Ask HN: How do you find clients? Hi, I'm thinking about doing some freelance web design and marketing for a bit of extra cash. Aside from cold calls what are some good ways to obtain clients? |
Ask HN: How do you find clients? Hi, I'm thinking about doing some freelance web design and marketing for a bit of extra cash. Aside from cold calls what are some good ways to obtain clients? |
Aside from that, just network as much as you can. All of my other leads come from friends and acquaintances.
2. Serendipity (I know sounds odd and I will probably get down-voted for this.) Don't leave a chance to get your work shown or known. Sometimes, small and seemingly useless leads can lead to huge opportunities.
Try to leverage Social Media, local PR firms, Freelance websites etc.
In short: start or get involved with local tech groups
This will help you find your initial contacts, and then hopefully find some ongoing/long term work.
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With my three friends I am running an IT service company for more than 5 years now. We have learned things the long and hard way during all these years. There was actually no single person to guide us regarding any aspect of the IT business though we have had many well wishers so far.
So to help entrepreneurs who are also planning to start their own company or who have just started the company I am planning to write series of articles which can help them in this journey. So here is the first one for you guys.
During these 5 years we have faced many challenges technically as well as in managing projects, clients and people. But one of the most challenging part of our business right now is scaling. We plan to double the revenue and increase the profitability without increasing head count considerably. We have around 70 people team right now and we plan to maintain the same. So now one of the challenges is to get quality projects from which you can earn more.
Following are few ways using which you can fetch software development projects from the market:
1) Contacts. Contacts. Contacts. Exhaust all your contacts for fetching the first project for your company. Do it for free if needed. You have to have experience to fetch some serious work. In your initial stage, contacts are the best thing you can have. This is perhaps the best time to use your family contacts and relatives.
2) If you are couple of years old company, make a list of all old clients and send them personalized mail saying if we can be of any other help.
3) Join the bidding site such as oDesk and Elance and start building a great profile. oDesk is my favorite site for getting new work as it has a unique model which makes a win-win situation for both buyers and providers. The other best thing about it is that you mostly get hourly projects over there and weekly payments. Payment for your work is guaranteed. Elance is good for bigger size fixed projects. There are many other bidding sites such as Guru, Rent-A-Coder etc but these two are my favorites.
4) Become a Microsoft Partner and access their database of companies. Email them, call them for building relationship.
5) Get your company or yourself registered on Facebook and Twitter. Use their search functionality to find out what people are looking for.
6) If you have little extra money try Google Adwords for keywords like "hire a programmer", "companies in india", "outsourcing" etc
7) Get it from most popular classified site craigslist.org
8) Tie up with local partners who can outsource you projects.
9) If you are a new company start developing on the latest technologies. For e.g. Developing iPhone Applications will get you far more projects than developing in PHP or .NET right now.
These are just the few ways and there can be many other ways to fetch software development projects. Please leave me a comment if you have other ways of fetching the projects. We all will be happy to know.
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Original post: http://abhishekdesai.com/how-to-fetch-software-development-o...
At a former employer we hired him on as a contractor and in the ~3 months he was on contract not a single line of code was ever produced even though there were promises made every week. Would not use again.
That said, as a past CF developer there is TON of ColdFusion work out there. Sure it is not glamorous but there are a lot worse things you could be doing for $$ :)
That said, I feel you are calling me out in a public forum is a bit inappropriate. To say I didn't produce a single line of code is a bold statement. As you called me out in a public forum, I'd be interested in discussing publicly. As your statement has the potential to cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars over my career, I realize personal litigation is an option, but I'm a civil person who would prefer healthy discourse, even when my character is attacked. However, that doesn't seem possible, as I have no clue who you are. I have chosen not to hide behind a made-up identity. You, however have the username "hackernews": I assume you are an employee of YCombinator? I doubt it, and to that extent, your username has the potential to be a libelous misrepresentation of Paul Graham's brand.
If you do not have the professional integrity to identify yourself, feel free to let me know who you are at a ColdFusion conference; I am a speaker at many of them.
When companies called me to set up interviews, I said (on the phone) "Turns out I decided I'm going to freelance. What was the project you wanted to interview me for? Perhaps I can help with that, as a freelancer."
