Becoming a freelance developer

[Abbid]

Hi all,

Currently i have a full time job as a developer for a small company, only been in the job a few months but been programming since university (approx 3 years).

Ive looked into a wide number of business that i could possibly start up and all involved selling a physical product. But while researching all of them its became apparant that each market i am looking at is already pretty saturated and has a lot of competition.

So i decided, instead of selling a physical product, i would sell my skills in programming and become a freelance developer.

However,i dont think i know enough (technology wise) to start taking on work.

My question is, when do you know that you are ready? is it when you get given a project and by the time you heard/read the spec you already have a pretty good idea of how to implement it?

or does the learning never stop? are you taking on projects that you do not know how to solve, in a technology that you have hardly use, and you learn as you go through the project?

PS - to any web developer - what framework (if any) do you use to create your site? at work we use php/zend framework/MVC design model. Just wondered what you guys used?

 

I would say in your industry the learning never stops. What you should do is contact other developers that have the skills you don't so if you get a job you cannot complete yourself you can outsource it.

Tim

 

[edmondscommerce]

if you can handle ZF stuff in PHP then you are already pretty advanced

If I were you I would choose a popular open source application and learn it inside out and then try to find yourself some clients.

 

[JDX_John]

It's very easy to do freelancing work in your free time alongside a regular job. You won't get the best rates, but sites like eLance, rentaCoder, oDesk, etc make it easy to try your hand.
That's the route I went and ended up running a bona fide development business, now I hire freelancers

 

[stender]

There a lot of websites which having programming jobs on offer and wanted. For example scriptlance.com
On there people post for projects they need doing and programmers bid to do the work. Your not going to make a lot on there as invariably someone in asia offers to do it for 10pence but you could do it for experience and may make some contacts.
A lot of people prefer to deal with a uk based programmer.

sorry just read the post above has recommended the same.

 

[Peter Bowen]

Selling programming skills is pretty crowded too. You'll have to find a unique edge or you'll be competing against people from lower cost economies who can work for less than the local minimum wage.

 

[Abbid]

Thanks for the replies so far guys.

Selling programming skills is pretty crowded too. You'll have to find a unique edge or you'll be competing against people from lower cost economies who can work for less than the local minimum wage.

Thats what i was thinking too, but theres only so much i can do to be unique from the crowd. I honestly cannot see what i can offer that is different from my competitors that will make me stand out!

Also i looked into the sites mentioned such as rentacoder, and as you said, bidding for a job is difficult when up against programmers from asia/india. It just came to the point of not being worth it. Being paid £50 to design and code a full database driven site just isnt worth the time/hassle.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

What sort of products did you look at to sell, with a lot of products you do not have to compete on price, but on the percieved value, look at the difference in say shirts, you can buy them for about a £5.00 or pay £80.00 for a top quality one. The material cost variation is probably less than £2.00 but the sales volume is much lower.

I would have thought entering the selling market offers a much more financially rewarding opertunity over a longer time than freelance developer, which is even more compeditive than retail

 

[JDX_John]

Thats what i was thinking too, but theres only so much i can do to be unique from the crowd. I honestly cannot see what i can offer that is different from my competitors that will make me stand out!

Well for a start you presumably have excellent English skills which makes it much easier to communicate with buyers. The dirt-cheap developers have something of a bad reputation amongst many people, so just being European is also a selling point to some buyers.

I find myself right at the top of the price bracket on those sites, I have to lower my rate to get to what I consider the top reasonable limit of $50/hr - but then I offer higher level skills as well as coding. However, if you are doing it on the side then you could set a rate of $20-25/hr which is probably equivalent to your effective hourly pay at work, and there are loads of people at that rate.

The biggest thing is to put effort into bid requests, make it clear you are seriously thinking about what's needed rather than simply saying "I can do it". Don't use some template application.

 

[garyk]

I would say the biggest skills to learn are the commercial ones not the technical ones. Many tech people under/misquote for jobs which of course isn't very good! Its all very well learning the skills to develop software as an employee but you never gain any commercial experience in tendering/estimating/quoting/time-scaling whilst working for someone else.

I remember back in 1993, got made redundant and thought hey I can do this development work freelance, through colleagues managed to pick up some decent size jobs (the first large one I massively mis-quoted hence my point above). I remember reading about other business owners/startups saying it was hell working all the hours and not earning much and I thought hey I wont be because I'll just be charging for my time, wrong! I was working 7 days a week for a pittance but hey learnt the hard way!

OK if I was starting again two main things I would focus on;

1. Products - getting a days pay for a days work is all very well even if you can charge £5/600 a day but you are still limited to the amount of time you can work. To make any serious money you need to leverage your time and can only do this via product sales.

2. Perhaps outsource sales or partner with a sales person. I always found bespoke development work feast or famine, either chasing opportunities down lik mad and when working on a project too busy to spend time lining up more work for when the current project is delivered.

Good Luck!

Gary

 

[JDX_John]

1. Products - getting a days pay for a days work is all very well even if you can charge £5/600 a day but you are still limited to the amount of time you can work. To make any serious money you need to leverage your time and can only do this via product sales.

No, not really. £500/day is going to gross you £100+k/year if you keep busy which is huge. Very few people who write software to sell make anything like that, because most products don't sell much and require years of marketing/SEO.

Easier is to provide a team IMO, whereby you are paid for your time and also make a margin on each person you provide.

 

[garyk]

No, not really. £500/day is going to gross you £100+k/year if you keep busy which is huge. Very few people who write software to sell make anything like that, because most products don't sell much and require years of marketing/SEO.

Easier is to provide a team IMO, whereby you are paid for your time and also make a margin on each person you provide.

