100k:

- network

200k:

- high signaled / luke warm outbound on dev communities (YC work at a startup job board is one)

- referrals

300k++:

- dedicated outbound tech sale person

you hired a sales person? can you elaborate on that?

Yeah.

I have a dedicated outbound sales person who pings their network for referrals every few weeks. Their job is to weed out noise + educate + convert hourly to project based billing

Went into a lot of detail on Reddit a couple years back here

https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ommiww/commen...

> convert hourly to project based billing

I can see how that helps in increasing revenue, but it also makes the work less agile, requires longer negotiations and adds risks. So it's probably not for everyone.

Some others have found a way to bill similar amounts but on short projects billed by the day/week. That sounds preferable to me, but you need to have a skill that produces value in such short projects.

>but you need to have a skill that produces value in such short projects.

I assume you're a software developer? There's your skill.

I think you're overthinking this. How is it less agile? You have a project, a price and a timeline. Everything between then and the end is on your schedule.

The only "unintuitive" skill you need to hone is assessing value and pricing based on that. But there is endless analysis and analogies out there to help.

I do it mostly for legal purposes.

Hit nested reply limit. Reach out to me on twitter I'll give you deets. Links in my bio

Are you saying project-based billing has fewer legal risks - could you expand on that?

Based on what I've seen other people do, it's basically someone who does the lead prospecting and qualification for you. They can be paid commission or flat, but are usually paid both.

Do you work for a lot of different clients at once? How do things work day-to-day?

Wow, I tried upwork but it generally always seems to be entities in significantly cheaper countries underbidding everything.

How did you get started to snap up your first jobs on it?

No idea on the specifics, but the theory goes like this : clients have been burned many times over cheap solutions. Cheaper is usually more expensive on the long run. For this to break the circle you need reputation of reliability.

If you're in the US, restricting yourself to jobs where they are limiting to the US results lessens that problem (doesn't eliminate it - I suspect there's a ton of fronting accounts)

I've tried it on the buyer side and anything less than $50/hour can't speak proper English. It's definitively cheaper but not significantly; and if you add the struggle of going through all the profiles, then the price will match reality.

Just wait till chatGPT hides this telling input signal. I mourn for humanity.

If you are cool with $12 USD an hour: it is the place to be.

You can do "decent" rates in the US if you only look at gigs that are only looking at US contractors.

Upwork can work for very niche things as a extra channel. I've seen it work for people selling packages of "I'll fork bitcoin for you for 2k". For normal contracts it's terrible.

I started on freelancer websites when I was 15 and it was nice to bag 20$ per hour plus extra if I happened to be faster.

But the more experienced you get the more you can charge and use your network instead of cheap jobs on Upwork.

Upwork is masochism