactly the reason why charging/paying by the hour is the default. Much easier to reason about, and much easier to measure.
- rogerbinns 11y ago
  I charge by time, even though I am producing results. The biggest advantage is that it deals with changes in the specs, addition or removal of features, new environmental issues (eg also test on ARM, use a cluster). If you charge for results only, then any change in what is desired means a renegotiation. Attaching a dollar figure to every "could you also ..." gets old quickly. For your regular employer what you are after is ROWE - results only work environment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    A hybrid approach works fine too. A fixed price for the prototype on a date; time and materials for changes after that point.
WA 11y ago
And yet, nobody answered question #2 (What was your defining moment when you realized you were worth more than what you were charging) like so: "I read a blog post or a book on how to charge more." This is not to say that a post like this doesn't have any value - or a book like Brennan Dunn's book. But sometimes, when I read stuff like that, I wonder how much is actually survivorship bias and how much one can REALLY learn from a post like this. It's a bit like Amazon reviews of books: Half of them are for people who have read the book and start to discuss things retrospectively.
- SilasX 11y ago
  I agree. I constantly see advice of the form, "You just need to insist on being paid what you're worth", as if a furrowed brow and a firm handshake can make just anyone able to charge enormous amounts. To be sure, for some freelancers, timidity in asking for more is holding them back, but it has to be combined with an honest self-assessment of how much you could reasonably ask for.
- kyleslattery 11y ago
  For me, reading blog posts helped build my confidence to be able to ask for higher rates—seeing that lots of other people charge over $100/hr can really help to convince yourself that you're worth that. You are right though, that reading blog posts is not going to create that change—for me it really came the first time I said what I thought was a high rate ($135/hr), and there was no pushback at all from the client. I was kind of amazed at first that they thought I was worth it, but with one success in the bag, it gave me the confidence to move forward.
- ryanwaggoner 11y ago
  I am that person. Read Brennan's book in 2012 and im making 3-4x as much net today as I was then. Is it entirely due to that book? No, of course not, but it did shift my thinking and start me down a road of continually pushing the boundaries to charge more. Which I often feel I'm pretty terrible at, but at least I'm trying. The set of freelancers working right at the rate they should be is orders of magnitude smaller than those who are far undervaluing their work because they've never even really tried to dramatically increase their rates.
jbhatab 11y ago
"When I first started, I charged less than $100/hour." Clearly some of them were on very different paths than me. I taught myself and charging anything over $30/hour would have been deceitful. I couldn't imagine delivering that much value when I was starting.
- meric 11y ago
  We didn't know how much value our work provides and was worried about giving our clients a raw deal. I think there's nothing wrong with starting with a low rate until we are confident in our abilities.
lordnacho 11y ago
I don't get why people are so keen on the per-hour model. This puts a lot of pressure on you to be fully productive and count hours like a lawyer. It also makes you think you're losing money when you're not billing, and the customer likewise feels the time/money pressure. I've negotiated fixed-price deals where I'm quite certain I can get the job done in x number of weeks, based on having done something similar before. And that's a quite leisurely x weeks, where I'm not really feeling any uncertainty about any part of the project (ie I know what APIs will be used, business logic seems simple, research is done already). At the same time setting a leisurely schedule also means if there is something unexpected, you can spend a bit more time solving it. Or take a break when you're ahead. Regarding the customers, being choosy appears to be very important. Anyone who mentions outsourcing to (somewhere cheap) is politely moved on. Anyone who doesn't grasp what they're after (a social network, with an iOS and Android app, and videos, and ...) is quoted a longer timeframe. Customers also need to be made aware of the importance of feedback, as in the agile model. That way they always get what they asked for, and you don't waste time on what didn't come to mind.
- rietta 11y ago
  That can be the goal. In my last experiment with this short of going to pure fixed bid, we had a client running an Excel spreadsheets to figure out exactly what they were paying for hour, for each developer even. We finally just gave up and switched them to a pre-paid hourly rate per developer on the followup projects. Some other clients are happy with a retainer that gets them a certain level of work without sweating the hours. It may just be a shortcoming of the approach that my company tried; we're open for trying again as none of us like clocking time like lawyers.
- maratd 11y ago
  > I don't get why people are so keen on the per-hour model. How many years have you been doing this? It doesn't sound like you've been at this for too long. > I've negotiated fixed-price deals where I'm quite certain I can get the job done in x number of weeks This works fine for a client who wants a very concrete x, y, or z. There's a problem with this sort of client. They only want x, y, or z and after you give it to them, well, you're done. If you have that sort of client and you're charging by the hour, you're an idiot. Quote them a fixed price at something like 500 per hour for what you estimate the work will take. They'll go for it, you make bank. At some point in your freelancing career you're going to start feeling jealous. Of the "normal" guy. They guy who wakes up every morning knowing he has a full day of work and is working for the same person he worked for yesterday. He knows what to expect, how things operate, etc. Everything is stable. Stability is an illusion, but it's a nice one. At this point, you're going to start looking for clients who don't want x, y, or z. You're going to look for clients who need x. And some more x. Then some more x. They keep needing x and there's no end. These clients are professionals. They know the industry. They're not really clients, they're middle men. They're agencies, marketing guys, whatever. They have a constant stream of work. They know it. And they know the best way to maximize their profit is to pay you by the hour. They will only pay you by the hour. They will laugh if you suggest anything else. It's alluring to you, because you get a ton of work, all the time and you're still billing twice what you'd get working a regular job, and you still get to work from home, set your own hours, specify your own tooling, etc. At some point, you'll get tired of this and decide you want to be the middle man. You start getting your own clients, hiring other guys to do the work ... and guess what? You're going to pay them by the hour. Because that's how you maximize your profit. Now, I know there are one-man armies out there who have their own clients, bill fixed price, do all the work themselves and are always busy. I know they're out there because I used to do that. It's exhausting. You have to constantly keep marketing yourself, keep working of course, and wear a bunch of hats at the same time. At some point, you'll have the desire to "outsource" the marketing portion of the equation and that's when you'll start billing by the hour.
ShirsenduK 11y ago
For every one good freelancer there are 100 crappy freelancers. The way you go up is via reputation. No better way than working with clients. When you have no reputation you start at zero when you have reputation you can command your price. If you want to start at a high rate prove yourself on GitHub. The gurus might not have been gurus when they started. 😊
- danieltillett 11y ago
  This. I think good freelancers forget how many bad freelancer there are out there poisoning the waters. Before you can charge like a professional you need to be able to prove you are one.
camdenre 11y ago
I had trouble remembering which question corresponded to which number as I read the article. It would have been nice to include the question above each person's answer (or maybe a hover over the number reveals the number, or something similar).
- asmosoinio 11y ago
  Had the very same idea. To be able to read this, I opened a TextEdit window where I copy&pasted the questions.
zerr 11y ago
One thing to remember - those who charge 30K per week (e.g. patio11) do so by doing the work they don't enjoy, and this would be even more non-enjoyable for more hardcore engineers here. We love making money with programming, not by marketing/SEO/etc... So the most interesting for us is how to make 30K/week by only pure engineering.
- gk1 11y ago
  > ..so by doing the work they don't enjoy Hey, speak for yourself. :) I happen to enjoy it very much, and that's what makes my consulting work very rewarding.
  - zerr 11y ago
    Yes, I generalized my thoughts and what patio11 said about quitting consulting :)
mgkimsal 11y ago
While I sympathize with the 'value pricing' sentiment, and do use in in some pricing situations, part of the 'value' measurement comes down to the other party's ability to execute and extract the value from whatever I (or my team) produce. Having a time factor in there (X hours, Y weeks, whatever) and having part of all of the price be affected by the time put in reduces that issue, but also generally will tie you to lower profits of any sort. I've done 100 hours of work for company X, and they were easily able to recognize > $300k of value from that project. Another 100 hours of work for company Y, and they were struggling and complaining about a $7500 charge for that time, as they "didn't see the point" (the original sponsor did, but the rest of the team wasn't executing on the whole project, and nothing was getting done, hence little value arising from anyone's time). Finding more projects like company X, and fewer like company Y, becomes it's own fun exercise.
ThomPete 11y ago
