Major shakeup at my company
So... Today our CTO and Head of AI was let go, I'm actually a bit nervous this shakeup will result in layoffs going forward. To be very honest, I don't really want to work for another big company again. I have really enjoyed the last two years spent being an entrepreneur and software dev, its a ton of ambiguity but I am very driven and love the thrill of building things from the ground up. I'm considering taking another crack at freelancing. My biggest problem has been an inability to close clients. There are a ton of reasons why that may be but that is where I seem to have the biggest issues. I attend Dev and Biz meetups regularly, I've been able to build a large network in my area, so I have been able to build some momentum.
Areas that I think I can improve:
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Build a portfolio, I don't have anything that's deployed, I have considered creating a few landing pages with a landing page generator, and some web/ mobile apps just to showcase my abilities.
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Launch a product (next week I should have my landing page up!)
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Following up on old leads, I hate pestering people but I feel like that's a part of sales.
Any suggestions would be amazing if you need a Dev, lets chat!
@Scottworks what kind of a developer are you? I'm assuming a full-stack dev?
Freelance is feast or famine, I've been there and done that. It sounds like you need to probably partner up with a marketing/growth creative. That being said, don't fault yourself for not closing. There are a lot of 'I need this project now...back-burnered' prospective clients out there. Folks love to talk, but talk is rather cheap.
It's a PIA to separate the wheat from the chaff, but if you persevere, you will succeed. It will be a grind.
I haven't come across too many tire kickers here on IH. Everyone seems really motivated to actually accomplish something! 🙃
Yes, I am a full-stack dev building Java/ Javascript web applications.
Keep your eye out on this community. Really good full-stack devs are hard to come by.
It will be really easy to close clients if you had a portfolio of work - the demand is insane. I can't afford to hire someone and pay them to "try" to do what I need accomplished. Too much of the time, even with a portfolio of work its hard to tell freelancers efficiency and I need to perform a code test (see code structure, see if takes them 1 hour or 4 hours to solve a problem, at hourly rates 20-40$ an hour 1-4 hour difference is huge cost driver on projects that can be thousands of hours) - this code test needs to take a good programmer 30 min, and a bad one hours, and the bad ones wont even bother taking it for "free".
If your unwilling to invest in time to build up a portfolio of all your skills to clearly and quickly demonstrate what you can do and at what cost and with what degree of quality, you cannot expect to close clients based on trust - that you can try and do at a big corporation that can afford that kind of thing.
Very good points here!
"Too much of the time, even with a portfolio of work its hard to tell freelancers efficiency"
This is a very interesting problem 👆🏾
Do you think it would be helpful to add a description of the features price, and time estimate for each project in the showcase? For example:
Basic Landing Page ($300, 2-4 Days)
Projects are so custom its really difficult to price development projects like that. Like payment integration can be a $100 problem or a $4000 problem. You can only price it the way you suggested if its something super simple like an ecommerce sales site or something, but people building something simple like that typically aren't going to pay you any good money - the level of competition for cheap solutions like that is insane, I would never waste my time competing in that space.
Its really about demonstrating your technical capabilities in such a way that I can look at it and extrapolate from what you have done, to see if I can use those skills in a different way for what I want done.
BAD (What everyone does):
I can build you a static site with payment integration for $300.
GOOD (What the 1% do):
Here is a site I've built with Laravel and integrated the backend with NoSQL running on AWS with 100 active users. The payment gateway is done through Stripe Connect and Paypal Pro because its a marketplace solution in which the transactions take place p2p. It took me about 15 hours to build and here is a sample of the type of code you can expect out of me. Highly skilled in PHP, Java,Ruby on Rails, NoSQL, AWS, Digital Ocean, My rate is $30/hr.
Literally anyone who can do the latter will $30/hr will get hired IMMEDIATELY. In fact they are impossible to find because their market price is probably close to 2x that!
$30 to build a marketplace, in my opinion, is basically free labor!
You can command a much higher salary than $30, just by focusing on building efficient, static websites for small businesses.
Just to play devils advocate:
You can easily flip your two bad & good examples, because the bad example is just someone providing a vague outlook of what they do vs. someone who can go into detail.
Anyone can build a static website, definitely. But no one is looking for a static website.
Businesses, especially small service based ones, are looking for websites that convert leads, acquire new leads, increase conversions, basically a website that is actually working for the business.
That isn't easy.
Also, there are plenty of super talented, full stack or backend developers that can whip up a CRUD project in just a couple of hours, but their front end work is abysmal.
I can't tell you how many cookie cutter, plain & boring bootstrap websites I've seen.
This advice is worth its weight in gold, thank you so much.
Sounds like you've got a great foundation laid with good connections; however, like @c0nsilience suggested, that could mean nothing for actual work.
But your three-point list is a good one. Wanted to add to the list:
All solid points, I started practicing my pitch before meetups and went from nothing to discussing potential jobs/ getting emailed for followups. I can definitely start building more of a presence online as well.
Are you looking for clients on a freelancing platform?
I was using Upwork heavily but it seemed like people were most active on it while I work at my full-time job.
Lean Startup and Lean B2B are both great books on sales/marketing/communication. From my own experience I think most devs aren't great at sales because we don't like to be pestered so don't want to do it to others. I've not landed a first customer yet so can't say what tactics work.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago