If we've ignored you, it's unintentional and I apologize.
Ken and I (Andrew) list our email addresses on our home page. Similarly, every automated email we send comes with the reply address set to one of our personal email addresses. Sometimes, people reply to those automated messages asking for things we can't really help with. I try to respond to everyone, but honestly, sometimes messages just slip through.
I've considered removing our email addresses from our web page. I'm sure that would decrease the number of messages we receive, which would increase the percentage we could reply to. But that would ultimately make us less available.
If you have any suggestions on how we can keep track of a high volume of inquires, I would love to hear them. Neither of us have run a startup at this scale before, so we're naturally trying to figure things out as we go.
This is non-news for most hackers, but is actually surprising to people outside of the industry. The atlantic has a wide readership. A lot of people are having trouble finding any work. They'd be surprised that some people would find 30 job offers irritating.
Founder of Lambda (http://getlambda.com) here. We negotiate these sorts of deals for a living.
We charge more for short-term trials (say 1 week), not less. Employers understand that flexibility is valuable and are often willing to pay more to avoid commitments. Conversely, they usually expect discounts for "buying in bulk", so it's reasonable to offer reduced rates for long-term (say longer than 3 months) contracts.
That said, $15/hr is way too low in any situation. There's a reason we set Lambda's minimum to $100/hr: doing so cuts out most clients that we don't want to deal with. I don't know much about your experience level, but a few years programming experience and some time spent as a startup founder should be enough for you to ask for $100/hr. I'm less familiar with the Texas market (we do business in NYC and SF), so $75/hr might be more appropriate, but I wouldn't go any lower than that.
If you send me an email, I'd be happy to hop on a quick call. We don't have many clients in Texas, so I don't think I'd be able to get you a better offer immediately, but I could give you some general negotiating advice.
Consider applying for an in-house job with a digital media agency or a dev shop. You'll get paid a normal salary while building up a portfolio of client work. If you work with a small team, you'll also get a chance to learn what sort of clients are looking for outsourced development work, which is obviously helpful when striking out on your own.
You haven't told us much about your experience level, so I can't comment on whether you're qualified to land desirable freelance projects yet. I can tell you that most of the freelancers we have on Lambda (http://getlambda.com) have at least 5 years experience and have either done some client work before or are currently launching a startup. I don't think we have anyone with an empty slate.
Right now, it's much easier for developers to get in-house positions. Almost everyone I speak with is looking to expand their in-house team and they need some convincing to try working with a freelancer instead. Freelancers can make a lot more than salaried developers, but they also tend to be more experienced.
I signed up on lambda...but don't really see it helping me. I don't have client's work per say but have worked as a software developer for a few years and have done projects on github.
First, talk to people looking for developers. That part is fairly easy: just about any networking event in NYC has a dozens of people looking for devs. I don't know where you're located, but the same is probably true for your area.
Once you're talking, convince them that working with you will be easier/quicker/more-effective than working with anyone else. That's the hard part, which definitely requires some practice. Pro-tip: don't try to convince anyone that you'll be the cheapest option, which is almost always a losing game to play.
If you prefer, I'd be happy to do the hard work for you. I run a startup that connects senior freelance developers with high-paying companies: http://getlambda.com.
Felt to me like they didn't understand how to sell people who aren't "X experts" - I'm not a digital media expert, I'm not a wordpress expert, I'm not an iOS frontend expert, I'm a generalist. I do software development, which apparently isn't that salable these days ;)
Hi, this is Ken. Sorry we didn't get back to you -- we've been getting a lot of interest and it's been difficult getting back to everyone promptly. I can't tell who you are from your HN handle, but I'd be happy to get in touch today if you shoot me another email.
I signed up pretty darn fast. I've been doing meetups, networking, everything I can imagine to get business development moving and I still have not found that 'thing' I'm missing to land a new client.
Last year, we built this site: http://www.thecostofcarbon.org/, which was part of a project for Al Gore's climate change non-profit.
Currently, we're looking for devs for a company that helps museums keep track of their collections, another that makes it easier for people to cook healthy meals at home, and a third that's encouraging universities to incorporate 3d-printing into their curriculum.
So there's quite a bit of variety in the types of projects we take on. Social good is a vague concept that means different things to different people, but we can certainly try to match you with projects that fit your interests.
It runs the gamut, of course -- someone's out there building an awesome campaign to advertise a blood drive, right now.
