Stuck in freelancing? How you can use it to your advantage

Many of us are freelancing while building our product. It can be very time consuming and frustrating. It can feel like those demanding clients are just taking too much time away from what we really love and from our future-full-time activity.

But you can use that to your advantage.

Just think about the #1 problem SAAS have, which is... finding customers.

So how about you view those freelancing clients as your SAAS product's customers?

Chances are those clients have hired you as a freelancer for a specific expertise. And chances are that expertise is what you sell, even in a slightly modified format, through your product.

Whether you sell SEO tools, community access, candies, cloth, you name it, you are an expert at that field you chose. (Or maybe the field chose you, but still, an expert you became)

In essence, you're selling the same thing in both situation, just with different strings attached. As a freelancer, you sell your time. As a product owner, you sell $25/m, $50/m plans for the usage of your product.

Now, what if in addition to those $25/$50plans, you also had an enterprise plan, where you sell your time, only via your product?

That's what I do at Polygonjs. I've been working on it for a good 2 years, and during this time, while I could demo it off to old colleagues, it was not yet usable in production. It was not yet time to offer it via the website. But it was very ready for me to use it for client work. And it actually gives me an edge when pitching.

So not only did it allow me to work on very nice projects, the clients requirements gave me tons of ideas of how to improve my product. Which I most likely would not have thought of without working with them.

So those clients were beneficial to me in a number of ways:

• I got paid (with all of them, touching wood).
• That battle-tested my product.
• If there was a need for a feature that didn't yet exist, I could decide if it was project-specific, or if it made sense to integrate it into the product, improving it even more.
• I understand more how non-technical clients express their requirements, which made me rethink my landing and documentation pages, as well just how I talk to new leads.
• That gave me the idea of having an enterprise plan, which I would not have thought about without re-framing how I could sell Polygonjs.

Therefore, freelancing went in my mind from a grind and distracting activity, to a fulfilling one, which I now embrace and intend to continue.

And for those among you who do not have an enterprise plan, does that give you an idea on how to incorporate it into your product? Or how you could pitch your expertise differently, using your product as a selling point?