Every freelancer starts out not having a lot of experience being freelancers and so they make the typical mistake of thinking about their clients as their employer rather than as an investment in a relationship that needs to be developed over time. Many get too hung up in the value of the services they provide when what they are really selling is trust. The people that manage to make good money on freelancing aren't always the best at what they do, but they are good at managing expectations and making the client feel like they made the right hire.
- weaksauce 11y ago
  Managing expectations is so important and you really should learn it early on in your career. If you pad your expectation and then deliver it early you delight. On time and you are still ahead of most freelancers/employees. If you see problems ahead with the timeline, communicate and let them plan around your delays otherwise you are surprising them in the worst way.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    Exactly. I found that most clients care way less about "world class" quality than they care about delivering on time since their job is rarely to deliver quality but rather simply to deliver.
einarvollset 11y ago
I'm one of the "gurus" - feel free to ask more questions here (see bio for more background)
jmadsen 11y ago
There are so many tangents to go off on, but let me pick this one thing to comment on: Read Justin Jackson's story about the Mayor vs. the Ad Agency Whichever price model you chose, you must learn early which clients are just wasting your time. There are no hard and fast rules, often it's just a gut feeling, but here are the mistakes I used to make & how to try to avoid them: 1) People who want to discuss their site for an hour or more on skype are not proper businessmen. Look for people who's time is money - they have some key questions for you, they don't just want to "chat" about their idea. People who just want to chat - get your hourly rate mentioned early. If you tell them "I charge X" and they still want to talk a bit, then go with your gut, but don't talk more than 15min. with anyone without giving some indication of the price. 2) Don't lower your price unless you are repeatedly being rejected at that price level BY THE TYPE OF CLIENT YOU WANT. That second part is important - your price will screen out the little projects you aren't really after. Don't worry if it is doing that job. But others will reflexively ask for a better deal, and won't push back hard if you don't budge. $10/hr less at "full-time" costs you $20,000 year that you'll never earn back. What always seemed to happen to me was, the moment I agreed to a lower rate, someone would come along who was willing to pay full rate, and now I'm massively stressed trying to do everything. 3) Ask to see any specs and/or designs early - offer to sign an NDA right up front This is to let you see how prepared they are, how professional they are, and if the work is defined well enough to be able to offer a weekly rate. Weekly rates are great, but they can be a harder sell for certain types of work. 4) Weekly rates are NOT risky if you define the number of hours/amount of work you can reasonable expect in a week. Project rates are dangerous. Weekly rates just mean, "Of course I can do that! You understand that will cost X, correct? Would you like to cut something else out, or just approve the overrun?" Weekly rates DO mean you need to be professional - you are promising 40-50hrs of actual work. For that reason I often go hourly to keep my personal flexibility. 4) Don't run out an "prepare yourself" for the techs you'll need for this project before signing the contract. This is for the younger folks starting out, mostly back-end developers. Create a career learning plan of technologies you want to improve at, and use down time to study those. Don't jump around to new languages/server tools/whatever that a potential client mentions & never get good at anything. To a point that's ok, when you really ARE new and need to get familiar with what is out there & being used, but get away from that habit quickly. If it looks useful, schedule it in your Career learning plan & visit at the appropriate time. I know there's plenty more, but I think those are solid enough that I feel comfortable offering them to people. Good luck!
discardorama 11y ago
Tangential: if someone wants to get into freelancing, how does one go about it? How do you find gigs? I'm into HPC, Hadoop, etc. and have been contemplating freelancing, for a change.
- maratd 11y ago
  It depends on what area you want to target. Big data would be a niche field. You would need to know your market. Your market being any niche market where big data is relevant. You then target players who are small enough to need your services, but not large enough to need someone full-time doing what you do. A lot of people see freelancing as some sort of gateway to doing what you enjoy on your terms. I suppose that's half true. The other half is marketing yourself and building a client base. Both halves are necessary. If you're willing to take a major haircut off your rate (both in terms of what you bill and the service fees you'll pay), you can get low-end clients on the freelancing sites. That should really be seen as training wheels though and not a permanent solution. Low-end clients pay less, give you more grief, and the projects are less interesting.
mdpopescu 11y ago
Anyone else being asked for a user and password?