But most advertising basically using psychological tricks to push you to want & buy all kinds of stuff that really make a negligible difference in your quality of life, if they add anything at all.
Worse, the best way to convince you that you need X is to convince you that you have an X-shaped hole in your life. That desirable mates are looking for a [your gender] with X. That your neighbors/friends/colleagues/rivals have X, better X, newer X, etc. and are wondering about you.
It's not real, and it's actively harmful -- we find happiness/contentment by being self-aware, by learning what things really matter to us, and finding ways to focus on & improve those parts of our lives; this most commonly doesn't involve buying anything at all -- often it involves getting rid of a lot of stuff and leading a simpler life.
But who has time for clear thought and introspection, nowadays? By default advertisers want you distracted and discontented, your thoughts teeming with desires and urges, racing along on the hedonic treadmill....
Why do you think blood drives are good? Why wouldn't it be better if the standard thing was to pay for blood? If it was typical to pay donors for this kind of thing (organs too), wouldn't that better ensure plenty of supply than making charity the primary source?
There's a big debate about this, though it's a tangent to this discussion. But it boils down to how adding money into the equation tweaks the incentives of those giving blood or donating organs in a way that's not necessarily good.
One obvious way -- suppose you're filling out a medical history form before providing blood or an organ, and you know that ticking "yes" to a question will disqualify you. You really need the money -- will you be honest?
I for one hate it when companies spend money to inform me of products I might like, especially when it potentially saves me dozens of hours searching and doing research. It's the absolute worst when they spend time and money informing me of the features and benefits of their product rapidly and in a fashion where I can tune it out easily it it isn't relevant. Ive never once used brands as a signal to help me decide, nor bought a brand I know and trust like coke when traveling in a foreign area.
Advertising is just the worst, helping get information into the market efficiently, ugh!
It's pretty much just the USA. In fact, most of our clients are looking for devs in NYC or the SF Bay Area, so even US devs outside those areas are on the waiting list.
Online rent payment. Rent and taxes are my only regular expenses that aren't automatically deducted from my credit card or bank account. And even the IRS accepts online (albeit manual) payments. In fact, rent is the only reason I have a paper checkbook at all.
It's an easy win on both sides. In exchange for letting me schedule automatic payments, my landlord could get much more timely payments. I think I'm reasonably responsible as folks go, but still occasionally forget to mail a check on time.
I have six rental properties as a landlord and I use Bank of America small business accounts which have an email payment system using ACH. The tenant receives an automated email invoice and can pay the invoice by ACH with a few clicks after a one-time setup. I receive an email from the bank when they have paid. It's completely paperless. No other bank was offering this at the time I set it up a few years ago. It's been working great except for the few luddite tenants who can't seem to get the simple setup to work. For them, I have them send a check to a B of A PO box and the bank processes the check for me.
The cost is $15 per month for one account, but you can add other accounts for free if you keep a min bal of $3k. And you can manage all accounts on one page of their website. It can be used by any business, including an HOA.
I use them to pay and receive rent (I'm a landlord and I rent my residence).
Additionally, whenever landlords who use Rocket Lease (my rental application company) inquire about rent payment online, I typically recommend Rent Share.
They'll even accept electronic payment from the tenant and mail a paper check to the landlord on your behalf, so if you want to have it autodrafted for your rent, you don't even require landlord opt in.
My landlord uses PayLease. It lets me setup autopay and stuff. $2 per payment, not too bad. Just low enough where I use it instead of mailing a check.
If you use a credit card you pay something just over 1% of the payment, which almost cancels out sorta if you have a 1% cash back credit card.
Rent payment companies are a dime a dozen. The problem is no one wants to pay to process a rent payment (landlord or renter) and renters appreciate the control they have in writing a check each month.
Plus, your bank probably offers free bill payment. Have you checked that out?
Great article overall. I particularly liked the three mistakes you pointed out:
I nickled-and-dimed a client on change requests, alienating that client and making myself appear less professional. ... I would have been better served by her loving me than making a little more money.
I completely agree. In fact, this is part of the reason new freelancers often regret setting their hourly rate too low. It's important that you set a high enough rate that you can throw in unbillable work now and then without destroying your earnings. The best freelancers consistently under-promise and over-deliver.
For pricing my services, I need to start high and work my way down. I generally start client conversations on my hourly rate at what I would consider a reasonable ultimate number, and then allow myself to be driven down from there — generally because the client wants a long-term contract and expects to save on my hourly based on the length of the engagement.
