> P.S. Everyone is telling you to charge the double you are charging now. Yes, do it. Just do it. You have no idea how underpaid you are (and will cry once you realise).
This is really, really good advice. Seriously, you are not charging enough. If you aren't being told "no, that's too much" by a hefty fraction of your potential clients, you are almost certainly leaving money on the table. Up your price until you're being told no by most people. You want people to think twice about whether they can afford you.
To me this would make sense if I had a large network of potential clients, but since I'm just starting out, I find it hard to be that picky. I'm planning on raising my price as I build up a body of work. Is that a sound plan?
Yes, you need a pipeline to pull this off, but maybe not as big of one as you think. Some advice:
* Be OK being idle sometimes. If you double your prices and get 2/3 the work, you're way ahead. And that time isn't wasted; use it to network, to have fun side projects, to learn new stuff, to relax on the beach.
* Take bigger jobs so you can spend less time hunting.
* Prefer referenceable clients to a big portfolio. If a prospective client can call a past client and get a rave review, that's gold. Unfortunately, that means you may have to be more picky about who you take on, which works against your price bottom line.
* Move up the value chain as hard as you can. Learn everything you need to do that. Your goal is to move from "what do I code next, boss?", to being that coder, but also an architect, a project manager, a trusted advisor, an expert on product building, a UX designer, etc. Assuming you're junior, that stuff takes time to learn, so don't fake-it-til-you-make-it and it's OK to start off as a coder-for-hire. My point is just that's where you want to expand to, as opposed to adding incrementally to your portfolio. If you're senior, well, that's what makes you awesome, so position yourself accordingly.
* Other, more senior, contractors are really good lead-gen. Work with them on one project and prove your worth, and they'll fill your pipeline for you, either by passing along work they can't take on or by bringing you into larger jobs. Your network isn't just your clients.
* If it's possible, consider moving to somewhere more target-rich. Edit: now that I've looked you up, I see you're also in Cambridge; they're may be better places to find work, but I don't know them. I should disclaim, though, that I know next to nothing about the games business.
Thanks, this is helpful. My background is in games, but I have a wider array of skills; I guess I just need to learn to position them as a service I can provide to solve a company's problems.
Yes and no, I think. Depends on your starting point. I did that to double my rate in ~8 months (every time I am looking for a new client, I tell my rate 20-30% larger then the last time).
But if you are starting at $20/h or so, you might want to start at higher rate from Day 1. Because it might be easy to find clients, but often they will be a bit problematic, you work probably won't be valued greatly, etc. As paradoxal as it might seem, the best and easiest to work with clients are the ones who you are charging the most.
The problem I've found is that it's hard to bill more than 20-30 hours in a week. A lot of time is spent doing things that aren't billable (meeting with potential clients, going to networking events, etc...), and of the time sitting at my desk "doing work," not all of it is going to be billable (I only charge for the time I actually spend doing work).
And the other problem is that there is lag time between two projects, so even when I have a project end, it's almost impossible to time it so that there isn't downtime in between.
As a result, I probably end up billing for maybe 20 hours a week (on average). So if I'm billing out at a rate that's twice what I would make per hour at a full-time job (40 hours a week), I end up quite a bit behind. (I have to pay for self-employment taxes, any expenses such as office space etc..., plus any benefits that I give myself). In the end, I'm learning that it's a lot harder to make the economics work out than you would expect.
When I had a startup, I looked at the guy who was billing us $140 an hour, and thought he was making bank. In hindsight, I've realized that he was probably doing just fine, but he probably did it because he enjoyed the work and the lifestyle, and not because it was going to make him rich.
In my experience, 20 hrs of project work / week is the ceiling for a solo professional. You'll need the remaining 20 hrs for a combination of new biz dev, paperwork, experimenting, and long-term planning. Once I adjusted my billable rates and expectations according - I was significantly happier & more productive.
>>> In my experience, 20 hrs of project work / week is the ceiling for a solo professional.
Same here. Also, you can't really do more than ~5hrs/d of productive work. Personally, I don't see much point in trying to pull extra few hours when I can do the same amount of work tomorrow in 1 hour or less. It hurts the income a bit but I am much much happier.
> If you aren't being told "no, that's too much" by a hefty fraction of your potential clients
How could that possibly happen? You don't get that kind of feedback from all potential clients. You'll get a reputation for being overpriced and then nobody will waste their time talking to you. Further, you'll hear "no, that's too much" at most once from any given client. For the next 20 projects that they'd have considered you, they'll just hire someone else without even talking to you.
Depends on the work you do. The feedback I get from clients is definitely not that I'm overpriced. It's that I'm really valuable to their efforts. My goal is to provide as much value in the business sphere as I do in the development sphere. And I've never had a client leave me (though I've left one or two.) I have had several who come to me a couple years later asking for help to fix what the cheaper option did.
There are definitely potential clients that can't afford me—for those I try to find a way to help them anyway, whether it's by reducing the scope of work, offering free advice over a long lunch, or pointing them toward someone I trust who charges less. But I never reduce my rate. Doing so is just working for free. I've come to understand through a lot of remediated projects that I keep fixing problems created by large shops (that shall remain nameless) that were billing 2x or more what I did. That'll do a lot for making you feel better about charging more for yourself.
Yup. It might seem like it's shit loads of money for something, especially when the project is rather simple. But something that simple might be a tool that save 10hrs/wk of work for a client.
Good points! I noticed similar trend, mainly with non-paying (or paying super-late clients). At the very beginning, I tried to be very understanding and find excuses for them (shit happens, you know). But I got screwed over for being so naive and decided to be stricter next time something similar happens (I was thinking about 2 weeks and no money - no work from then). But I got better at recognising potential trouble-clients and luckily, haven't had to do that :)
I worked as a free-lance programmer 'on retainer' for a big project (I'd do work for them once a month or so).
It's never too early to discuss what will happen when you want to quit. I didn't do that, and after being more and more bored with the work, less and less excited about the pay and the whole project, I still spent more time working for them than would have been deemed reasonable, because there was no way to cleanly break off this work relationship according to a predefined set of rules.
It worked out OK in the end, but knowing that you can stop your free-lance work anytime you want (assuming you don't owe anything and the client doesn't owe you anything) and pursue other projects makes it a lot less stressful in some cases.
I love the pomodoro technique mostly because it reminds me to remove external distractions, so much so that I built my own tool for it.
http://i.imgur.com/BxeyJF8.png (as lots of them don't let you alter periods of time, sound notifications etc) with a simple task list (I was improving my JS skills so I wrote the clock timer as a jquery plugin and the interface with knockout.js, a useful little exercise).
Planning to built a Pomodoro clock using Arduino... Some day :) I know there is a bunch of them available but hey nothing is more fun than using a device built by yourself.
I've used that and it's really well written, issues I had though where I work with headphones in (even at home) so I often didn't hear the tablet/phone where I can chuck mine on a virtualdesktop off screen and just listen for the notification noise (it also does desktop notifications on chrome).
An arduino one with a nice dot lcd and some kind of logging would be a kickass little project though, I might steal that as an idea :D
This is really, really good advice. Seriously, you are not charging enough. If you aren't being told "no, that's too much" by a hefty fraction of your potential clients, you are almost certainly leaving money on the table. Up your price until you're being told no by most people. You want people to think twice about whether they can afford you.