This is so funny. I did exactly the same thing. I mean, exactly!
I wrote a podcast transcription service using IBM's Watson API. And as a result, having realised it was getting a very crowded space and I had neither the energy nor marketing skills/money to launch it alone, I contacted the CEO of a leading transcription company and landed a gig to build out their mobile product. At least my app will now get a high profile launch, and not vanish without trace. Plus, I get paid.
I'm a remote freelance front-end web developer and most of my gigs at the beginning came in a similar way. I just showed clients stuff that I built on Codepen and previous websites I built for fun for myself and things picked up from there.
My recommendation is to start a daily project of some sort. Daily UI, Daily blog post, etc.
It gives you a chance to put out a steady stream of non-perfect work and show off your process to potential clients as well.
He did not do it for the gig. He, as far as I understood was just playing with new technologies as a learning opportunity which gave him an option of a 6-mo gig as a freebie.
The message, I think, is that being conversant in new technologies gives you good opportunities to sell those skills. Author did not try hard, so his ROI on 6-month learning was measly (6-mo gig), but it shows opportunity is there if one aims for high ROI. At least that is how I read it.
As a freelance developer, I wish the situation is better, but I just take the work I can get and do other things when I'm not working.
A side project isn't strictly for learning or an investment to find a job. You fail to understand that a self employed person operates in a very different world of thought than an employee.
Just to let you know, I've been self employeed for 10+ yrs. I'm confident I understand that world :)
For me, side projects are "this is the diection I want to take my career (but no one yet has asked)." The crowd (aka The Market) might be "smart" but it can also be slow. If you're not ahead and/or anticipating then someone else (aka your "competition) certainly is.
The arc of the point - I think :) - is to get into a position where works chases you, and not you chasing it. It's not easy. But it's certanly possible.
This is why I don't "freelance": it's filled with people who think spending 1 hour of unpaid work to get 1 hour of paid (and usually poorly paid, < $150/hr) work is acceptable. I have no inclination to compete with essentially free labor.
The only acceptable way to "freelance", in my opinion, is to start or join a consultancy and sell something. And then you're not really "freelancing" anymore, so much as running a business.
Please note: I recognize that "not all freelancers" are like this. Generalizations aren't universal truisms, exceptions exist, and neither of those things is relevant to my comment.
> This is why I don't "freelance": it's filled with people who think spending 1 hour of unpaid work to get 1 hour of paid (and usually poorly paid, < $150/hr) work is acceptable. I have no inclination to compete with essentially free labor.
You sound really condescending. Less than 150$ is not "essentially free labor", and the people working for those amounts are not illogically choosing to do so. Even among developers it's a small fraction that can pull in the amount you are eluding to making. 150$ an hour works out to $312,000 yearly at 40 hours a week.
Solo freelancers (to whom OP is referring) do not bill 40 hours a week unless they're working a ton or incredibly dishonest. A good portion of your time is spent marketing, doing unpaid pseudo-work-pseudo-marketing like GitHub side projects, billing clients, chasing unpaid bills, tweaking your website (marketing), networking (marketing), etc. Not to mention most freelancers become freelancers so they can avoid the 40 hour work week! When I freelanced full-time I tried not to work more than 30 hours a week all in. I usually billed about 15 hours a week but only because I had a few big clients and didn't need to do much marketing as they sustained me for the 2-3 years I was doing it.
A $150/hr freelancer who is busy for the year could reasonably expect to pull in about $100k gross (before any taxes, etc) assuming they take a few weeks off each year and bill about half their time or a little less. More if they automate a lot of marketing, have a local VA or someone doing the client phone calls, etc, allowing them to bill more. So the very successful ones are probably in the $150-175k gross revenue range before their taxes or paying anyone helping them.
I'm not saying @sidlls's implication that $150/hr is poorly paid isn't idiotic, because it absolutely is. Just pointing out that $300k will not happen strictly from trading 1 hour of work for $150 at any scale reasonable for a 1-person freelance shop.
It's a little more complicated than that for me - I stopped coding a long, long time ago and most of my work now is strategic and business focused. Some of those tasks are highly specialized and I can invoice $200/hr. Some are commodity tasks that the market is used to paying much lower rates for and I have to bill $100/hr (and then prove value by taking fewer hours to do it than a cheaper resource would). Other things are well-defined and I can charge a set price for and net greater than what any hourly rate I would have been able to negotiate would be.
I agree that the math is more complicated but that doesn't mean you're being poorly compensated or anything. I'll charge as low as $80/hr for stuff like documentation prep. I also won't do documentation prep in 99% of instances because I'd rather charge $145/hr to write code.
That's where I do a kind of a blended rate. If you need this deliverable and that deliverable I might just average it out. But, yea, where I can get the $150/hr+ work I take it over anything else.
Yeah, and that's a bit more than what I cost my current employer all-inclusive on an annual basis, so it's about right given the additional tax burdens I'd have to take on to maintain my current income and benefits.
You do realize there are people living in places where cost of living is 1/10 of SV and even working for "free" they have N times higher disposable income than someone pulling in 300K+ in SV?
I would need $330k/yr in San Francisco, over $450k in Palo Alto to match my current standard of living. Probably a little more since my state/local taxes are a low double digit percentage of what they would be in California. Not to mention the fact I can get from my home to my office in 15 minutes during rush hour. Which in either of those two places mean I'd need to be within walking distance.