Constant haggling will make every new project a frustrating experience. I usually recommend setting a fair rate and then holding the line when clients ask for a discount. That's tough to do with your first few projects, but becomes easier once you're more confident about your rate and abilities.
More projects, less hourly. When starting as a consultant, I was really selling only my hours. Now Symonds & Son is a business in its own right, and I’ve hired designers and developers to help with my workload. Working with other talented individuals makes much more sense on a project basis, where I can package their (and my) hours together.
This depends on what type of projects you're looking to take on. Landing pages and presentation work will probably pay more if you charge per project (since clients won't believe you can more 10x faster than cheaper devs), but building new product features for startups is probably better at an hourly rate (since startup clients always change what they're looking to build).
If anyone is looking to get started as a freelancer/consultant or just looking to expand their existing business, take a look at our startup: http://getlambda.com.
Great additional advice, two other thoughts building on it:
1) Make sure the client knows that you're doing work that's out of scope, but that you're not charging for. Otherwise they just think it's part of the package, and will expect it next time. I've seen consultants get upset that clients didn't appreciate all the extra work they were doing, when the clients didn't even know it was extra.
2) Stay firm on your rates, but offer discounts to clients for things that cost them nothing and help your business. Knock 10% off if they pay up front: it gives you cash in hand, saves you from having to follow up with accounts payable, and makes it harder for them to cancel the project. Offer a discount as part of a retainer or an ongoing support contract. Show them where there are opportunities for someone on their team to do the work, rather than engaging you. If you show them that you're a partner in helping them reduce costs, they'll value your services more.
Your second point is also a good way to deal with late payment penalties - something which it can be hard to add to a contract (as in, $x if you pay within 30 days $x + 10% if you're late).
Selling it as a discount for paying early is generally going to be easier to get a client to agree to - who doesn't like a discount? So it's $y normally, but $y - 10% if you pay within 30 days.
It's no effect on your bottom line, but it does make for happier clients!
The US also has usury laws, which I found fairly surprisingly when I was just starting out. I previously thought usury was a strictly a historic crime, like adultery or eating bacon on the sabbath. But some people are very much offended by the idea of lenders charging too high an interest rate.
They actually become relevant for late fees, since you usually do want your fee to be punitive enough to encourage timely payments. The usual practice is set your fee to 1.5% per month or the highest percent allowed by law (i.e. just below usury if that's applicable in your state).
> I completely agree. In fact, this is part of the reason new freelancers often regret setting their hourly rate too low. It's important that you set a high enough rate that you can throw in unbillable work now and then without destroying your earnings. The best freelancers consistently under-promise and over-deliver.
I agree with your agreement, but... it's hard for new clients to understand that you will not nickel and dime them. My rate is rather high for my market, but I do not nickel and dime. But it takes people a while to learn that, no, I don't bill for that 10 minute phone call. No, I don't itemize parking costs when I come to a meeting downtown. No, I don't charge them double time for tackling an emergency on the weekend.
And... some times clients end up going with someone else with a 'cheaper' rate, and I know they end up paying probably just about as much as I'd be charging them with an hourly or daily rate (I have both, but most people still prefer hourly, and I don't turn them down yet because of that).
EDIT: "nickel and diming" on things I outlined above I don't do. Full on changes - "we need 3 new forms" - still get charged for.
I nickled-and-dimed a client on change requests, alienating that client and making myself appear less professional.
One of the many advantages of charging a daily instead of hourly rate is that you avoid this kind of nickel & dime haggling with clients that nobody enjoys. If you batch up change requests into day-sized chunks and you've both agreed on the daily rate then it's a non-issue. It's just important to make sure that you and the client are in sync about the number of days spent.
Most of our clients have been in NYC or the SF Bay area and they usually prefer local developers. Even if someone is working remotely, it's helpful to be able to meet once a week or so.
We're happy to take applications from developers elsewhere, but we might not be able to get back to you for a while.
We started Lambda (http://getlambda.com) as an Elance/Odesk competitor for precisely these reasons. Most of the people looking for developers on the big offshoring platforms aren't the types of clients we'd want to work with ourselves.
The big problem is education. We speak with a surprising amount of people who've never hired a developer before. They often don't understand the difference between Wordpress dev and someone who's been doing high-performance numerical computing. If they tried to hire a dev on Elance, it would almost certainly be a frustrating experience for both parties, since they're unable to write a reasonable job description.
