Byte Through

I’ve been doing freelance work for well over two years now, so far it has been a great experience, but as with any other job, it has its own bad things and bad times, here’s a quick list of things you must avoid when looking for jobs:

1) Avoid people who says something like “this should be an easy job for someone who knows what they’re doing”, this simply means the client already knows this job will take more time and effort than what he wants you to believe, so he will ask for 4/5 hours and will ask you go for a fixed price, like $100 or even less, then he’ll suddenly start asking to add this and that, and eventually you’ll end up working two days on that project and receive exactly the fixed amount you agreed, after all, you said it was ok and if the project turns out to be more than what it looked like, it is your fault because you didn’t have enough experience to make a better estimate, you will of course be granted a big thanks for your hard work, and probably will be asked later to do more work, but if you want to get somewhere in life, this is not the way to go.

2) Avoid people who comes and tell you that they are willing to pay very cheap, like $5 an hour or so, but that if work is done as expected, there is a chance of more work in the future, again, you will only be made to be a worker bee, then will be let go, by the end of the project you will realize other people have been doing the same work for $15-$50 an hour, so you will either drop the project or ask for more money, at which time the client will just walk away to find someone else who can be deceived into hard work for a few bucks a day.

3) Sometimes, you get people who wants you to work for a time frame, say 10 hours a week or so, for two weeks, and they already know that nothing will be ready because the project needs at least 40 hours a week for two months, so by the end of the second week, after no progress has been made, you will get a request with something like “unfortunately we don’t have any more budget, but we do like your work and would like for you to continue on this project, so we are prepared to offer you a deal, you will work for free until the project is done and then we will get you x% of the revenue for a year or two, after sales start to come in”, where x is usually 1 or 2, so basically what they are asking of you is “fund our development effort, we will not make you a partner or give you more than 1% of the earnings, but we will get rich because of you, and that should make you happy somehow”. When this happens, simply walk out the door, with a smile on your face and your fingers away from the keyboard, truth is, more likely, you won’t get paid, ever, if you get to finish this app, you won’t have any ownership, you won’t be able to say it was made by you, and you will not get any cash until way too much time has gone by, you probably will end up moving to something else that actually pays your rent and food, while coming to them once in a while just to check if something has happened, that’s a sad story isn’t it, avoid this kind of deal, it’ll get you nowhere.

4) Most people talk about what to do when hiring someone, how to look for the right skills and references and so on, but we don’t always get to see the other side, how a freelancer choses clients, and you should know that there are way too many bad clients out there, not always can you believe what a customer says and you should always check any history or references you can get, i once had a client who could not understand that 30 hours over 15 days is not the same as 40 hours over three weeks, he wanted me to rewrite his app, from scratch, in 30 hours, at a very small hourly rate, after a review of what the app features were, i came up with an estimate of 3/4 weeks of work, 40 hours/week, for a total of 120/160 hours, sent him an email with my proposal and delivery estimate, he simply replied: “ok, so you need 3 weeks, so instead of 30 hours this week, lets make it 10 hours a week for the next 3 weeks, is that ok for you?” that’s when i realized i had to move on.

He didn’t like it, instead, he went and complained how i was unable to finish in tree weeks and that i probably just wanted to steal his money by pretending to need more than 30 hours, i’m not sure where he got that time frame, my guess is that he had already planned budget for 30 hours and so he was not considering anything else, so before you accept a project, be sure the client actually knows what needs to be done, make sure your proposal is very clear, and that budget, time frames and hours needed are all already defined and agreed before any work is done, only after the client has accepted to work under those terms, accept the job.

5) Some freelancers will jump to any job they can get, but if you really want to make a living out of this, you have to start being more selective with which jobs you get, if you want to be taken serious, look for serious clients, if you are living on a country where making $100 a week gets you all you need and more, that’s great for you, but in the case of people who need at least $500 a week or more (as in having to pay $1000+ a month for your apartment, plus internet, car, food, clothes…), you can’t afford to do cheap jobs for people who may actually be doing less money than you, so in those cases, simply do not apply for those jobs, first of all, freelancing is not for everyone, you need to be sure of your skills, just as in any other job, those skills are what will take you very far, or simply won’t take you anywhere, second, you need to know how to apply them, don’t expect clients to be very considerate with time, on a full time job, you probably can get away with being lazy a couple hours a day, on a freelancing job, you probably will be monitored so the client can be sure his money is well spent, if you also care and would like to keep your clients, you can’t just take any job out there, you need to look for jobs that you like to do, you need to look for something that you know will make you feel good, that’s because you will be spending a lot of your time doing this work, if you don’t like it, then why did you came here in the first place? remember why you quit your day job? why come and do the same here? clients will appreciate your work more if they see you like the work you’re doing for them, people who means business likes to get things done, price comes second, they want real expertise and honest people, and then there’s people who likes to save cash at the cost of quality, these kind of people usually go jumping around trying to find a magical freelancer that will somehow get everything done at very low cost,

6) Absolutely never erase email, documents, chat transcripts or any other documentation related to a project, keep an archive of past projects, sometimes clients will get back to you months after the project was completed, asking for updates or fixes, you will be glad to have an archive of all the past work, because we tend to forget about things we are not involved any more, another reason you want to keep a full archive of each project is, sometimes, clients may like to sue you, because of things you didn’t agree to do that they feel they asked you to do, because things didn’t worked out well for them and they want to blame someone for their bad choices, or because they are out of cash and want to get some more work done from you, for free, they may come up with something like “we were working under the assumption that you understood everything, and when we asked you said yes i understand, but you did not comply” or some other people will actually come and say something like “we hired you to do work for us, so this new app that you have released as shareware belongs to us, because when you were working with us you also started work on that app, so our money funded your development, and so you have to hand over the app source code”, so when that time comes, which hopefully will never do, you need to be prepared to show proof of what really went on back then, just remember to always stay clean and do things right.

So that’s it for today, i would have liked to add a few more things and avoid sounding so doom and gloom, but i believe these are aspects of being a freelancer that everyone should be aware of, so there you go.