I got a lot of business that way and it pretty much started my career.
Of the rest, 9% is from ads places in local newspapers and 1% from random web traffic.
Getting started is the hardest part to getting good word of mouth referrals. You need to talk to everyone about your business. Tell your friends about your freelance work. Go to job fairs and talk with prospective employers (look for the smaller places where the owner rather than an hr rep is there). Find where business people congregate and talk to them.
I had to learn the hard way that the only way to get work was to step completely out of my comfort zone and start talking to people.
Good luck!
Then, for some reason I haven't quite fathomed yet, they often say "yeah, that's fine. See you this afternoon."
This is why, yesterday, I was paid $1000 to get someone's new laptop talking to their printer and copy some files off the hard drive of a dead PC (which in reality just had one dead stick of RAM and a family of cockroaches to whom I served an eviction notice.)
Ultimately, this is just the time value of money + "I can't be bothered learning how to do this trivial task because hopefully I'll never have to do it again." + "If I just pay this guy what he wants it'll be done today, and I can quickly forget about what it cost."
This probably only works on rich people, and because I'm not one myself it seems pretty weird. If I was rich enough, paying $1000 to not be annoyed any more probably would make sense.
I did a job for someone that took 20 minutes (including time to invoice) and I sent an invoice for $200. My understanding was that they'd had a couple people trying to fix the issue for an entire day before that, and they had a TV deadline (ads going out that night with a link to a broken website). $200 was nothing compared to the time cost of adding more people who couldn't find the problem, or having their client paying to send people to a broken site. The fact that it took me 20 minutes didn't factor in to their thinking when paying the invoice.
I've learned this from my own experience writing/maintaining various open source libraries centered on using Parse with Ruby. The rapid growth of Parse has caused at least a handful of their thousands of developers to want to use it with Ruby (either for a Rails app, or a native iOS app with RubyMotion). Of those people, at least a handful have contacted me looking for a freelancer. Of those people, some have become paying clients.
You need to do more than just write the software though -- you need to be active in discussions where people are looking for software like yours, because that's often how people end up arriving at your software. Ideally the software you're building also supports some other software with a decent user base rather than trying to do something completely independent; that way you have a pre-established target user base who may already be looking for your solution.
Additionally, I started out doing contracted development work, and now I mostly do consulting. It's less stress and easier to predict how long it will take. And I get to spend my development time on my own projects.
A final note: if you contribute to other open-source projects, sometimes you can get in touch with the primary maintainer and have that person forward you work they don't have time to do.
It doesn't have to be open source. As long as it's a community of techies working together to solve a problem, being the Helpful Cheerful Person in the Neighborhood can lead to consulting work.
Here the link to it: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/95nDR8/:IPAD5_eU:aOVZRh4+/free...
Hope it helps
Word of mouth is the most powerful way to get business, of course. So the first step is to let the people you know know that you're available. Tell the people who might need your skills that you have them; if they don't need you, they might know someone who does. (This is a good use for LinkedIn.)
Have an elevator pitch ready that summarizes your tech specialties (e.g. HTML5, Dojo), business expertise ("have created several websites for realtors"), and a sense of the best match that hints at your rate ("affordable for small businesses"). Have a web portfolio ready. Update your LinkedIn page.
Depending on how much "a bit of extra cash" you can get started with sites like elance.com but my sense is that the money isn't all that great. (That perception might be inaccurate.) If all you're looking for is "a little extra" and an opportunity to expand your skills, it might still be a good idea.
I think there are two important aspects of "word of mouth" however. First, is you have to get the word out. Don't be shy about telling family, friends, colleagues, people you meet in a bar, etc. about what you do. Depending on your audience, be prepared to "present" your skills in an appropriate way. For people who may not be your direct client but will be acting as the courrier of your message, keep it simple – you probably won't get the business because of what you say to them but because of how they know you out of context from business.
The second important part is to give your clients a great service experience. You don't have to be the best at what you do as long as you find a way to make your clients happy. Clients can then speak to both your product and your service. Client referrals are over 80% of my new business.