Our solution has been to take a very unsexy approach: anyone who wants to hire a dev through our service needs to first hop on a phone call and tell me a little about what they're looking for. Sometimes we reject potential clients outright (particularly if they have poor expectations about price) other times we suggest they hire a different type of dev than they initially thought they needed.
Unless Elance is willing to start offering this sort of concierge service, it's unlikely to grow into the sort of place where qualified devs will want to find qualified clients.
Although your 100/hr minimum rate does cause me a bit of concern. I'd find it difficult to justify that rate for most of the work I do, which is PHP and javascript development.
For me the $100/hr minimum is an excellent filtering mechanism for serious clients. As a consultant I think there's a place for this, a place for Elance, a place for Odesk, and a place for AWS Mech Turk (AWS's horribly named labor market).
Even with two technical co-founders (we're both developers), we're still following this strategy with Lambda (http://getlambda.com). With the exception of our homepage (which is a Jekyll site), we haven't written any code and don't have any immediate plans to start coding either. We've been able to bring in >100k in sales in one month and expect to be able clear over a million next year.
We've discussed some ideas we could start developing, but in each case, we've always been able to come up with a quicker/cheaper way to test the relevant concept without development work. Sticking to a "no code" strategy has been a good way to focus our efforts on activities that actually matter. We both like to code and would probably be happier spending a week hacking instead of taking sales calls, but the latter is more important to our company right now.
Just because you can write code doesn't mean you have to.
Looks like a good business and if you are able to bring in that many sales it looks like an excellent business.
How do you find your consultants and your customers?
I'd guess:
consultants: hackathons, personal network,
customers: personal network, conferences
That's right for the customers side: it's a lot of personal networking and referrals.
For consultants, we've had a lot of resonance with various social media channels. It's really nothing fancy or surprising, just making a consistent effort to engage with various communities (like HN) has been fantastic.
SEEKING FREELANCERS - NYC or Bay Area preferred - Remote is okay
Lambda is a talent agency for freelance developers and designers. We help you find clients, negotiate for higher rates, and take care of the business side of freelancing.
- Exceptional talent only: $100/hr minimum rate.
- No recruiters or spam. We're developers too and we only match consultants with projects that fit their expertise and interest.
- Serious clients only: Wanna hear about a disruptive social network for cats that "just needs a coder"? Neither do we.
- Freelancers with side projects or startups are especially welcome!
We've posted about this on HN a few times and have been amazed by the response. I apologize in advance if it takes a while for us to get back to you -- we interview everyone personally and are still ramping up the process.
Right now, we're particularly looking for NYC Rails devs and SF iOS devs, but anyone else based in the US is still welcome to apply!
Not sure when it changes, but the usual explanation (by Americans themselves) of this US-only remote thing is that they afraid of dealing with the people who are not easily suable.
In our case, the explanation is even simpler. Most of our work is for local devs, where the clients prefer to be able to meet the freelancer face-to-face occasionally. Even for a project where most of the work will be done remotely, kick-off meetings and in-person collaboration is still valuable.
Of course it is valuable, but why limit the choices a priori? Let your clients choose by themselves, maybe some of them will prefer to sacrifice face-to-face meetings in exchange for finding the best candidate...
In general, with marketing, you need to keep your Message simple. As in drop-dead simple. Especially when you're veyr small.
That's why you see food trucks offering tacos, sushi, or organic chocolate-and-truffle-oil-suffused hempseed brownies, respectively... but food trucks offering all 3 of these, not so often.
With recruiting it's kind of the same. Also, out-of-towners have different filtering / recommendation / communication needs, and take different payscales, also
So they're probably just applying the 80-20 rule, and catering to what their known client base seems to ask for most.
Ken and I (Andrew) list our email addresses on our home page. Similarly, every automated email we send comes with the reply address set to one of our personal email addresses. Sometimes, people reply to those automated messages asking for things we can't really help with. I try to respond to everyone, but honestly, sometimes messages just slip through.
I've considered removing our email addresses from our web page. I'm sure that would decrease the number of messages we receive, which would increase the percentage we could reply to. But that would ultimately make us less available.
If you have any suggestions on how we can keep track of a high volume of inquires, I would love to hear them. Neither of us have run a startup at this scale before, so we're naturally trying to figure things out as we go.