Yes but thats the crux of it JDX most devs/contractors/consultants typically
dont get that much work at that rate in a large block, I have periods of good rates and steady work but they are usually mutually exclusive.

I'm not saying making/selling products is easy but it is something you can build a nice business around if you get a good product and persevere with it. One example of this is just a few weeks ago I was trawling the net and found a very simple and I thought quite basic looking accounting package. Small biz, started some years ago by a husband and wife and now they have 40,000+ customers and turn over about £1.5 mill not bad for a product I have never seen (despite being in accounting software for 18 years) and a very crowded market.

 

[Abbid]

JDX/Gary,

If you dont mind me asking, how is your pricing structured?

If a client asks me to create a price of software for them (desktop or site), i would charge (say) £500 for the actual creation and then give them the option of either paying £50 per month for support and X number of changes, or to pay just for support, or to pay on a per change basis as and when they need it.

Also, do you ask for an amount upfront and the rest on completion?

Am i thinking about this in the right way?

 

[garyk]

In terms of payment for bespoke solutions I used to do 20% upfront, 30% on completion and 50% 60 days after that. I tend not to do large scale bespoke anymore, more a combination of consultancy/small volume product sales.

Pricing depends on your target market, I generally do consultancy for the big boys (> £100 mill turnover) so can charge much more than for an SME.

Gary

 

[JDX_John]

Yes but thats the crux of it JDX most devs/contractors/consultants typically
dont get that much work at that rate in a large block, I have periods of good rates and steady work but they are usually mutually exclusive.

In the contracting market, £400/day is not out of the question (rates are down right now due to the recession though) and contractors are typically hired on 6+month contracts, and extended quite often. However, a contractor is not quite the same as a freelancer, you'd normally have to go onsite to work

I'm not saying making/selling products is easy but it is something you can build a nice business around if you get a good product and persevere with it. One example of this is just a few weeks ago I was trawling the net and found a very simple and I thought quite basic looking accounting package. Small biz, started some years ago by a husband and wife and now they have 40,000+ customers and turn over about £1.5 mill not bad for a product I have never seen (despite being in accounting software for 18 years) and a very crowded market.

But how many years did their product bring in only enough money to supplement their income from other sources? By all means, make a product, but doing it without having other work for at least the first couple of years is going to drain you dry!

 

[JDX_John]

Abbid, wherever possible I try to work on the basis of hourly/daily rates on the basis of work done. That's because in the small-scale market you're typically dealing with people who don't really know what they want, or how to describe it of they did. You can guarantee the few you try to give you a spec will miss many 'small' features like "oh, we need to let you generate an XLS document of the user's activity", because they're not trained in this area. To an extent it's always going to happen, designs are inherently evolutional, but without a proper spec agreed initially anything can happen and the client can refuse to pay unless you do the 'small changes' he asks for.

If I can get the work specified to a degree I'm happy there are no massive surprises, I'd probably want a set of payment milestones. If the project is a couple of days then I might just ask for payment at the end before handing over the final set of files, otherwise I'd probably try to have milestones somewhere between every 1-4 weeks depending on the project size and how well I knew the client.

I haven't had work involving support as an add-on, normally if a project was going to have multiple phases I'd try to agree each phase separately as the previous one was completed. For genuine support work like being available in case of bugs, I might try to get a retainer fee to guarantee X number of hours availability per month.

 

[JDX_John]

Pricing depends on your target market, I generally do consultancy for the big boys (> £100 mill turnover)

Got any leads? My company's looking for new projects that would suit a small team (5-10) of developers...

 

[garyk]

Can always bear in mind JD. These companies typically have their own IT, what they dont have are specialist skills, in my case Sage Line 500/1000 which is what they are paying for.

I would still stand by my point about products though as a long term strategy, 80% of my revenue is from consultancy but already at at 41 I'm thinking I cant be doing this in 10 years as I will probably find it much harder whereas you can build a nice little income, yes granted over time with a product.

Look at Duane at Kashflow, he was a contractor who had an idea and built a business around it with a nice little residual income model.

Cheers

Gary

 

[DuaneJackson]

Ive looked into a wide number of business that i could possibly start up and all involved selling a physical product. But while researching all of them its became apparant that each market i am looking at is already pretty saturated and has a lot of competition.

So i decided, instead of selling a physical product, i would sell my skills in programming and become a freelance developer.

No! you were nearly there with your first option. You want to sell a product, not your time by the hour.

Have you looked at a software product (saas) as opposed to a physical product?

My question is, when do you know that you are ready? is it when you get given a project and by the time you heard/read the spec you already have a pretty good idea of how to implement it?

or does the learning never stop? are you taking on projects that you do not know how to solve, in a technology that you have hardly use, and you learn as you go through the project?

The learning never stops, IMO. If you think you're ready, give it a go.

 

[DuaneJackson]

No, not really. £500/day is going to gross you £100+k/year if you keep busy which is huge. Very few people who write software to sell make anything like that, because most products don't sell much and require years of marketing/SEO.

Easier is to provide a team IMO, whereby you are paid for your time and also make a margin on each person you provide.

If 100k a year is the limit of what you want, and you're happy owning a job instead of a business then that's fine.

Yes, products take marketing and SEO. But so does selling your services.

If you build a decent product for a market that wants it, and use a recurring revenue model then it works very well and you can make considerably more than £100k a year withouth having to turn up to the office.

 

[Rodent1982]

There was a couple of very good articles on starting up on your own in .NET magazine recently. If you get a chance go buy a copy, well worth a read.

www.netmag.co.uk/zine/latest-issue/issue-193