167 points by philipmorg 11y ago

Svenstaro 11y ago

Please don't fuck around with the scroll behavior.

mcdougle 11y ago
What did they do? I don't notice anything different.
- Svenstaro 11y ago
  Smooth scrolling but that interferes with my scroll rate and vimium which also optionally does smooth scrolling. Generally, web designers really shouldn't touch scroll behavior at all, it's rather bad practice.
  - bshimmin 11y ago
    I noticed this and was instantly aggravated by it (it's especially obvious on a Mac because it doesn't do the "rubber-band" bounce at the top and bottom). What purpose does it even serve on this page?

jayshahtx 11y ago

> pass on the cheap, low-value projects. Hold out for the clients that have budgets and value your time. Every second you spend with clients that don’t have money and don’t value your time is another second you have wasted. I just finished my first 8 months of consulting work and while this is true, it is so difficult to actualize. When we had zero projects, I would take any meetings I could get. A part of me would hope that during the meeting, the client would realize where I could add value and increase their willingness to pay. In reality, however, it was the client who tried to push down our rate time after time. A hard lesson for a novice, but I lost hundreds of hours to clients that I knew, deep down, didn't have the budget. With that being said, this is dangerous advice to internalize pre-maturely. Without underpricing yourself in the beginning, it's difficult to derive self-worth (IE: confidence) and increase your rate later on. And the last thing you want is an early freelancer to turn down work because they think they are worth more. TLDR; Underpaid work might just be a rite of passage in freelancing. It was for me.

Swizec 11y ago
The other problem with not taking undervalued work is that your runway is not infinite, while the market's is. So you might just run out of money before you land that client you're holding out for. And when the end of runway is approaching, you will become desperate, and you will take on a terrible project. Then it will take a really long time before you build up your runway again to the point where you can hold out for better projects. Basically, hold out, but don't wait too long.
sanderjd 11y ago
This is why the word "underpriced" always seems wrong to me in this context. Your price at the beginning has to be lower because your profile is lower, which means you have a weaker negotiating position. "Underpriced" only becomes the right word if your rates aren't rising in conjunction with your profile, which does happen for sure, but isn't the case right at the beginning.
- tertius 11y ago
  "Your price at the beginning has to be lower because your profile is lower" This is the sentiment that makes you justify charging too little.
  - mcintyre1994 11y ago
    So what is the alternative? If you don't have any cheap clients (cheap labour) or portfolio (free labour), how do you convince clients what you're worth?
    - mgkimsal 11y ago
      Arguably, you can invest some of your time in your own portfolio projects that demonstrate the particular skills and value you want to promote. It's not an exact science, and harder in some industries than others, but not impossible, and it's something that too many folks (me included) tend to gloss over or ignore. Keeping a relevant industry-related blog won't necessarily convince every single client, but it's one of those things that can swing someone's mind to committing to you when there's not a lot of other obvious signals.

buckbova 11y ago

Isn't the title "12 Gurus Got 5 Questions About How They Set Their Rate"?

pmjordan 11y ago
HN has some form of "no numbers in titles" policy. I'm not even sure list articles are allowed at all.
- SilasX 11y ago
  Right, but not against the numbers per se (or else it could just be machine-filtered), but about titles artificially framed in the listicle format: >If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

soft_dev_person 11y ago

> No one is paying you for your “time,” they are paying you for a result, so stop charging for your “time.” I wish regular employers would adopt this more as well. My value is what I do/produce, not how much time I spent doing it. Some days I produce massive amounts of value, while others I barely get anything valuable done. I'd like a work place that would encourage me to go home and enjoy myself on the bad days and stay as long as I want on the good days, instead of expecting a regular 40 hour work week every week (I have flex, but on average...). On the other hand, I guess my employer has this issue too. We usually have an upper (money or time) limit on a contract but charge by the hour. And this is pretty much the standard in my industry and a requirement from our clients. How did we end up this way? It makes no sense!

nightski 11y ago
Value of items produced isn't always so easy to measure.
- soft_dev_person 11y ago
  Which is probably exactly the reason why charging/paying by the hour is the default. Much easier to reason about, and much easier to measure.
rogerbinns 11y ago
I charge by time, even though I am producing results. The biggest advantage is that it deals with changes in the specs, addition or removal of features, new environmental issues (eg also test on ARM, use a cluster). If you charge for results only, then any change in what is desired means a renegotiation. Attaching a dollar figure to every "could you also ..." gets old quickly. For your regular employer what you are after is ROWE - results only work environment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  A hybrid approach works fine too. A fixed price for the prototype on a date; time and materials for changes after that point.

