The inevitable happened, the user that I've answered tons of questions about freelancing deleted his account, thankfully I took backups and will recreate it [together with a killed joke] in the comments below (should've just webarchived it, meh)

I'll keep adding questions & answers I come across to make this a useful resource for people that want to get into freelancing, want to ask me something in the comments, you name it.

Might compile it into a better searchable resource eventually (some sort of blog with TOC), but right now neither do I have the time nor will to do that.

Wish I could have taken over the link that has been now posted a lot, but every post has an ID and I doubt it's possible, will tag dfox to clarify though and also floydian and devtea, that have been so nice to always post a link to that one rant.

The promised joke:

Here's johnny, prepare yourself for a total of 4k characters

>>How do you get customers?<<

>>Where do you find them?<<

Both are answered easily by just telling the platform I personally use: Upwork.

I search clients myself usually and recently I started developing a dashboard, that fetches the feed of my pre-filtered job search, that I created on upwork and gives me an easy scroll through list that I can filter, ban specific words and now that I got my API key approved for higher request amount, I will also add automatic deletion of jobs that have too many bids by the time I look at it or are too old, had no activity etc. since the ones contacting me, rarely catch my attention, nor interest, so I just decline them.

(1/6)

You'll see many people on here complaining (or often even whining) about upwork; not getting accepted or not finding clients, getting shitty clients, .. - freelancing is certainly not for everybody, especially digital one, as also most like to gather their clients range physically, by pitching themselves etc. I am more of a digital nomad, I hate being forced to one location or same people/projects.

Filtering bad clients is just something you learn through a lot of faceplanting or being just born with it, I was lucky - I just had a feeling for it and can easily also e.g. tell apart by just throwing in some questions in the interview or pre-contract phase, if the client is going to be unprofessional, useless or rude.

(2/6)

Many clients straight out told me, that they chose me, because I was the most energetic about their job offering and suggested some change - if I am interested in a job, it shows, I never shit out bids, if I bid, I am actually dedicated and interested in the project/job and have already things approximately planned out and have researched e.g. the website in question.

You need to be able to talk to people, they all are also just humans, don't act like a bot and send out "I'm an african prince.." kind of copy pasta

Again: Upwork is definitely not for everybody, but it's the only platform out there that has it all, an example of what sets it apart from others, you can read here: https://devrant.com/rants/956254/...

(3/6)

I spent a good amount searching the link, that I posted when originally somebody asked me on here: https://freelancetowin.com/upwork-p... I found it to be a great resource for myself too, especially understanding that the questions part in the bids gets put first - it also summarizes a lot of things I would mention now again (don't undersell yourself, have a good picture, bidding too cheap, ..), so just check it out.

---

>>How do you deal with their requests alone?<<

Not sure what you mean with this, so you'll have to ask in more detail

(4/6)

>>How do make prices?<<

That depends on a lot of things, mainly though, is it worth it to you, to spend X amount of time for Y amount of money, then there's factors like how much the client can pay (e.g. you can estimate by looking at current profits, how much your work is going to increase said profit - especially per year), sometimes I myself do it for a lower price than usual, because it just clicks and I love that project/client or can use it as my own sandbox for new technologies, to learn myself to better it, on a real life project, not some todo list or a hello world.

---

>>How do you get yourself knows and win against Web Agencies and similar?<<

Main winning factor is sounding natural and being able to sell yourself, suggesting change, telling future profits, targetting UX etc., but you'll read more on that on the link I put above.

---

>>How do they found you?<<

Also answered in the bigger block above, I don't, I usually hate all that "find" me.

(5/6)

>>How do you continuously find new customers and therefore earn enough to live?<<

Being smart about it, you basically develop a sense for what filters to apply, what is trash jobs, by e.g. filtering category, budget range, keywords to search for, ..

(final)

I hope all things linked and said, cover all grounds, I couldn't quite find old posts, where people asked me and I did equally as much explaining (probably deleted account etc.), so I tried to write everything again.

