Q: Experiences with Freelance Web Sites?
About 2 years ago, I tried freelance work with Web sites (Upwork, Freelanceer, Guru, etc.) and it seemed like a race to the bottom. The freelancer side of the market was crowded, with many obviously unqualified candidates making preposterously low bids on jobs. Buyers seemed unwilling to pay for higher quality work.
I wonder what experiences anyone here has had with this sort of thing?
A lot of buyers prefer the cheapest offer - that's true. But you do not need to join the rat race.
If you have a portfolio, experience, then you can expect better pay.
Submit what you think its worth (ignore other offers, do not worry about your being higher), but be realistic about it.
Barely anyone will pay on those markets for a designer with weak portfolio asking for $50/ph.
Also, keep in mind to submit your proposals to people from wealthy countries - asking for $50/ph from the Indian or Thai company will usually get you ignored (after all, they have a vast, qualified workforce available locally for much less).
When I started Freelancing, I asked for $30/ph even if I should have asked for more (when I was doing marketing, I would ask for $100/ph). But I was building reviews on a freelancing site and trying to make connections, so that was fine.
After three months I asked for $35/ph for long-term projects and $50/ph for short-term ones. Thanks to few reviews I had, I saw no drop in customers.
After a while, I switched to $65/ph for long-term projects and $100/ph for short term. Once again I have seen no drop in the number of customers. After another six months, I have set my prices to $175/ph for a day, $150/ph for a week and $125/ph for a month, with excellent results. When I have a corporate customer knocking to my doors, I usually ask for much more, but that is only because they do not care about the hourly rate as much. While I have seen a drop in the number of customers, I am okay with that, since I grandfathered all my previous clients, so I still get the bills paid, and I enjoy working on familiar projects (mostly the ones, that I created in the first place).
When I was charging between $30-35/ph, I would send ~20 offers before getting one accepted. Now it's more like 5-6 offers, and I usually pick 1 out of 2-3 to work on (so I send 15 offers and decide to work on one job out of 3 willing customers).
I know a lot of people getting discouraged with freelancing when they submit 3-5 proposals and don't get a job. You need to send at least 30 proposals to test the waters. You need to have unique parts of your proposals (I use the unique header of 5-6 sentences dedicated to the offer and then ~10 sentences of copy paste).
I hope that helps.
This is the strategy to follow. Start small, prove yourself (even to yourself), then go big!
Did you get all those high priced clients contacting you through UpWork? What is your niche and skill?
I do not use UpWork. I got few gigs there but then moved elsewhere as I do not like its UI/UX and the fee structure. I prefer not to mention the site I use now (I do not want my name, and that website appear in Google associated with this comment).
I am a Full Stack Developer with solid Marketing skills (I was running my marketing agency for few years). At the moment I mostly work on creating web apps for universities/schools, online shops, health and ecology related companies. My customers do not know a bit about development and expect me to do the work and report on progress occasionally without them being bothered - they trust me to do that.
I have got some customers from recommendations. I make sure that my customers love to work with me and they are always getting more than they pay for (doing some extra research, picking better solutions for them, telling them if they can save money on development by choosing a different path with the same outcome).
The other customers I get are from job ads. I swoop the market for job offers posted a day ago with very few submissions. Often some high-value offers are hidden there as they require particular skill to complete. As a full stack developer, I do not mind learning a new skill quickly.
I am moving away from freelancing websites and cutting off all the grandfathered customers as we speak (they got two months notice, six weeks left). I am preparing to launch my blog and trying to get customers through that to cut out the middleman and focus on other things.
Just a note, I am not working full time on those high paying gigs. They are only occasional, and they help me to have a more relaxed financial situation. I plan to move entirely to those rates within two months time once I finish working for all grandfathered customers.
Cool...thanks for the answers man!
In the summer of 2002 I was abruptly terminated from a web design job after 2 weeks. I hadn't completed college, but I'd done intern work on our university athletics website so I could stumble my way around Photoshop and HTML. I found a website called Rentacoder and started bidding desperately on fixed-bid projects using that little bit of sports website work as evidence.