WA 11y ago

And yet, nobody answered question #2 (What was your defining moment when you realized you were worth more than what you were charging) like so: "I read a blog post or a book on how to charge more." This is not to say that a post like this doesn't have any value - or a book like Brennan Dunn's book. But sometimes, when I read stuff like that, I wonder how much is actually survivorship bias and how much one can REALLY learn from a post like this. It's a bit like Amazon reviews of books: Half of them are for people who have read the book and start to discuss things retrospectively.

SilasX 11y ago
I agree. I constantly see advice of the form, "You just need to insist on being paid what you're worth", as if a furrowed brow and a firm handshake can make just anyone able to charge enormous amounts. To be sure, for some freelancers, timidity in asking for more is holding them back, but it has to be combined with an honest self-assessment of how much you could reasonably ask for.
kyleslattery 11y ago
For me, reading blog posts helped build my confidence to be able to ask for higher rates—seeing that lots of other people charge over $100/hr can really help to convince yourself that you're worth that. You are right though, that reading blog posts is not going to create that change—for me it really came the first time I said what I thought was a high rate ($135/hr), and there was no pushback at all from the client. I was kind of amazed at first that they thought I was worth it, but with one success in the bag, it gave me the confidence to move forward.
ryanwaggoner 11y ago
I am that person. Read Brennan's book in 2012 and im making 3-4x as much net today as I was then. Is it entirely due to that book? No, of course not, but it did shift my thinking and start me down a road of continually pushing the boundaries to charge more. Which I often feel I'm pretty terrible at, but at least I'm trying. The set of freelancers working right at the rate they should be is orders of magnitude smaller than those who are far undervaluing their work because they've never even really tried to dramatically increase their rates.

jbhatab 11y ago

"When I first started, I charged less than $100/hour." Clearly some of them were on very different paths than me. I taught myself and charging anything over $30/hour would have been deceitful. I couldn't imagine delivering that much value when I was starting.

meric 11y ago
We didn't know how much value our work provides and was worried about giving our clients a raw deal. I think there's nothing wrong with starting with a low rate until we are confident in our abilities.

lordnacho 11y ago

I don't get why people are so keen on the per-hour model. This puts a lot of pressure on you to be fully productive and count hours like a lawyer. It also makes you think you're losing money when you're not billing, and the customer likewise feels the time/money pressure. I've negotiated fixed-price deals where I'm quite certain I can get the job done in x number of weeks, based on having done something similar before. And that's a quite leisurely x weeks, where I'm not really feeling any uncertainty about any part of the project (ie I know what APIs will be used, business logic seems simple, research is done already). At the same time setting a leisurely schedule also means if there is something unexpected, you can spend a bit more time solving it. Or take a break when you're ahead. Regarding the customers, being choosy appears to be very important. Anyone who mentions outsourcing to (somewhere cheap) is politely moved on. Anyone who doesn't grasp what they're after (a social network, with an iOS and Android app, and videos, and ...) is quoted a longer timeframe. Customers also need to be made aware of the importance of feedback, as in the agile model. That way they always get what they asked for, and you don't waste time on what didn't come to mind.

rietta 11y ago
That can be the goal. In my last experiment with this short of going to pure fixed bid, we had a client running an Excel spreadsheets to figure out exactly what they were paying for hour, for each developer even. We finally just gave up and switched them to a pre-paid hourly rate per developer on the followup projects. Some other clients are happy with a retainer that gets them a certain level of work without sweating the hours. It may just be a shortcoming of the approach that my company tried; we're open for trying again as none of us like clocking time like lawyers.
maratd 11y ago
> I don't get why people are so keen on the per-hour model. How many years have you been doing this? It doesn't sound like you've been at this for too long. > I've negotiated fixed-price deals where I'm quite certain I can get the job done in x number of weeks This works fine for a client who wants a very concrete x, y, or z. There's a problem with this sort of client. They only want x, y, or z and after you give it to them, well, you're done. If you have that sort of client and you're charging by the hour, you're an idiot. Quote them a fixed price at something like 500 per hour for what you estimate the work will take. They'll go for it, you make bank. At some point in your freelancing career you're going to start feeling jealous. Of the "normal" guy. They guy who wakes up every morning knowing he has a full day of work and is working for the same person he worked for yesterday. He knows what to expect, how things operate, etc. Everything is stable. Stability is an illusion, but it's a nice one. At this point, you're going to start looking for clients who don't want x, y, or z. You're going to look for clients who need x. And some more x. Then some more x. They keep needing x and there's no end. These clients are professionals. They know the industry. They're not really clients, they're middle men. They're agencies, marketing guys, whatever. They have a constant stream of work. They know it. And they know the best way to maximize their profit is to pay you by the hour. They will only pay you by the hour. They will laugh if you suggest anything else. It's alluring to you, because you get a ton of work, all the time and you're still billing twice what you'd get working a regular job, and you still get to work from home, set your own hours, specify your own tooling, etc. At some point, you'll get tired of this and decide you want to be the middle man. You start getting your own clients, hiring other guys to do the work ... and guess what? You're going to pay them by the hour. Because that's how you maximize your profit. Now, I know there are one-man armies out there who have their own clients, bill fixed price, do all the work themselves and are always busy. I know they're out there because I used to do that. It's exhausting. You have to constantly keep marketing yourself, keep working of course, and wear a bunch of hats at the same time. At some point, you'll have the desire to "outsource" the marketing portion of the equation and that's when you'll start billing by the hour.

ShirsenduK 11y ago

For every one good freelancer there are 100 crappy freelancers. The way you go up is via reputation. No better way than working with clients. When you have no reputation you start at zero when you have reputation you can command your price. If you want to start at a high rate prove yourself on GitHub. The gurus might not have been gurus when they started. 😊

danieltillett 11y ago
This. I think good freelancers forget how many bad freelancer there are out there poisoning the waters. Before you can charge like a professional you need to be able to prove you are one.

camdenre 11y ago

I had trouble remembering which question corresponded to which number as I read the article. It would have been nice to include the question above each person's answer (or maybe a hover over the number reveals the number, or something similar).

asmosoinio 11y ago
Had the very same idea. To be able to read this, I opened a TextEdit window where I copy&pasted the questions.

zerr 11y ago

One thing to remember - those who charge 30K per week (e.g. patio11) do so by doing the work they don't enjoy, and this would be even more non-enjoyable for more hardcore engineers here. We love making money with programming, not by marketing/SEO/etc... So the most interesting for us is how to make 30K/week by only pure engineering.

gk1 11y ago
> ..so by doing the work they don't enjoy Hey, speak for yourself. :) I happen to enjoy it very much, and that's what makes my consulting work very rewarding.
- zerr 11y ago
  Yes, I generalized my thoughts and what patio11 said about quitting consulting :)

mgkimsal 11y ago

While I sympathize with the 'value pricing' sentiment, and do use in in some pricing situations, part of the 'value' measurement comes down to the other party's ability to execute and extract the value from whatever I (or my team) produce. Having a time factor in there (X hours, Y weeks, whatever) and having part of all of the price be affected by the time put in reduces that issue, but also generally will tie you to lower profits of any sort. I've done 100 hours of work for company X, and they were easily able to recognize > $300k of value from that project. Another 100 hours of work for company Y, and they were struggling and complaining about a $7500 charge for that time, as they "didn't see the point" (the original sponsor did, but the rest of the team wasn't executing on the whole project, and nothing was getting done, hence little value arising from anyone's time). Finding more projects like company X, and fewer like company Y, becomes it's own fun exercise.