What I do is I find the rare project post that contains an actual specification of some sort which doesn't seem completely ludicrous and is something that I can make a fair start on within 1-3 days of work. I build out a prototype hitting on a few of the major technical aspects of that spec. A significant portion of the time I win the bid after sending them a link to the prototype or a video of it in action.
Another place I found a client was on reddit. Someone posted a job as an ad at the top of the page. It didn't have a real spec but it did hint at some specific technical aspect of the project, so I built a quick prototype based on a related open source system. Then I told them that I wasn't interested in a regular job but rather wanted to work in a freelance capacity (because that is what I wanted).
Did one free job for a local small business. I sought them out. I just called, told them honestly that I needed to start a portfolio and offered them a free site. I did it quick, on Wordpress and used the experience to gauge how much time and effort a typical site would take and I based my first fees off this.
I wrote down names of businesses around town that I came across then looked to see if they had a website. Amy time I saw an awful website I'd contact the place and sell myself. At this point my rates were so low they might as well have been free and I bagged a few clients.
After I got about 4 sites under my belt and on my portfolio I raised prices, offered web app development and marketing and then joined a local group of business owners that met for lunch weekly. I made connections there and at various networking events held by local chambers around the Chicago suburbs.
Through these connections I got a few more clients. Once I got to job six or seven I tripled my rates and the strangest thing happened. I got less leads but the majority of the leads that came to me we're eager to close and easier to close. I was working less to close deals and those deals were worth three times as much as before.
I then slowed way down on reaching out to prospective clients as I had a steady stream of them contacting me first. The last group I contacted was a new non-profit in town whose cause was something I related to. They paid for my services and asked me to join their board of directors after I finished their (now "our") site.
Through that I made connections in the non-profit sector, state and local government, and with lots of people in the medical field.
I bumped up prices a bit more and saw an opportunity. Until then my market was anyone who wanted a website. Even though I weeded out a lot of the crappy clients by increasing my price I still got a lot of awful people to deal with. So I then focused in on non-profits, government, and social services (which was close to what all the connections I made in the medical field were into).
I'm three years in, work for an awesome and growing company, and my own freelance work is booming. I make a minimum of $2k for a run of the mill business website.
Things to note: throughout that time I used AdWords (about $400 worth of Google's free gift cards in total), I had a website from day 1, and I forced myself into lots and lots of social situations that were awkward for me. I also made sure I was on Yelp, Google Places/Maps, and every business and/or web design directory I could find.
It's important to know your market too. Where I am, even a halfway decent designer can look like a genius because all the local design firms create sites that look like they came straight out of 1997 GeoCities. I've had multiple clients turn to me after being pitched by them. I'm not a great designer either. I'm so-so. You can see for yourself how truly unimpressive I am at https://chooseclever.com. I'm not awful but I'm not above average by any means. Is your competition great? If so then do you compete on price or quality?
One thing I've learned along the way is that most everything you read about clients in different web design blogs is true. Same with pricing. I didn't listen and had to learn the hard way.
* Sign up for all freelancer Marketplaces: Elance, Odesk, Guru, Freelancer, RentACoder.
* Sign up for RSS feeds for jobs(full time/freelance) in your domain.
* Start bidding, sending out emails to all of the above that apply.
* You're bidding against devs from 3rd world countries(so you will have to price somewhere in the median atleast until you get your first decent folio piece done)
* Also it doesn't matter if your request doesn't exactly apply. Don't be self-selective. Also even if you don't expect to get that job, apply still. Get your name out.
* Be very communicative, friendly and more open than a simple 'Here's my folio' etc. You're trying to sell yourself, so figure out what the client want, customize your pitch. This part will take a bit of hit and trial on your end to figure out how to get the first client reply. If your post looks like others, then you won't get one.
* Work on the side on your own project, something that's production worthy and you can showcase if the above steps haven't worked till then.
* Reply to posts on HN, Ask HN like Who's hiring + Who's hiring a freelancer. Even add yourself to HN contractor list and anything similar you see elswhere.
* Market, Market, Market every chance you get. I used to spend atleast 3-4 hrs initially just sifting through job posts, replying, emailing everyday.
