Ask HN: How do you find clients?
Hi, I'm thinking about doing some freelance web design and marketing for a bit of extra cash.
Aside from cold calls what are some good ways to obtain clients?
Aside from cold calls what are some good ways to obtain clients?
83 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadWord of mouth is the most powerful way to get business, of course. So the first step is to let the people you know know that you're available. Tell the people who might need your skills that you have them; if they don't need you, they might know someone who does. (This is a good use for LinkedIn.)
Have an elevator pitch ready that summarizes your tech specialties (e.g. HTML5, Dojo), business expertise ("have created several websites for realtors"), and a sense of the best match that hints at your rate ("affordable for small businesses"). Have a web portfolio ready. Update your LinkedIn page.
Depending on how much "a bit of extra cash" you can get started with sites like elance.com but my sense is that the money isn't all that great. (That perception might be inaccurate.) If all you're looking for is "a little extra" and an opportunity to expand your skills, it might still be a good idea.
I think there are two important aspects of "word of mouth" however. First, is you have to get the word out. Don't be shy about telling family, friends, colleagues, people you meet in a bar, etc. about what you do. Depending on your audience, be prepared to "present" your skills in an appropriate way. For people who may not be your direct client but will be acting as the courrier of your message, keep it simple – you probably won't get the business because of what you say to them but because of how they know you out of context from business.
The second important part is to give your clients a great service experience. You don't have to be the best at what you do as long as you find a way to make your clients happy. Clients can then speak to both your product and your service. Client referrals are over 80% of my new business.
Once you get a couple of clients that have regular work your pretty much set
This will help you find your initial contacts, and then hopefully find some ongoing/long term work.
* Sign up for all freelancer Marketplaces: Elance, Odesk, Guru, Freelancer, RentACoder.
* Sign up for RSS feeds for jobs(full time/freelance) in your domain.
* Start bidding, sending out emails to all of the above that apply.
* You're bidding against devs from 3rd world countries(so you will have to price somewhere in the median atleast until you get your first decent folio piece done)
* Also it doesn't matter if your request doesn't exactly apply. Don't be self-selective. Also even if you don't expect to get that job, apply still. Get your name out.
* Be very communicative, friendly and more open than a simple 'Here's my folio' etc. You're trying to sell yourself, so figure out what the client want, customize your pitch. This part will take a bit of hit and trial on your end to figure out how to get the first client reply. If your post looks like others, then you won't get one.
* Work on the side on your own project, something that's production worthy and you can showcase if the above steps haven't worked till then.
* Reply to posts on HN, Ask HN like Who's hiring + Who's hiring a freelancer. Even add yourself to HN contractor list and anything similar you see elswhere.
* Market, Market, Market every chance you get. I used to spend atleast 3-4 hrs initially just sifting through job posts, replying, emailing everyday.
* Remember to raise your prices sooner than you think.
* Recently i've been trying out Google adwords, which haven't really led to a lot of hits. But i've been getting like 1 really good query for like 100 clicks. For the average amount i make per invoice, that ad costs are very minor even at the ridiculous CPCs to hit the front page.
* A lot of people mention word-of-mouth here. This is really the best way. For every satisfied client you're essentially expanding your network exponentially and getting in touch with people you would never have come across. But initially since you might not have a portfolio, it will be difficult to get work this way. Also until you're able to price your work higher than average, you won't get the right kind of clients. And without the right clients you won't get paid higher. So it's a vicious cycle you need to get out of by piling up showcase work as soon as possible.
* With lower rates it will be difficult to sustain work, since you would have to take on more work before the current one is over. Hence your focus suffers and work quality too. So you're hampering your prices, word-of-mouth network further if you take on work and underdeliver. I've been guilty of doing this(probably still am).
* So as soon as you get too much work to handle, double your rates.
PS: I'm one of the third world dev that people on HN are very fond of :-)
PS2: Since i posted the link to my site http://www.cloudshuffle.com at the top of this post. So far i've gotten 51 visitors in 20 minutes. Cheeky i know! but it was on-purpose to prove my point about marketing yourself when you get a chance.
