Ask HN: How to move beyond “freelancer”?

Alas this also means that I often need to actually turn up to the clients office.

Working though an agency has similar issues, as you describe, but let's face it - no-one likes paying their bills or pay the full whack for stuff.

It's just the cost of doing business.

The only way (that I can see) to totally escape is to actually make something other people will want to buy and sell direct.

Some random things I learnt from the transition :

- The most interesting projects rarely (mostly never) relies on a one person "team". Big projects are important for the customer and they need to know they will have someone to contact even if it's holiday time. You want the true customer to buy from you interesting projects : don't be alone.

- Once you have a team, you will look for interesting projects. They are more complicated to get. They often come from medium / large organization. Those orgs. have important inertia. Projects can take weeks of month to start. Chase multiple projects at the same time.

- Once you have bigger project you must learn to make precise time evaluation. It is really complicated. It must be done before the project is sold but you must not spend too much time on it. It is key since you want to earn money (no brainer) but mostly to have a smooth production calendar.

In my case, we are just a team of two. I spend half time in sales activities and the other developing websites. My coworker is full time dev.

If you want to discuss in details, reply here or email me : paul@agence-donatello.fr

Good luck ! There are freakingly high mountains of demands and needs outside. You can take your piece.

The TLDR is: package a small part of your expertise as a product, and sell it as a SaaS. Having dependable recurring revenue is a game changer.

What are you doing to find work directly?

You need to hire a couple people to write code, and start selling full time. This is where things get hard. I haven't made it work correctly yet either. Good luck!

Otherwise you will hire the cheapest labor -which is yourself...and you'll never break free of being a freelancer.

My personal advice...the reason raising your rates isn't working for you is because "you don't get the work." This is key...if you need the work, you will never successfully raise your rates.

I have fetched $350/hr for SEM consulting...when you can easily hire an experienced pro for $50 and someone more experienced than me for $175. How do I charge that much? It's simple. My opportunity cost let's me turn down lower paying gigs.

The secret to winning a negotiation is going in believeing you can walk away without feeling like you missed out. If you can walk away....you are in the driver's seat.

You're being nickel-and-dimed because you don't value yourself enough. Stop charging hourly rates and stop working for middlemen.

[0] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245960#up_4247615

The "true client" proves there's business for you to get which will pay you what you want to be paid. Go out and find the customers. That's really what it comes down to.

I found that the key was to find clients who value your work. Working with individuals or small businesses can be tough because they are usually highly constrained by budget and do not understand everything that goes in to what you do. They want freelancers because they can't afford full time people. They will compare you to the rates they can find on Craigslist or Elance and balk when you require market rates.

Instead, find startups with technical people doing the recruiting or large companies with established roles and processes for freelancers. They will at least understand market rates and what you actually do.

You also need to have the power to say no to clients. That usually means savings and the willingness to wait long periods between jobs in order to find the right one. For me, the hit rate of was 1 out of every 8-10 job opportunities.

1. Jim Camp's negotiation book, "Start with No": http://www.amazon.com/Start-No-Negotiating-Tools-that-ebook/... One key takeaway: You can refuse to compromise on your rates, provided that you can afford to walk away if necessary.

2. Patrick McKenzie's (patio11's) advice for moving beyond the "freelancer" title, in particular http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro... and http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/17/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-...

I used these strategies to double my daily rate as an Ember.js consultant from $1k to $2k, and it was a fairly straightforward exercise in the end.

People have suggested building our own product. That is all well and good, and honestly at some point you will want to stop selling your time because your time is finite and can't be scaled. That's when product development becomes more attractive. But if you are still having fun writing other peoples stuff and just want to get out of a rut and increase your rate then you can do that.

Pricing is a skill, we charge weekly rates (based on 32hrs) per person and honestly most clients equate that to an hourly rate in the end. We also set a minimum charge for all projects and bill based upon value delivered instead of hours when appropriate, for example, we just picked up a small project < 1 week in duration where we charged $7k. Every time a potential client starts trying to negotiate our rate down, I move the conversation to value and most of the time I can win solid deals and I don't negotiate my rate down. I have in the past, but once someone knows you will negotiate your rate, they will always go for more and you end up in a death spin to the bottom.

1. Word-of-mouth.

2. I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, and we occasionally get pitches for the "true client," and we always tell the would-be middlemen to just send the true client to us. This almost never happens, and in reality there is rarely a true client, and even if there is the middleman won't pay our rate because we're already near the top of the market (see point 4).

3. You might not be able to move beyond "freelancer" without getting a conventional job or starting a startup.

4. If you can't find a way to charge more you may have found the market rate for what you're doing and who you're doing it for. In my consulting firm ~$200/hour is the top market rate. We can't functionally charge more.

5. I don't want to be a jerk, but I wonder how your sales and marketing skills rank. I wrote more about that issue here: http://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/07/how-i-learned-about-assert.... In many small consulting firms, sales and marketing are at least as important as product. Have you thought about hiring a business or voice coach? What's your sales funnel like?

