Ask HN: Freelance developer hit the ceiling: what to do next?
i've been a freelance developer on Upwork/oDesk for 7 years, and gradually i realized that my income stopped growing (some 4 years ago). I tried to do everything i could think of and yet, there was no further growth, i hit some ceiling at about $100K a year. Trying to figure out what was wrong, i did a study using Upwork API to find who the top developers are and what are they doing to get there, and the answer didn't please me: i am one of the very top developers (#10 at the time i did the study) and there isn't much room above. Yes out of hundreds of thousands.
Which makes me think that freelance sites aren't for me: it is that proverbial room where i am the smartest guy in, and when you are the smartest guy in the room, you are in the wrong room. If i am comfortably within top 0.1%, i will definitely make a lot more in the environment where i will be the average one.
Question is: where is that room? I am in the EU (can be anywhere except UK/Ireland). Anyone who had a similar problem please share your experiences, what did you do to grow from there?
One obvious idea is to do my own startup, which i am now trying, but that is another story. Trying, but i am not sure startups are for me, i'd better work for hire.
41 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadWhat skills do you want to be using?
For someone who programmed since the age of 10 learning a new programming language is easy. I started on oDesk as a Flash developer (it was 2009 - heyday of Flash), then gradually moved onto other stuff, my most recent new language was Go (i did PubNub Go SDK). Right now i am coding in Python but i can easily be doing something else next month.
But really, i don't think skills are an answer here. At least not technical skills. There is no way i could be making $200K instead of $100K by learning any kind of technical/programming skills. What i need is new markets.
Not sure what you mean by "new markets". Do you mean new markets for your programming skills? Or are you thinking of changing careers, for example going into sales or big ticket consulting?
New markets - some new way of selling my programming services which don't share the 'race to the bottom' style of Upwork bidding.
I kind of assume that if i am one of the just a few top people on Upwork there must be a way to get several times as much if i am on a market where average skills are comparable to mine.
Networking events may work if you know how to use them effectively.
I will hopefully soon have your problem too on upwork. My idea is to:
1. extreme specialization. Example: I like backend, high performance, low-level, databases (rdbms & nosql). So I'll probably go into lowe-level java/c++/c database coding. And then either contract on this or get a job Example: antirez gets a nice San Francisco wage coding full-time open-source redis.
2. startup Different ideas. But if I get good at the low-level-high-performance-thing even something with that.
Without knowing what your skills are, it's hard to make suggestions. But ... have you looked at working at a top notch company where your skills would be very much in demand. For example, with the right skills you could land a very well paying job in banking in say Frankfurt or Zurich. I've worked for a Zurich insurance company and that was one of the best paid gigs I've ever had.
If you are in the top 10 on UpWork currently, then very few people in the world know how to achieve what you have already achieved, much less improve upon it. You can try to look for ways to improve your income further, but most people are not going to know an answer for you.
That said, if you are earning $100k in Vilnius, then it will be extremely difficult to find a higher-paying employment offer relative to living costs anywhere in the world. Maybe you can make 1.5-2x that if you go to work in finance - but you will most likely need to move to some of the most expensive cities (Zurich, London, etc) in the world.
The typical way of increasing income as a freelancer, after maxing out the hourly rate on your own is to start a development company. Partner with 1-2 freelancer friends, and start taking on bigger projects. Hire a small team of junior developers, and bill out their time as well. Grow. Start taking on fixed-bid mid-sized enterprise and government projects.
But this can be a very tedious and soul-crushing change, especially at the stage where you have only a few junior developers on staff: you will need to move from doing actual development work to reviewing their code, and handling "management and sales".
If that doesn't sound like something for you, perhaps instead consider:
* Moving to somewhere with even lower cost of living than Vilnius. Hell, move to the next beach-front villa somewhere in Asia every 6 months.
* Be more picky about accepting work - optimise for how much fun they seem to be, not only the hourly rate.
Agency - i tried, so far it didn't work. I haven't found a single client who wanted me as an agency. I think it works differently from freelancer sales: you pitch to totally different people in different situations. My Upwork study also included a separate study of agency success, and it was overwhelmingly negative, there are very, very few successful agencies on Upwork, looks like whole agency thing doesn't work there. Of those not in India/Pakistan and thus working for $10/h (something clearly impossible in my case), there is just 1 really successful one, visibly making >$1M a year: https://www.polcode.com/en/ and a few others making $200-$500K a year, but i seriously don't want to go from 1 person business to 20 person business for 2x raise or 200 person business for 5x raise. And i don't believe i can pull it off. This is something completely unrelated to what i do now, i'd be as good trying to switch careers into an opera singer.
Probably a good choice (and a challenging one), would be to build a new freelancer site, targeting better and bigger customers, not the classic freelancer customer which make decisions based on price.
Obviously this site should get onboard top notch developers/freelancers and curate them.
1) i am no longer a part of the company. i can link you up with the sole owner if you have any interest though. 2) it is nowhere near successful really. more of a zombie startup.
i tried to do all i could to help it out, even prepared to apply to YC, but i couldn't convince the partner (current sole owner, i left it and given up my share) to agree to go to U.S. if accepted.
Or maybe you've done some target marketing, approached some middle-managers in those companies or similar.. Interesting how did you get such sales. (But your [ex] product looks great, indeed).
Btw, I'm in the same situation - living in eastern Europe, working remotely and getting "western compensation". So I'm stuck here... When you adjust for cost of living, and especially housing, moving west doesn't make sense...
LOL now try to think how coding people making $10K+ a month in Ukraine feel like! Many of them have 10-acre villas, chauffeur driven cars and full time gardeners. Real upper class. That's what i call being stuck!
Regarding the product - I guess if you had enterprise pricing separately (maybe as "Contact us") you could've arranged better deals with those AAA shops... not sure :)
Enterprise pricing page - good idea, i will tell Maxim (owner). upd: he said that in fact decisions on buying it is usually taken by IT department heads who then massively rework the system for their own needs, so a higher priced sale would be impossible, in many cases they already prefer open source.
In fact, even selling whole company failed through - interested buyers who definitely had money, eventually refused to pay even $100K. Working on Upwork has definively been way more productive activity.
Is your manager/main contact typically a business boss or technical?
Lastly, how much do you charge?
That sounds interesting because in my experience people don't pay unless they are forced to (some system does it for them, or they need something more from you so forced to pay for the previous work to get that done, etc.)
Generate passive income on the side, there are only 24 hours in a day and you cant expect that your salary will grow exponentially.
Starting a business in a place which has everything already? Not a chance.
One chance may be doing angel investing. I am researching it.