PS3: Also a weird point i noticed. Almost 95% of the traffic so far is European, and not American. That's completely different from Who's hiring/freelancer thread trend i've been seeing for the past 6+ months.
This approach also has a beneficial side-effect. Cheap clients deny the bid. Usually these clients turn out to be the most demanding ones with little understanding of scope or appreciation of your work.
But once i had a couple of portfolio pieces, i bid around the top 5% percentile and now usually much higher on these marketplaces. It gets me the right client who're appreciative and i get to focus on them without worrying about the hours*rate all day long.
Edited the post above.
IMHO one's better off spending time building a few simple apps and communicating your worth to the client than go blackhat from the start.
The first time I freelanced I was so paranoid about getting work I took on silly amounts of work for absurdly low amounts of money. I'd also add bits on to 'sweeten the deal' - "I'll also do X and X and X!" etc.
It just ended up depressing me. I'd be working harder than my friends (in their 'real' jobs) for far less cash, with far less respect from the clients.
Now I'll just set a fair price and stick to it. Decent clients seem to respect you for doing it (and understand you have your own overheads) and there's a much more business like approach to the job (unlike the cheaper clients, who I completely agree, end up the most demanding).
Also, feeling much happier and more valued doing the work makes me want to put in much more of an effort.
I think you might have stuck longer to the lower rate + spec work. The idea is to start low and ramp up very very quickly. Infact initially you should try to double your rates, and adjust(A/B test!) your rate according to response rate.
Also i think rate is not a static thing. It depends on how much work is on your plate, or how less. It also depends on the market. So when tomorrow a lot of these startups go belly up and billion dollar valuations runs dry, so might your work. You will have to adapt accordingly.
If you don't have enough work at a particular rate, there's no harm in claiming a lower rate as a few test data points. You can always bill some hours you might not bill on the higher rate. For eg. sometimes i leave off some of the research hours when i'm billing a higher rate, but i bill them when i bid a lower one for whatever reason.
I guess at the time I was worried about what people might say if I asked for too much - or what would happen if I didn't get any work. It's dreadfully hard to rid yourself of that mindset.
You _never_ want to compete on price. Compete on quality. It's a good idea to eliminate the cheapskates ahead of time.
Good going, Sid. How long did it take you to reach this stage? I have recently started looking out for freelance work, and since I don't much else to show apart from my startup, it has been fairly tough to get high paying clients.
I still haven't signed up on the sites like Elance etc, but looks like might have to bite the bullet soon.
Great advice, especially those three main points Market, Market and Market!
Managing is hard when you're not doing the work, and the quality of the final product will differ. Especially when you're subcontracting, the person you dole out work to will for obvious reasons be cheaper than you are. Hence their quality of work would usually be lower, unless you found someone better than you for much cheaper. But then in that case they will realize that soon enough and leave.
You can minimize it by making sure the tickets etc. are atomic and unambiguous enough. I use mockups, screenshots a lot(especially since i work with english-as-a-foreign-language people). Initially i put in a lot of time QAing stuff. But i was proving to be a bottleneck where i would interact with the client, then divy up work to the devs and then QA it back. I just didn't have the hours to do all that. So i've been making clients become more involved in the process. So allowing them to help out on testing, project-management side and trying to make my presence minimal. Also all communication is kept on tickets, and linked to exact git commits for it. So i can catch up and see where we are, even drop right down to the code to see what changed.
To be honest, it's still a work-in-progress. It's been taking more and more of my time to manage stuff than code productively. So sooner i'll have to think of getting some help on that end.
All my latest gigs came from Twitter or from people contacting me directly after seeing a presentation in conferences (like [1] [2]) or sites I made like hackerbooks [4].
I also get very specialized leads via the open-source project I maintain and which match one of my skills (ETL, activewarehouse [3]).
Make sure you learn skills in demand and create small "marketing/learning" projects while you are not billing!
[1] http://lanyrd.com/2012/rulu/swxtt/
[2] http://lacantine.ubicast.eu/videos/8-mongodb-etl-et-indexati...