* Remember to raise your prices sooner than you think.
* Recently i've been trying out Google adwords, which haven't really led to a lot of hits. But i've been getting like 1 really good query for like 100 clicks. For the average amount i make per invoice, that ad costs are very minor even at the ridiculous CPCs to hit the front page.
* A lot of people mention word-of-mouth here. This is really the best way. For every satisfied client you're essentially expanding your network exponentially and getting in touch with people you would never have come across. But initially since you might not have a portfolio, it will be difficult to get work this way. Also until you're able to price your work higher than average, you won't get the right kind of clients. And without the right clients you won't get paid higher. So it's a vicious cycle you need to get out of by piling up showcase work as soon as possible.
* With lower rates it will be difficult to sustain work, since you would have to take on more work before the current one is over. Hence your focus suffers and work quality too. So you're hampering your prices, word-of-mouth network further if you take on work and underdeliver. I've been guilty of doing this(probably still am).
* So as soon as you get too much work to handle, double your rates.
PS: I'm one of the third world dev that people on HN are very fond of :-)
PS2: Since i posted the link to my site http://www.cloudshuffle.com at the top of this post. So far i've gotten 51 visitors in 20 minutes. Cheeky i know! but it was on-purpose to prove my point about marketing yourself when you get a chance.
PS3: Also a weird point i noticed. Almost 95% of the traffic so far is European, and not American. That's completely different from Who's hiring/freelancer thread trend i've been seeing for the past 6+ months.
There's plenty of people I've met which haven't directly contributed to my bottom line, but to try to look at everyone as a potential $ is a wrong approach. I enjoy trying to find referrals for other people I meet, and I think that's come back to me a few times (unexpectedly, but not that surprising, perhaps).
Couple other random thoughts:
"Selling the Invisible" (beckwith?) - useful to read. Not specifically tech-oriented, but will get you in the right frame of mind.
"Million Dollar Consulting" (weiss?) - may give you a different perspective on freelance consulting.
Contact local design shops to see if they need an extra pair of hands on call.
Put up a portfolio website with a phone number. Then answer the phone if someone calls.
gentle yet shameless plug: http://indieconf.com is being held again this year to cover precisely these sorts of topics - how to get clients, how to not get ripped off, etc - we'll have 18-21 sessions total - I'm confirming them with speakers this week, so the site doesn't yet reflect the full schedule.
Way too many freelancers/consultancies botch this up and don't build their websites with conversion rates in mind, and worst of all, don't ask for visitors to contact them (the call to action).
Also, use wording that resonates with businesspeople (who hire you) instead of just technology. i.e. Are you a Wordpress developer, or do you help brick and mortar businesses get more sales (and happen to use Wordpress to get there?)
Instead of just listing out some screenshots of sites you've worked on, talk about how you helped your past clients. Continually emphasize your abilities to deliver business value.
That said, one trick I learned was to always scan the local news looking for local businesses who recently got grants or some other windfall of funding. I assumed (usually correctly) that they would spend some of that windfall on building or revamping their website. I got some good long-term work that way. It was a cold call, but one with research behind it
Any Meetups related to the web -- events for developers, UI/UX, and biz meetups -- are great for networking. I'm a developer who gets emails from designers who want to talk on a big job that requires custom dev. You should be able to do similar -- find people who want to take on a job that requires more design or marketing than they can (or want to) personally do. (This may be a good way to meet people directly who need your services, not just people who will give you referrals.)
Attending a Startup Weekend hosted in your town is a _fantastic_ way to meet people, especially if you can talk shop with them like many HNers can.
It's quite the commitment, but co-founding a hackerspace has worked wonders for me. I meet a lot of smart people -- many of whom aren't web developers -- who then refer people they know to me.
If you're a designer or biz person, wander into a hackerspace near you.
Focus on people already spending money on marketing. You can find this out by looking at local publications, look at their google adwords spend, look at their website etc.
I'd also add check you are selling the result people want not the service. Selling a wordpress site...so is the offshore freelancer for $5 an hour.
Selling a 10% increase in profits through effective online marketing, bingo (of course you need to be able to actually deliver). When you do this you need a lot less customers and they appreciate you a lot more.