Cue all the people saying it's "easy" or "just a matter of time" to get a $500k/yr job at Netflix or some garbage, but the truth is most software developers aren't going to work for any of the Big n companies, and will top out their comp around $125-175k cash and some RSUs that will be worthless 90% of the time. Even in Silicon Valley. So you get to make ~10% more in SV doing the same job you'd be doing in Minneapolis or Omaha or Pittsburgh or Charlotte or Reno for a cost of living that means you get to take home $500/mo in disposable income, sit in traffic for two hours each way, and pay one of the highest state tax rates in the country.
I'd rather make slightly less and have a maxed out 401k, Roth, be making double payments on my mortgage (how many people in SF can even have a mortgage, let alone pay it off in ~12 years, without being millionaires?), and be able to drive from my home to my office in less time than it takes the 2009 Patriots to make 5 touchdowns.
India. I charge $40/hour and people either ask me to charge a one time fee or reduce the price. Funny how people forget there are other places on earth where charging $150/hour would be nuts!
If they work for an hour a week, that amazing number really isn't that amazing anymore.
If they can sustain such a workload over time for hopefully much more than an hour a week (keep in mind, it was 1 free hour per 1 paid hour, so $75/hr average), then yeah, pretty freaking amazing.
It's good in any major city in India if you get regular work. Considering average Rs. 12 lpa as what a good software developer earns as full time (at least 50 hours/ week).
You can separate projects for learning technologies and projects for customer need. For example, when I wanted to learn Elixir, I made a simple to do list with concurrent users to test Elixir's scalability. A to do list is nothing new for customers but it still enabled me to learn more about the tech. Often, these two categories intersect over a large enough set of projects.
Are you using a high DPI screen with a low scaling factor? If I set zoom to 150%, I can easily read the text 4 meters away from my desktop monitor. Not comfortable _at all_ up close.
I wrote a podcast transcription service using IBM's Watson API. And as a result, having realised it was getting a very crowded space and I had neither the energy nor marketing skills/money to launch it alone, I contacted the CEO of a leading transcription company and landed a gig to build out their mobile product. At least my app will now get a high profile launch, and not vanish without trace. Plus, I get paid.
If so, I'm glad things worked out for you! Well done. And if that wasn't you, congrats anyway :D
My recommendation is to start a daily project of some sort. Daily UI, Daily blog post, etc.
It gives you a chance to put out a steady stream of non-perfect work and show off your process to potential clients as well.
I suppose it's better than nothing. But then again, as mentioned, that's not saying much.
The message, I think, is that being conversant in new technologies gives you good opportunities to sell those skills. Author did not try hard, so his ROI on 6-month learning was measly (6-mo gig), but it shows opportunity is there if one aims for high ROI. At least that is how I read it.
A side project isn't strictly for learning or an investment to find a job. You fail to understand that a self employed person operates in a very different world of thought than an employee.
For me, side projects are "this is the diection I want to take my career (but no one yet has asked)." The crowd (aka The Market) might be "smart" but it can also be slow. If you're not ahead and/or anticipating then someone else (aka your "competition) certainly is.
The arc of the point - I think :) - is to get into a position where works chases you, and not you chasing it. It's not easy. But it's certanly possible.
The only acceptable way to "freelance", in my opinion, is to start or join a consultancy and sell something. And then you're not really "freelancing" anymore, so much as running a business.
Please note: I recognize that "not all freelancers" are like this. Generalizations aren't universal truisms, exceptions exist, and neither of those things is relevant to my comment.
You sound really condescending. Less than 150$ is not "essentially free labor", and the people working for those amounts are not illogically choosing to do so. Even among developers it's a small fraction that can pull in the amount you are eluding to making. 150$ an hour works out to $312,000 yearly at 40 hours a week.
A $150/hr freelancer who is busy for the year could reasonably expect to pull in about $100k gross (before any taxes, etc) assuming they take a few weeks off each year and bill about half their time or a little less. More if they automate a lot of marketing, have a local VA or someone doing the client phone calls, etc, allowing them to bill more. So the very successful ones are probably in the $150-175k gross revenue range before their taxes or paying anyone helping them.
I'm not saying @sidlls's implication that $150/hr is poorly paid isn't idiotic, because it absolutely is. Just pointing out that $300k will not happen strictly from trading 1 hour of work for $150 at any scale reasonable for a 1-person freelance shop.
Cue all the people saying it's "easy" or "just a matter of time" to get a $500k/yr job at Netflix or some garbage, but the truth is most software developers aren't going to work for any of the Big n companies, and will top out their comp around $125-175k cash and some RSUs that will be worthless 90% of the time. Even in Silicon Valley. So you get to make ~10% more in SV doing the same job you'd be doing in Minneapolis or Omaha or Pittsburgh or Charlotte or Reno for a cost of living that means you get to take home $500/mo in disposable income, sit in traffic for two hours each way, and pay one of the highest state tax rates in the country.
I'd rather make slightly less and have a maxed out 401k, Roth, be making double payments on my mortgage (how many people in SF can even have a mortgage, let alone pay it off in ~12 years, without being millionaires?), and be able to drive from my home to my office in less time than it takes the 2009 Patriots to make 5 touchdowns.
Government rate for unskilled workers is ~$1/hr over here.
That said, Congrats ishanjain28. I don't even get close to that :)
If they work for an hour a week, that amazing number really isn't that amazing anymore.
If they can sustain such a workload over time for hopefully much more than an hour a week (keep in mind, it was 1 free hour per 1 paid hour, so $75/hr average), then yeah, pretty freaking amazing.
I still don't know how to get out of that mindset.