[3] http://www.activewarehouse.info/
[4] http://www.hackerbooks.com
2. Serendipity (I know sounds odd and I will probably get down-voted for this.) Don't leave a chance to get your work shown or known. Sometimes, small and seemingly useless leads can lead to huge opportunities.
Try to leverage Social Media, local PR firms, Freelance websites etc.
By some optimizing, keeping my bids low, and disabling Content Network, I was able to get CPA to ~$10; as long as I was converting more than 10% of my leads (which I was), I came out significantly ahead.
Web Development keywords tend to be expensive, so it was cheaper to focus on many long tail terms rather than compete for "wordpress", "web development", etc.
I started out with hundreds of terms related to building and converting sites to WordPress , and used Adwords and Google Analytics data to kill off any term that was costing me significantly without bringing in any leads.
Incidentally, I started out with Content Network enabled, but found that it brought no leads and cost more than search clicks. Not sure if that was click fraud or what, but killing Content Network was the best optimization decision I made.
In short: start or get involved with local tech groups
I manage a user group for the primary language I use, and in over 3 years of full-time freelancing, I've never been without work.
At a former employer we hired him on as a contractor and in the ~3 months he was on contract not a single line of code was ever produced even though there were promises made every week. Would not use again.
That said, as a past CF developer there is TON of ColdFusion work out there. Sure it is not glamorous but there are a lot worse things you could be doing for $$ :)
That said, I feel you are calling me out in a public forum is a bit inappropriate. To say I didn't produce a single line of code is a bold statement. As you called me out in a public forum, I'd be interested in discussing publicly. As your statement has the potential to cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars over my career, I realize personal litigation is an option, but I'm a civil person who would prefer healthy discourse, even when my character is attacked. However, that doesn't seem possible, as I have no clue who you are. I have chosen not to hide behind a made-up identity. You, however have the username "hackernews": I assume you are an employee of YCombinator? I doubt it, and to that extent, your username has the potential to be a libelous misrepresentation of Paul Graham's brand.
If you do not have the professional integrity to identify yourself, feel free to let me know who you are at a ColdFusion conference; I am a speaker at many of them.
There's plenty of people I've met which haven't directly contributed to my bottom line, but to try to look at everyone as a potential $ is a wrong approach. I enjoy trying to find referrals for other people I meet, and I think that's come back to me a few times (unexpectedly, but not that surprising, perhaps).
Couple other random thoughts:
"Selling the Invisible" (beckwith?) - useful to read. Not specifically tech-oriented, but will get you in the right frame of mind.
"Million Dollar Consulting" (weiss?) - may give you a different perspective on freelance consulting.
Contact local design shops to see if they need an extra pair of hands on call.
Put up a portfolio website with a phone number. Then answer the phone if someone calls.
gentle yet shameless plug: http://indieconf.com is being held again this year to cover precisely these sorts of topics - how to get clients, how to not get ripped off, etc - we'll have 18-21 sessions total - I'm confirming them with speakers this week, so the site doesn't yet reflect the full schedule.
I don't quite have that as a standard reaction to all client requests all the time, as I'll often ask more questions and try to engage them a bit first before the 'this is what it will cost' bit, but that's generally the direction I go in.
I think tech people have a hard time with this response because they're often unsure of their own skills. At least, I know that's the case with a few friends of mine who rarely think about "the business side" of things. I've done this long enough now where i know that anything someone asks me for can be done, it's just a matter of figuring out how.
However, the flip side of this is that I've seen the result of people (and possibly even been this person) just saying "yes" to everything, building it, and it not really working. I do think some customers have been burned by that - a dev who claims to be able to do anything, then delivers them crap, charges a fortune, then leaves a mess for someone else to clean up. After they've gone through that a couple of times, they're wary of anyone who claims to be able to do anything.
I've learned to try to be more cautious how I phrase my abilities, because I know how it can appear. In general, anything someone wants done, I can make happen. It doesn't mean I will be the one doing the work, but I can bring in the appropriate skilled people when needed. That's a function of age, in that my network is more useful than it was 10 years ago, and possibly wisdom. 10-15 years ago I'd always try to build everything myself, and sometimes ended up with subpar stuff.
Aside from that, just network as much as you can. All of my other leads come from friends and acquaintances.
