Freelancers - how did you land your first client?
What strategies did you use? What did you do wrong, and what did you do right?
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What strategies did you use? What did you do wrong, and what did you do right?
Github profile and open-source work. Clients are coming by themselves.
+1
Upwork. I took up small tasks and built up my profile to top rated. Then better clients came to me.
Get involved with your local communities. The most valuable asset in any service based business is trust. It's much easier to build trust if you see that person days in and out and you know you belong to the same community.
I've been freelancing for over a decade and 99% of projects came from someone I knew, or simply by pure chance.
The last project happened purely by chance. I was learning to use a product and wrote a intro tutorial on it and shared it on Twitter. Next thing I know, the CMO of that company contacts me and I start writing paid articles for them.
You have to do stuff and meet people. Even in these times you can write blog posts or contribute to open source projects. If you know a topic in depth, write a book and sell it on Gumroad.
A couple of responses have said "cold email". So how did you decide who to cold email? How many cold emails did you have to send to get a response?
Cold email is actually pretty broad now that I realized, when I made the comment below.
To be specific, I sent a mixture of cold emails, linkedin messages, and bit of googling.
When I first started, I probably would send out close to 20 cold emails a day.
After a while, that starts to become inbound because of word of mouth and referrals.
For context, I’m a copywriter. I see a lot of the freelancers here are devs.
Thanks for the additional information!
I sent a cold email while in the middle of a particularly boring class one day. It wasn't even really development work, I was fixing up their product copy directly in the source code. Made 500 dollars and felt so cool!
DM'd someone in response to a tweet.
I wasn't even doing consulting at the time but thought it was something I could do.
I had no idea what I was doing, how to negotiate or how to invoice.
I hope freelancers land their first client using Glyph (www.glyphleads.com) 😇
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Soliciting people through cold email works for me. Cold calls too.
I got my first clients through my project, One Word Domains - some of my users who saw the quality of the product that I've built approached me with proposals to build tools/webapps that were along the same tangent.
Do open-source work and tell people about wherever you can.
Contributing to an existing project is good but it's even better if you create something of your own and people start using.
It doesn't have to be the next React but something like a component library, website template, CMS or static site generator theme, wrapper around an existing API.
Boast about it on Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook groups, appropirate subreddits, write a blog post about it.
You can also start blogging and write articles targetted towards your ideal clients.
You can checkout communities like r/forhire, IndieHackers Jobs group, Monthly Hacker News Freelancer thread, etc.
I run a blog (though it's not as active because I'm too busy with client work) about freelancing if you're interested. It's Kodeblok.
I would love your feedback.
If you have any more questions feel free to reach out.
Adem
We won a hackaton and the organizing company approached me.
Literally just cold email.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.