(at)billgates it all depends on what jobs I take (see image and: https://devrant.com/rants/1434663/...)

I can live off of it just fine (never checking my grocery bills etc.), I have skipped entire months too sometimes, when I was not feeling well, it's highly flexible and if I need more - I just stack one or two jobs more.

I don't bill by hours btw. as it's more work, usually implies very tight scheduling and screenshots - which I find absolutely damaging, considering you e.g. enter credentials all the time to access your dev server, also that way I can start doing work in the morning, notice I am doing absolute rats shit and then continue at night

The upper range jobs usually are in the range of 5k$-10k$+, recently I prefer/aim to just do my calm 4ish jobs and then have the rest of the month to myself though, as I had felt slow burnout symptoms again and I won't let that happen, since that'll shut me down for longer than I could do a break for.

(at)billgates to add also: most 500-1k$ jobs are one of the easiest ones and can often be also raised towards 2k$, filling up the monthly needs pretty quickly, just slightly more annoying than having e.g. 3~ clients only

(at)billgates image attachment failed

(at)billgates what I am trying to say is (sorry haven't slept in a day again), that you can either fill up with multiple small jobs or with bigger ones, or even mix those, depending on what you find most interesting.

Good guy Josh. 🤩

@dfox is it possible for this link:

https://devrant.com/rants/1435207/...

to link to this thread now? it would be a shame if people don't find it, because old posts can't be anymore edited.

@Floydian @Devtea (the ones I remember, hopefully if somebody else did too, they find this thread eventually) thanks for posting the original rant before, for the future just link this one though, as the old one got deleted.

@Floydian welp, tough shit eh? haha

@Floydian thank you for posting it to people that ask, since you're much more active outside the subscriptions, than I am :)

Really cool of you to take the time to do this man.

I am gonna take it to heart whenever I give freelancing a try. I did (try)it before and sucked at it, might be different now that I have a couple of years in me.

@JoshBent yeah you should write one, even posting one on github is good enough as it’s just a static site. Will share the link to other people interested in this 👍🏻

Hmm I can understand the possible logic behind the fragility of rants .. After all, they are called rants, not articles nor FAQs .. But then devRant rantonomy is definitely evolving into something more than rants. Hence we now have filter.

I feel that it is time for devRant to have a separate section/category for important/valuable/archiveable/nondeleteable content. I gave similar advice to dfox under one of my previous rants about possible features for devRant.

Or we can follow reddit users and do something on our own .. like use tags more meaningfully and more "dedicated" to the context. For example, any rant with tag "Free To Save" can be saved by any ranter in any method without the consent of OR. Rants with tag "Article" must be meaningful and valuable. Etc.

@cursee

or I can do something on my own instead of waiting for others to initiate :3

@AleCx04 Thanks! it was really important to me that such a good resource doesn't go offline and that people on here (or from google) still have it available :)

@devTea yeah I thought of seperating it from my actual blog as a possibility, to make maybe others contribute too, but as said, it'll take some time until I come around to that

@cursee

>>Or we can follow reddit users and do something on our own .. like use tags more meaningfully and more "dedicated" to the context.<<
>>[..] without the consent of OR [..]<<

The rant in question I was referring to, wasn't mine, so I couldn't have tagged something for "archival", also the right to delete should still be maintained - so I get dfox position on that.

@JoshBent this is absolutely superb advice, thank you so much for taking the time to write and archive it.

@RememberMe glad it helped you and glad I archived it :)

Amazing rant with good xp, I strongly advise you (like others above already told so) to create a blog RIGHT NOW.

Gold content + patience is always a nice start (and you have both).

@capcj haha thanks for the kind words, but it'll take me a bit until I can freely just blog "out loud", maybe putting it into a github page, wouldn't only have the positive outcome of people being able to contribute, but also that I could seperate it from my other blog I haven't yet published to the mass

Thanks for sharing this! Looks like freelancing wouldn't be a bad avenue for me to explore either. That way I wouldn't have to work for a boss (which I detest, it's that despicable "authority") and be able to make my own work based on what the client wants. And given the pay (I guess that those 10k projects are ones in the range of multiple months?), can't go wrong with that 🙂

Please do put it on one of the Git hosting sites in a little static blog though!