I've learned this from my own experience writing/maintaining various open source libraries centered on using Parse with Ruby. The rapid growth of Parse has caused at least a handful of their thousands of developers to want to use it with Ruby (either for a Rails app, or a native iOS app with RubyMotion). Of those people, at least a handful have contacted me looking for a freelancer. Of those people, some have become paying clients.
You need to do more than just write the software though -- you need to be active in discussions where people are looking for software like yours, because that's often how people end up arriving at your software. Ideally the software you're building also supports some other software with a decent user base rather than trying to do something completely independent; that way you have a pre-established target user base who may already be looking for your solution.
Additionally, I started out doing contracted development work, and now I mostly do consulting. It's less stress and easier to predict how long it will take. And I get to spend my development time on my own projects.
A final note: if you contribute to other open-source projects, sometimes you can get in touch with the primary maintainer and have that person forward you work they don't have time to do.
It doesn't have to be open source. As long as it's a community of techies working together to solve a problem, being the Helpful Cheerful Person in the Neighborhood can lead to consulting work.
1) When people come to me and say "I need someone to build X for me," I usually say "I can help you make sure X gets done right." If the person contacting me isn't especially technical, that means I remove the weight from their shoulders of verifying that they actually got what they paid for when they hire another freelancer/contractor to do the job.
2) Sometimes people already have devs either hired internally or managed externally, and they're having trouble and just need someone to come in and tell them how to get back on track. This might involve some code but it wouldn't actually be my job to write the code, just more of a training thing / someone to call.
3) Sometimes startups with non-technical founders in particular just need guidance on what they should actually be doing with technology. They don't know how it could improve their business, but they do know that they like what my software says it can do, and they're not sure what to do next. Usually these people are trying to compensate for a lack of a technical co-founder.
4) A lot of the time the initial email to me isn't looking for a consultant, and the business may not even have considered the idea; but sometimes especially larger institutions know that they want a consultant with intimate knowledge of the software they're working with. You can't get that by hiring a consulting firm.
Transitioning was easy -- I just started telling people I would do consulting instead of development work when they contacted me. I had intentionally not take development work that involved maintenance agreements for some time (I rarely built complete sites; I just built components or additions to my own open-source software). It also helped that I had spent a lot of time meeting with entrepreneurs and hearing about the businesses of people who had previously hired me. But there is a lot to know about consulting just like there is a lot to know about development and it takes some research and experimenting to deliver good experiences.
Here the link to it: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/95nDR8/:IPAD5_eU:aOVZRh4+/free...
Hope it helps
Of the rest, 9% is from ads places in local newspapers and 1% from random web traffic.
Getting started is the hardest part to getting good word of mouth referrals. You need to talk to everyone about your business. Tell your friends about your freelance work. Go to job fairs and talk with prospective employers (look for the smaller places where the owner rather than an hr rep is there). Find where business people congregate and talk to them.
I had to learn the hard way that the only way to get work was to step completely out of my comfort zone and start talking to people.
Good luck!
When companies called me to set up interviews, I said (on the phone) "Turns out I decided I'm going to freelance. What was the project you wanted to interview me for? Perhaps I can help with that, as a freelancer."
I got a lot of business that way and it pretty much started my career.
Because I tried this, and it turned out to be pretty low - like 1 - 2% (which was on the high-end).
So just to get a response, I had to send 50 - 100 emails. Maybe I am misremembering, but it is something like that.
Looking for smaller niches where the respondents won't get 200 replies - is probably a better use case.
That's interesting.
What I do is I find the rare project post that contains an actual specification of some sort which doesn't seem completely ludicrous and is something that I can make a fair start on within 1-3 days of work. I build out a prototype hitting on a few of the major technical aspects of that spec. A significant portion of the time I win the bid after sending them a link to the prototype or a video of it in action.
Another place I found a client was on reddit. Someone posted a job as an ad at the top of the page. It didn't have a real spec but it did hint at some specific technical aspect of the project, so I built a quick prototype based on a related open source system. Then I told them that I wasn't interested in a regular job but rather wanted to work in a freelance capacity (because that is what I wanted).