I do know that we're in the process of hiring a firm to re-do our website, and we found a couple through http://wpengine.com/partners/ and one through our ISP. One guy we sent an email to, and he said he didn't talk on the phone. Not surprisingly he's off the list: If he's that uninterested or busy before we send him a lot of money, what's he going to be like after?. We found an outfit named Orange Blossom: http://orangeblossommedia.com/ that has an impressive portfolio, and they seemed to understand the non-standard stuff we needed. CohoWeb: http://cohoweb.com/ is another favorite, and they came through our ISP. In both cases their sales guys were efficient.

Clients often have a hard time evaluating consultants. That's one reason we've been writing a blog for the last seven years: We're professional writers, and the blog does at least show that we can write, and it also attracts a lot of potential clients via search traffic. How are your clients finding you?

If your sales and marketing are not very hot—and I'm not saying that, but I am saying it's possible—you may want to consider trying to work for Orange Blossom or someone else on the WP-Engine list.

You simply build your brand, including a website, a blog and attract people to it. Get known widely (by having content that people share) and deeply (through good work and referrals). This takes time to build. But it's like any other brand.

Basically, you need a brand, and cultivate relationships. Probably the best two pieces of advice I can give you are:

1) Make it safe to fail, so you can iterate and try better things. For example, have 100 users and only try a particular pricing or offer with 5 of them. A/B test various website designs, email marketing strategies, etc. Partner with one or more business developers who are passionate about client relations, and give them % of PROJECTS, not the company. This way, if anything fails, it doesn't bring down the whole thing. And you can do this "all day" because your expected value is always nonzero, so the more you do it, the more you get. You can even hire others to do your job for you - again, on commission. Like 2 levels of MLM.

2) Establish relationships before you need them. Network, and let people know what you need without pushing them. Over time when you really need something, you do 90% of the work (set up the whole experience etc) and let them know how they can be of help by doing only 10% of the work. Something simple and well-defined that starts off your onboarding process. Inbound leads basically, and "warm introductions".

First of all, pick a niche industry and own it. Too many agencies I see are just out to make money by developing as many apps and sites as possible. This means a lot of cold calling into different industries and talking to a lot of different people with different needs. If you stick with one industry, pretty soon, you'll find areas where you can really start to focus. This in turn makes you valuable to not only business, but then your name starts to get passed around since you have specific ways you're helping other people in that industry. Less cold calling and more referrals is what follows then. I would also start locally, get as many customers in your local niche then broaden out, go regional, then national.

Secondly, the one thing that has made my agency successful is minimizing overhead. It's basically me and my partner. We work from our homes, but are in constant contact with each other (technology is great ain't it?). This means, no employees to pay, no office rent, no heating bills, no additional hardware or furniture. It allows us to keep our rates fairly low and still have a very nice profit margin since we have so little upfront costs. This also benefits our clients since it saves them money too.

Lastly, I use a progressive billing system. I start out working with my clients on an hourly rate - mainly doing consultation work. Then once we start having steady work, I go to them and say, "Hey, you're paying a lot for my hourly rate since and we're always doing work for you, why don't we just set up a monthly total (a 5-8% discount off my hourly rate) with a minimum of hours I need to work for your company each month and go from there?" 90% of our clients have switched over to a monthly or yearly billing subscription. This is a biggie since you don't have to worry so much about where your next project is coming from, you can really focus on your clients and know you have a steady stream of revenue coming in. This also allows you to continue to cold call and bring in new business - makes a huge difference compared to working project to project.

Hope this helps!

wrapping your head around this and going without a paycheck is tough. most people aren't tough enough to deal with it, including you, until now. this is why agencies can charge 200% markup on your estimate AND screw you for 40% on the backend.

Build and sell your own product or service. This also will carry way higher residual value than hit-and-run freelancing gigs.

I'm getting my cofounders to read it now, I first read it 12 years ago, and I still think it's the single best introduction to business and sales skills I've seen, despite having read a LOT of such books before, during and since my MBA. Good luck with the business!

How good are your communication skills? In consulting/freelance/contract this is huge. You will never be able to charge as much as someone who has great rapport with the customer, articulates points in a clear way, and shows understanding of the big picture goals.

How big are the companies you work with? As a rule of thumb small companies are not usually paying the highest rates. Small companies have more interesting work, but pick your poison.

What percentile are you capabilities in? This requires some brutal self honesty but usually it's harder to get top rates if you are not at the top of your field.

Do you try to work remote? Jobs usually pay more if you are willing to stay on site most of the time. Hate this but it's true.

Do you have an impressive portfolio of work to show? When people see it do they "ok, thanks", or do they say "wow that's really cool"?

The good news is you can change and improve everything on this list.

If you don't have a huge history as a 'company', that's not a weakness, because you can pay more attention to each new client you get.