Ask HN: $7000 per month freelancing
I registered a domain name 93days.com for this and hope to make it live by the first day of summer. So, getting a picture of who I am and how I got into the downturn, the readers will be able to see all my daily work on the road to success. To make it more interesting, I set the timeframe to 93 days, let it be summer months plus 1 day as a bonus. This way I will be able to track my success, what I have done that is useful for my business and where I lost my time for nothing.
I will post all small and big thing I have done that day, will place some ratings and charts of my performance and other things like that. I will post where I sent my previous works, where I applied as a candidate for a job, what design and development works I have done, what projects I have been involved in.
I am going to let users easily direct me in my decisions and actions. They will be able to vote for doing this and not doing that. I am trying to build this site visually appealing and easy to use, add infographics. I had good and bad times being a freelancer but I like this business and I am not to give up. I want to set objectives and one of them is my monthly income.
So, one of my questions to you fellows who gets the bulk of income freelancing, do you receive at least $7000 or so per month doing your design/development work? It surely can be a difficult task but at least a good shift to that figure in three months will be great to achieve. Do you think it will be interesting for someone like me to track how I am getting out of the pit? Undoubtedly, I am open to any new suggestions regarding the site, please share your ideas about how to make it interesting, what info you would like to track in details and so on. Thanks!
20 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 64.5 ms ] threadI do, however, like the idea of cash flow transparency, since people tend to really consume that type of content.
/also, paragraphs.
I'm gravely concerned that it will not work for professional services. Clients hold preconceived notions about the value of an hour of work. And it's blissfully unencumbered from any of the risk factors that produce true (2-3x FTE) consulting bill rates.
More importantly, very few --- maybe none! --- consultancies are surefooted enough to have a consistent bill rate established across all their clients. Contract rates happen on a case-by-case basis. As the dynamics of your business change, so will your rates. Publishing your cash flows just invites drama.
And who, exactly, is it helping? Other people with 92 days to dig themselves out of a hole? Get yourself out of the hole first.
I would strongly suggest you not let users direct your decisions. Most people are not freelancers. Most career advice I receive from people outside IT is shockingly bad. ("Glad to hear about the business being successful, Patrick. You know, you could go back, get your MA, and then get a nice secure government job! They'd love having someone with business experience! And you'd get a pension!") The intersection of "people who are in financial difficulty" (and would be interested in reading that blog) and "people who give good career advice" is vanishingly small, partly because many people who are experiencing financial difficulty got there as a predictable results of choices which they feel committed to justify.
With regards to freelancing: first, get out of the mindset that you are providing development/design. You are solving business problems for clients. Dev/design are two things in the toolbox that help you do that. Can you earn more than $7k or so solving problems that prevent businesses from making money? Yes. Absolutely yes. The people who you need to convince to buy your services to do this are not poor and, by and large, are not actively interested in the problems of poor people. "Hey hire me because I'm poor" will not be a successful tactic with them. "Hey hire me because I have a track record of producing useful things which made rich people like yourself even richer" is much closer to the mark.
If you are going to write a blog denominated in 92 days, anything other than "92 days of riveting new success stories from my clients" is a waste of your energy.
In particular, do not tell the rags-to-riches story. Prospective clients, like it or not, will see the "rags" and discount your bill rate 35%.
With very good execution, it may be possible to overcome those issues or even turn the whole thing into a positive with his clients. But it's a big risk.
The problem here is that you have a family to feed and you are looking to get out of a financial pit. I wouldn't suggest such a route (freelance web dev) without a nest of savings to rely on.
I don't think you would benefit from posting your numbers. What freelance web developers make is very personal. I have seen "internet marketers" post monthly earnings on their sites but that seems less personal to me and these people generally work for themselves (freelancers always have a boss... the client.)
This feels like a terrible idea to me. I've been consulting for a while and the last person that clients want is to hire someone who 1. can't make decisions without asking the Internet for help, and 2. puts all the tiny details about their work out there for the public to see.
Do not do this.
I think you should go buy Gerald Weinberg's "Secrets of Consulting" now - it's a quick read. Freelance/consulting work is about solving other people's problems, not putting your own problems out there for other people to solve.
Additionally, it's going to take more than 93 days to build a following on your blog. And I would doubt that you get very good advice from visitors, especially at first.
If you're main focus is to make $X per month to support your family, stop doing anything that doesn't make you money. Stop reading HN/reddit/cnn. Stop writing your blog. Stop asking for advice. If you cannot draw a line from what you are doing to profit, stop doing it and switch to making money.
Blogs are hugely narcissistic, which is only going to take your time away from making money. There are some great ones out there, but it sounds like you need to make money, not navel gaze.
I highly doubt that you will make any significant money off of your blog in 93 days. Or ever. You know where you will make money? By solving an existing problem for a business that increases their income. In exchange, they will give you money (so much better than the attention that blog visitors give you!)
However, in my personal experience (a long lesson to learn!), it's a bit like Field of Dreams thinking: "if you built it, they will come." That does work, but it's a long process, and I suspect it's generally a side effect of the blog.
Think about it this way: is your ideal client really going to be spending a lot of their time reading blogs like yours? I would guess not; the people who would likely read it would be other technical people.
When I went from Field of Dreams thinking to direct line to profit thinking, I was amazed at how much work I was doing that had no chance of yielding income. I discovered I was only doing profit-generating things for about 2 hours per day. I thought I was busy and going to be successful, but I was just wasting my time.
HTH. Good luck to you. I think you definitely can make that much money per month in income, but make sure you have a definite value prop.
FWIW, when I was doing blog/email marketing/web design work, I found the best path was thus. Get them to sign up for a webinar on your blog, and give a live webinar via GoToMeeting once a week. That was my best success -- I think the key was that it qualified leads a ton, and gave me a chance to exhibit my professionalism and skillset before I asked for money.
I really need to work on getting better clients!