Cold email to a niche with your offer and educational content works a treat. Also networking events, partner up with non competing services etc.
All my latest gigs came from Twitter or from people contacting me directly after seeing a presentation in conferences (like [1] [2]) or sites I made like hackerbooks [4].
I also get very specialized leads via the open-source project I maintain and which match one of my skills (ETL, activewarehouse [3]).
Make sure you learn skills in demand and create small "marketing/learning" projects while you are not billing!
[1] http://lanyrd.com/2012/rulu/swxtt/
[2] http://lacantine.ubicast.eu/videos/8-mongodb-etl-et-indexati...
Once you get a couple of clients that have regular work your pretty much set
Because I tried this, and it turned out to be pretty low - like 1 - 2% (which was on the high-end).
So just to get a response, I had to send 50 - 100 emails. Maybe I am misremembering, but it is something like that.
- Create list of potential clients you want to work with. - Get their twitter accounts, and create a list containing their twitter handles. Name the list something cool (Wedding Businesses to watch)
- You will have a list of tweets from people you might get work in near future.
- Engage with them on Twitter.
- After 3-4 INTELLIGENT replies - all of sudden you are in the online friends category with them
- You dont need to pitch now, if anyone of them is interested they will find about your website from your Twitter Bio and will call/email/message you.
It really had worked for me. I was spending 20-30 mins on that list daily.
By some optimizing, keeping my bids low, and disabling Content Network, I was able to get CPA to ~$10; as long as I was converting more than 10% of my leads (which I was), I came out significantly ahead.
Web Development keywords tend to be expensive, so it was cheaper to focus on many long tail terms rather than compete for "wordpress", "web development", etc.
I started out with hundreds of terms related to building and converting sites to WordPress , and used Adwords and Google Analytics data to kill off any term that was costing me significantly without bringing in any leads.
Incidentally, I started out with Content Network enabled, but found that it brought no leads and cost more than search clicks. Not sure if that was click fraud or what, but killing Content Network was the best optimization decision I made.
If I were starting today, I'd use matchist (matchist.com, the new startup I'm building). Our goal is to become a trusted referral source in your inner circle.
This approach also has a beneficial side-effect. Cheap clients deny the bid. Usually these clients turn out to be the most demanding ones with little understanding of scope or appreciation of your work.
The first time I freelanced I was so paranoid about getting work I took on silly amounts of work for absurdly low amounts of money. I'd also add bits on to 'sweeten the deal' - "I'll also do X and X and X!" etc.
It just ended up depressing me. I'd be working harder than my friends (in their 'real' jobs) for far less cash, with far less respect from the clients.
Now I'll just set a fair price and stick to it. Decent clients seem to respect you for doing it (and understand you have your own overheads) and there's a much more business like approach to the job (unlike the cheaper clients, who I completely agree, end up the most demanding).
Also, feeling much happier and more valued doing the work makes me want to put in much more of an effort.
But once i had a couple of portfolio pieces, i bid around the top 5% percentile and now usually much higher on these marketplaces. It gets me the right client who're appreciative and i get to focus on them without worrying about the hours*rate all day long.
Edited the post above.
You _never_ want to compete on price. Compete on quality. It's a good idea to eliminate the cheapskates ahead of time.
Good going, Sid. How long did it take you to reach this stage? I have recently started looking out for freelance work, and since I don't much else to show apart from my startup, it has been fairly tough to get high paying clients.
I still haven't signed up on the sites like Elance etc, but looks like might have to bite the bullet soon.
Great advice, especially those three main points Market, Market and Market!
Managing is hard when you're not doing the work, and the quality of the final product will differ. Especially when you're subcontracting, the person you dole out work to will for obvious reasons be cheaper than you are. Hence their quality of work would usually be lower, unless you found someone better than you for much cheaper. But then in that case they will realize that soon enough and leave.