ThomPete 11y ago

Every freelancer starts out not having a lot of experience being freelancers and so they make the typical mistake of thinking about their clients as their employer rather than as an investment in a relationship that needs to be developed over time. Many get too hung up in the value of the services they provide when what they are really selling is trust. The people that manage to make good money on freelancing aren't always the best at what they do, but they are good at managing expectations and making the client feel like they made the right hire.

weaksauce 11y ago
Managing expectations is so important and you really should learn it early on in your career. If you pad your expectation and then deliver it early you delight. On time and you are still ahead of most freelancers/employees. If you see problems ahead with the timeline, communicate and let them plan around your delays otherwise you are surprising them in the worst way.
- ThomPete 11y ago
  Exactly. I found that most clients care way less about "world class" quality than they care about delivering on time since their job is rarely to deliver quality but rather simply to deliver.

einarvollset 11y ago

I'm one of the "gurus" - feel free to ask more questions here (see bio for more background)

jmadsen 11y ago

There are so many tangents to go off on, but let me pick this one thing to comment on: Read Justin Jackson's story about the Mayor vs. the Ad Agency Whichever price model you chose, you must learn early which clients are just wasting your time. There are no hard and fast rules, often it's just a gut feeling, but here are the mistakes I used to make & how to try to avoid them: 1) People who want to discuss their site for an hour or more on skype are not proper businessmen. Look for people who's time is money - they have some key questions for you, they don't just want to "chat" about their idea. People who just want to chat - get your hourly rate mentioned early. If you tell them "I charge X" and they still want to talk a bit, then go with your gut, but don't talk more than 15min. with anyone without giving some indication of the price. 2) Don't lower your price unless you are repeatedly being rejected at that price level BY THE TYPE OF CLIENT YOU WANT. That second part is important - your price will screen out the little projects you aren't really after. Don't worry if it is doing that job. But others will reflexively ask for a better deal, and won't push back hard if you don't budge. $10/hr less at "full-time" costs you $20,000 year that you'll never earn back. What always seemed to happen to me was, the moment I agreed to a lower rate, someone would come along who was willing to pay full rate, and now I'm massively stressed trying to do everything. 3) Ask to see any specs and/or designs early - offer to sign an NDA right up front This is to let you see how prepared they are, how professional they are, and if the work is defined well enough to be able to offer a weekly rate. Weekly rates are great, but they can be a harder sell for certain types of work. 4) Weekly rates are NOT risky if you define the number of hours/amount of work you can reasonable expect in a week. Project rates are dangerous. Weekly rates just mean, "Of course I can do that! You understand that will cost X, correct? Would you like to cut something else out, or just approve the overrun?" Weekly rates DO mean you need to be professional - you are promising 40-50hrs of actual work. For that reason I often go hourly to keep my personal flexibility. 4) Don't run out an "prepare yourself" for the techs you'll need for this project before signing the contract. This is for the younger folks starting out, mostly back-end developers. Create a career learning plan of technologies you want to improve at, and use down time to study those. Don't jump around to new languages/server tools/whatever that a potential client mentions & never get good at anything. To a point that's ok, when you really ARE new and need to get familiar with what is out there & being used, but get away from that habit quickly. If it looks useful, schedule it in your Career learning plan & visit at the appropriate time. I know there's plenty more, but I think those are solid enough that I feel comfortable offering them to people. Good luck!

discardorama 11y ago

Tangential: if someone wants to get into freelancing, how does one go about it? How do you find gigs? I'm into HPC, Hadoop, etc. and have been contemplating freelancing, for a change.

maratd 11y ago
It depends on what area you want to target. Big data would be a niche field. You would need to know your market. Your market being any niche market where big data is relevant. You then target players who are small enough to need your services, but not large enough to need someone full-time doing what you do. A lot of people see freelancing as some sort of gateway to doing what you enjoy on your terms. I suppose that's half true. The other half is marketing yourself and building a client base. Both halves are necessary. If you're willing to take a major haircut off your rate (both in terms of what you bill and the service fees you'll pay), you can get low-end clients on the freelancing sites. That should really be seen as training wheels though and not a permanent solution. Low-end clients pay less, give you more grief, and the projects are less interesting.

mdpopescu 11y ago

Anyone else being asked for a user and password?