Any freelancers out there? How did you start?
I'm a self taught programmer and confident in my ability to build rails apps. I've had an internship working with front end technologies, but other than that I have no other professional experience. I'd like to get into freelancing and my idea so far is to try and get some small/easier jobs done on Upwork to build up a portfolio. Money isn't important at this point. Any advice on how to get started would be very much appreciated! My goal is basically to be able to work a few months on freelance projects and then take a trip for a few weeks and repeat.
I started freelancing in college and continued through my 20s. I had about three really good jobs during that time period, and every single one of them came about the same way: I built a cool project on my own that was highly visible, and a company came knocking that either wanted something similar for themselves or just wanted my general skillset.
If you want to emulate this path, step #1 is to build something interesting that will be a hit with some audience. Your big advantages here are that you can study the audience in advance, and the space of ideas you can operate in is huge, because you don't need to make money from the idea itself.
For example, I helped my brother get a contract job by suggesting he build Flexbox Defense. It was obvious that would be a hit on HN, because they love code, and it's a free tool that helps them learn to code with a creative twist.
Probably a better idea than copying me is to go to someone who can teach you more directly how to freelance. I recommend:
solid reading material thank you!
Hey Bungalow, I was going to write a response but someone forwarded me this just a few minutes ago and it's basically what I would say: http://typicalprogrammer.com/how-to-start-freelancing-and-get-clients.html
Aside from that, register a domain and start building your portfolio immediately. Having a couple of live sites will be better than the kind of piecemeal work you'll find on Upwork/etc.
Feel free to email me if you have any questions.
Ooo, that's a great article!! Thanks for sharing!!
awesome read! sounds like my plan was the exact wrong one XD
I have some freelancing experience (UpWork) I'd say so far I made about 2K over the course of 2 years haha. So definitely not my main source of bread. 1K of that though I made in a couple of months because I actually got a real hourly-paying gig.
You definitely need something to show your competence. I'd suggest you build some projects, throw them on a website and put them on your UpWork portfolio.
Then it is imperative that you apply to jobs that you can actually do. Take the time to read it, then respond personally to each post as those stick out more than "general or template responses".
Rails sounds more niche/harder than basic front end HTML/CSS stuff so maybe you'll have less competition usually within a few minutes 50 people + have applied to a job, can you imagine reading through those potential applicants. I've done it, it sucks a lot of people to choose from.
Then what is also important is to (assuming you're hired) deliver on time, get that 5-star review and keep it... most jobs have a 90% satisfaction and above. If you do stick around on UpWork be aware of that, don't leave jobs idle as my nearly 100% score dropped to 88% when I left some minor jobs open that clients did not respond to.
Mostly just try, once you've shown that you're capable, keep applying. It's hard as a clean slate, I think I had to apply to 20 jobs before I got 1.
Ultimately though in my opinion freelance/hourly work sucks. Better to build something that multiplies your time/makes money without your presence. That is the dream anyway.