You can minimize it by making sure the tickets etc. are atomic and unambiguous enough. I use mockups, screenshots a lot(especially since i work with english-as-a-foreign-language people). Initially i put in a lot of time QAing stuff. But i was proving to be a bottleneck where i would interact with the client, then divy up work to the devs and then QA it back. I just didn't have the hours to do all that. So i've been making clients become more involved in the process. So allowing them to help out on testing, project-management side and trying to make my presence minimal. Also all communication is kept on tickets, and linked to exact git commits for it. So i can catch up and see where we are, even drop right down to the code to see what changed.
To be honest, it's still a work-in-progress. It's been taking more and more of my time to manage stuff than code productively. So sooner i'll have to think of getting some help on that end.
I don't quite have that as a standard reaction to all client requests all the time, as I'll often ask more questions and try to engage them a bit first before the 'this is what it will cost' bit, but that's generally the direction I go in.
I think tech people have a hard time with this response because they're often unsure of their own skills. At least, I know that's the case with a few friends of mine who rarely think about "the business side" of things. I've done this long enough now where i know that anything someone asks me for can be done, it's just a matter of figuring out how.
However, the flip side of this is that I've seen the result of people (and possibly even been this person) just saying "yes" to everything, building it, and it not really working. I do think some customers have been burned by that - a dev who claims to be able to do anything, then delivers them crap, charges a fortune, then leaves a mess for someone else to clean up. After they've gone through that a couple of times, they're wary of anyone who claims to be able to do anything.
I've learned to try to be more cautious how I phrase my abilities, because I know how it can appear. In general, anything someone wants done, I can make happen. It doesn't mean I will be the one doing the work, but I can bring in the appropriate skilled people when needed. That's a function of age, in that my network is more useful than it was 10 years ago, and possibly wisdom. 10-15 years ago I'd always try to build everything myself, and sometimes ended up with subpar stuff.
1) When people come to me and say "I need someone to build X for me," I usually say "I can help you make sure X gets done right." If the person contacting me isn't especially technical, that means I remove the weight from their shoulders of verifying that they actually got what they paid for when they hire another freelancer/contractor to do the job.
2) Sometimes people already have devs either hired internally or managed externally, and they're having trouble and just need someone to come in and tell them how to get back on track. This might involve some code but it wouldn't actually be my job to write the code, just more of a training thing / someone to call.
3) Sometimes startups with non-technical founders in particular just need guidance on what they should actually be doing with technology. They don't know how it could improve their business, but they do know that they like what my software says it can do, and they're not sure what to do next. Usually these people are trying to compensate for a lack of a technical co-founder.
4) A lot of the time the initial email to me isn't looking for a consultant, and the business may not even have considered the idea; but sometimes especially larger institutions know that they want a consultant with intimate knowledge of the software they're working with. You can't get that by hiring a consulting firm.
Transitioning was easy -- I just started telling people I would do consulting instead of development work when they contacted me. I had intentionally not take development work that involved maintenance agreements for some time (I rarely built complete sites; I just built components or additions to my own open-source software). It also helped that I had spent a lot of time meeting with entrepreneurs and hearing about the businesses of people who had previously hired me. But there is a lot to know about consulting just like there is a lot to know about development and it takes some research and experimenting to deliver good experiences.
Looking for smaller niches where the respondents won't get 200 replies - is probably a better use case.
That's interesting.
But nevertheless, you are making money with your business so that's awesome.
IMHO one's better off spending time building a few simple apps and communicating your worth to the client than go blackhat from the start.
I think you might have stuck longer to the lower rate + spec work. The idea is to start low and ramp up very very quickly. Infact initially you should try to double your rates, and adjust(A/B test!) your rate according to response rate.
Also i think rate is not a static thing. It depends on how much work is on your plate, or how less. It also depends on the market. So when tomorrow a lot of these startups go belly up and billion dollar valuations runs dry, so might your work. You will have to adapt accordingly.
If you don't have enough work at a particular rate, there's no harm in claiming a lower rate as a few test data points. You can always bill some hours you might not bill on the higher rate. For eg. sometimes i leave off some of the research hours when i'm billing a higher rate, but i bill them when i bid a lower one for whatever reason.
I guess at the time I was worried about what people might say if I asked for too much - or what would happen if I didn't get any work. It's dreadfully hard to rid yourself of that mindset.