I won a few tiny ASP coding projects and also some graphic design projects, but really found traction in a specific niche: XP-style icons. I spent the next few years doing nothing but XP-looking icon sets, both through Rentacoder as well as direct unsolicited clients that found my website (I don't know how, nature finds a way I guess.)
Wasn't a lot of dough, but enough for what I needed at that time. I failed to really parlay service and grow beyond a 1-man service company, which I kick myself for. However, one of my last Rentacoder clients that began as a $150.00 fixed-bid graphic design project grew into a full-time position for 3+ years with a VC-funded start up working with super smart people who knew way more than I. So that was good.
Rentacoder proper always felt like a pretty straight-shooting outfit, I always got paid and disputes (which were rare) were settled decisively. And at the time, it was purely eat-what-you kill, vs. nowadays you have to pay to even bid on projects and even then get upsold six ways from Sunday. It feels very dirty now.
Rentacoder's been swallowed up twice, first VWorker and now Freelancer. I've purchased work there in recent years, but would not seriously bid on anything for the reasons you allude - it's a race to the bottom and although there are exceptions on both sides of the vertical it really takes a trained eye to spot them.
My 20/20 hindsight lesson is that 1) buyers need to see proof and total assurance that you can complete their project successfully before you even KNOW what their project is, and usually this is portfolio/case study that does the trick. The more proof, the more comfortable it makes people feel. Then 2) they'll look at the rate card differently, and again what I call "good" buyers won't start with price, but they'll get there eventually so price yourself according to what the market or situation will bear. I'm sure everyone else here knows those #s better than I do.
Bart summed it up well. And I'll add - just be really good, keep getting better and be patient and be persistent. It takes 100s of attempts to get to a "yes" sometimes and these same qualities that make designers good.
It can be good as either a buyer or a seller, but you have to know how to handle the onslaught of bullshit from either end.
As a seller, the best technique I've found is to hunt for higher-budget projects, make a proposal which demonstrates you've read the project requirements, and if you've got the time, mock up a demo that addresses some basic functionality of the project so they know you can do the work before hiring you. This also helps you flesh-out a portfolio to use to bid on further work. For example, if a client wants to create an e-commerce website it could be worthwhile to set up a basic store, customize it with the client's company name. Add a custom module that fulfills one or more of the client's specific requirements, and add it to your bid proposal in the vein of "In fact, I'm so confident in my ability to deliver this project that I've set up a demo site that addresses your need for product customization. You can check it out here: http://..." It requires a little more effort than the typical "space monkey' race-to-the-bottom developer is willing or able to put forth, but my conversion rate was well over 50% with that technique. It limits the number of applications you can make in a day, but if you keep each of the projects in its own little directory it lets you build up a portfolio you can use to quickly apply to future jobs with minor customization.
As a buyer, it's important to test applicants prior to making a hiring decision. Any serious freelance applicant won't mind proving their skill. Don't focus on written questions or coding challenges. Instead, give them a simple task that can be completed in a short amount of time. Keep in mind that freelancers are busy and don't like working for free -- so try to keep it to under an hour, unless the project you're hiring for will be a large project with a budget to match. For example, if you're hiring someone to build a custom WordPress plugin that interacts with the Twitter API, try asking them to set up a basic WordPress installation with a custom plugin that posts a tweet every time a button is clicked. For smaller projects -- say less than a week -- browsing the freelancer's portfolio will suffice, although you've got to contact the sites in the portfolio to make sure they were really built by the freelancer in question. You wouldn't believe how often people lie about building stuff they didn't build. Sometimes a quick sanity-check with https://builtwith.com/ can be used to determine if someone is BSing about which technologies they used on a given site. (Although old projects are likely to have been redeveloped since.) Getting in touch with the site is also a great way to check references and ask if there were any problems with the freelancer in question or just ask if they'd hire them again. For more info on hiring developers, you can check out http://how-to-hire-developers.com/
I have a bit of experience when I ran a web development agency. Never really went well. We found that the only things we could outsource were non-innovative, non-creative 'paint-by-numbers' type stuff. HTML markup etc. Nothing that requires in-depth thought.
This comment was deleted 8 years ago