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Ask HN: What's the most time-consuming part of your job as freelance developer?

24 points by mrassili ↗ HN
What's the most time-consuming part of your day-to-day work as freelance developer (or designer) working with multiple clients?

Related question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23704861

16 comments

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thiscatis
Dealing with "just a quick small change" from customers.
dgb23
In terms of “should have been far less time consuming” rather that just “time consuming”:

Unspecified functionality/design:

My clients are often non-technical (not developers) and UI/graphic designers. So there can easily be a lack of understanding and rigorous communication if you don’t take the time to write things down and keep an updated version of that thing as you figure out the unknowns.

jpescada
Finding new leads. When I have job requests coming in it’s all fine, but when I have to chase new jobs and go through multiple rounds of ping-pong messaging with possible customers it becomes very tiring. Ideally, I would be doing this weekly while working on projects, but I haven’t made it a priority.
davidbrennerjr
Acquisition cost is very high. I spend most of my time selling myself than any other activity. I've been doing consulting since 2015. My network has grown to 5k, yet I still have to come up with new ways of expressing the same things.
kugelblitz
I changed from "regular freelance" project work with 2 to 4 clients at a time, to contract work one client at a time, usually as an extension of their dev team. This has cut negotiating time significantly, I can bill pretty much 35-40 hours for the week and allows me to focus on coding, this suits my style of work well.

You can earn quite a bit if you're efficient, though this model is not that scalable beyond that e.g. it's difficult to build an agency / consultancy with full-time billing and very low negotiating overhead. Your role will turn more into that of a manager + salesperson as you hire more people.

learyce
I have the exact same problem. Feel like I spent 20-30% of my time chasing down new leads or going through the obligatory 2-3 rounds of intro/prospecting calls. Have you had any luck with building out lead pipelines?
francisofascii
Answering the question "how long or what is the cost to do X thing" only to be later told "don't work on it", is the most unpaid time consuming activity. Sometimes you really don't know if it will take 2 hours or 2 weeks without some investigation.
bzb3
Not sure if the most time consuming, but what really pisses me off is how much time I have to spend emailing/calling/etc clients to discuss project details, money, etc that I'd rather spend writing code. That's probably the worst part of freelancing
mrassili
Have you tried setting up a contact form on your website with a survey that collects all the informations beforehand for you?
bzb3
That would be good for first contact only... And believe me, non technical people are unable to properly explain what they want. Going by what they ask without giving constant feedback means you'll end up with something that has little to do with what they originally wanted
davidtranjs
I have to switch between multiple Slack workspace, repository to communication and work.
muzani
Getting paid. A lot of the work is trying to get people to complete payment. Sometimes the app is done and handed over and it goes through months of "We'll bank it in next week or tonight."

Sometimes it's a negotiation tactic to try to squeeze a freebie. Say a company commissions 10 training sessions, which by contract is paid after the 10th. They'll rush through 9 sessions in 2019 and never get around to the 10th one, saying that the previously trained team were no longer around and that the new team need some practice to get up to par.

Chasing and suing clients is simply not profitable, exhausting, time consuming. Writing better contracts is time consuming and often that time is not billable. The trick is to filter clients who won't pay, and basically handle marketing in such a way that you don't get these clients. A lot of it is spotting patterns in bad clients and sometimes refusing someone who could potentially be a profitable client just because they could also potentially be a trouble client.

moneywoes
What are these patterns if you don't mind sharing?
muzani
Sorry, just saw this comment. I'd say the main one is irresponsibility. I used to think they'd be certain to pay me because they lose out the most by abandoning their project. But many people are simply negligent and just let their companies die. These also tend to be the type who feed their kids junk food, who don't fill in the car tank, who set up meetings and 'forget' to show up. It's hard to say, but if you meet someone who seems irresponsible and negligent, stay far away. I've come across at least a dozen companies that have died because they chose not to get any work done. Where they landed contracts, invest 10 years of savings, take loans from friends and family, then don't even bother to deliver.

Late payments are a huge symptom of this.

Another pattern is tire kicking. This is usually bundled with boasting that they are a legitimate business. One guy I know would talk about how he had to move our meeting because he had to meet with his company secretary and a had a meeting with this giant telco. Another one set a meeting to unreasonable times because she had to take an interview with a media outlet, then refused to change it to some other reasonable hour.

Lack of empathy is another, or dumb haggling. These will find ways out of paying you in your contract, and there's plenty of gray area to haggle over.

And then, for apps, watch out for people who don't know why they're doing what they do. They want an app. It has no business purpose. Maybe it collects big data for AI later. They tend to suffer buyer's remorse later and will not pay you.