Thank you so much for this. I as said on other rants, I spent my life working with localization only and I love to code. But now, the company is not 100% fine and some people were fired. So I am trying to get prepared for that and these tips are just gold. :)

@Condor

>>guess that those 10k projects are ones in the range of multiple months?)<<

most of the time, but some people are just impatient and have to / are happy to pay the express fee :)

@brunofontes you're welcome! if there's any questions then just tag me :)

@Condor I do have a static blog already, but I am really picky about when I launch it, so either I would setup a seperate instance of it or preferably as mentioned above have it up on github/gitlab so people can contribute questions and also answers :)

@JoshBent Thank you for that! You are a great person. :)

@JoshBent I'd say GitHub, that's the one that people use the most.. or GitLab but now that that's running on GCP, meh.. GitHub seems to be okay. Also thanks for the insight in the time frame 🙂 regarding that express stuff though, how much of time squeezing would you be willing to accept for e.g. a 3 month project before they get discarded as assholes? Asking mostly to kinda gauge what can be expected of a client and what's asking for the impossible. Of course clients who want stuff overnight are asses, but 6 weeks? One month, 2 months?

@Condor I was thinking of setting up a master mirror from github to gitlab to keep them in-sync anyway :)

For your question though: you mean it would take 3 months time (active/passive?), but they would want to squeeze it down to X? highly depends on per work basis, can't do magic afterall, if something takes me active 3 months, it will take that much even if they'll pay me an infinite amount

I tried to hire high class programmers to do something like that before (co-delivering a job, by outsourcing), but the quality just was never up to my standard of delivery, so I ended up wasting the time they needed for their part, paying them and then re-doing it myself scraping together parts from their atrocity

not implying I am some ultimate guru, I still learn almost on a daily basis talking to people, yet still the delivery of those very (very!) well payed programmers was arse.

@JoshBent sorry about that - this is great information. We have no functionality right now to redirect a rant, but I'll see if I can throw something in to try to do that somehow.

@dfox thanks I very appreciate anything in that direction, even just the thought if nothing works 😊

@JoshBent No problem. Should be good to go now!

@dfox wow that was quick, awesome, thanks! what was the solution to get that? :)

@JoshBent I just added a constant on the backend and in two spots where rants are fetched it looks to see if the id is in there, and if so, swaps in the one to redirect to :)

@dfox how neat, thanks! :)

@JoshBent Yo!

This thread is dope as fuck!

@leanrob haha thanks

@JoshBent

Hey Josh, so I have decided to move my ass and do something.

https://devzin.xyz/ (version 0.0.1)

I am gonna keep my faovrite rants there and this rant is one of them. Please let me know if you wanna remove it from there.

PS : I am willing to open it for anyone to use and welcome any kind of collab.

@cursee I'm fine with it as long as it is updated once there's more questions answered, looks good :)

@cursee maybe also include sometimes the post that my answer refers to, it might lose context easily

@cursee could also be better to split them into different containers to make them look like seperate posts, I've got some really nice design ideas, but not sure how much you care to implement them :P

@JoshBent please share 😬 I'll do my best to implement it quickly.

My current to-do is as follows
- integrate user avatar somehow
- embed rant/comment instead of devrant URL in body (as you suggested)

@cursee a quick combination of mockups in my head

what do you mean by "embed" though, isn't the whole purpose of archival, so if the comment goes down, that disappears too - or did you mean the way I have it too?

@cursee another mockup for one comment threads for example

@JoshBent embed was a poor choice of word. I will copy and paste the text 😆

@JoshBent both are cool and don't think very difficult to pull it off. Especially the second option.

But can I copy devRant design? Later dfox think I'm stealing his stuff from here 😬

@dfox @trogus would you be mad about the design described in the last couple comments?

@cursee I doubt but tagged both, let's see