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Freelancing

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SummarySome thoughts on freelancing in the software development business.
Shared2015-10-14

Sandy beaches; downhill skiing; coffee shop Hugh Grant-esque romance. When people imagine themselves leaving their corporate jobs and becoming their own boss, moving from project to project as a knife through butter, they envision themselves living the good life and doing so on their terms. This is absolutely possible to achieve, but as with anything, freelancing isn’t all rainbows and unicorns! But we want rainbows; we want unicorns. How can we get to this point? Let’s start at the bottom.

Freelancing is Tough

As soon as you leave your large organization, there is a very strange sensation that is exhilarating and terrifying all at once: I am now responsible for everything, and if I fail at any one thing in this chain, I fail. What is encompassed by “everything?” Let’s take a look at what we’ll talk about for the rest of the post: software freelancing.

Here’s some very basic logic based off of these responsibilities:

What’s more, how do you know if the client you are selling is a client you actually want to work with? How can both parties vet one another?

Building Relationships

One way to get around many of the issues you run in to while freelancing that are related more to the business side than what you actually create is to foster relationships with businesses locally (or remotely, if you can manage that across the Internet). Attending meetups, lectures, happy hours, conferences, hackathons, open houses and the like are great ways to meet folks in your community and get to know them and their businesses. The more knowledgeable all parties are with one another, the more they can suss out whether or not they want to work with each other. Once someone has a good experience with you, it is more likely that they will come to you again to solve their problems.

If you can build enough relationships, you may not need to go outside of your local community for work. But what if your city doesn’t have enough work for you or you travel regularly? What if you want to expand your freelance reach to a national level?

Finding Non-Local Work

Without an agency or consultancy brand name behind you, finding work from organizations outside of your network could be difficult. There are a number of services which help you, such as Elance and Gun.io, but the one that really caught my eye was toptal.

What really stuck out to me was the concept of their only accepting what they call the “top 3%” of people that apply. Their rigid screening process ensures that only quality developers are admitted to their community. To me, this guarantees prestige and sets the bar very high. This also means that, as a marketplace, toptal would need to ensure that clients are legit and responsible, as well. In sum, toptal

and much more.

I want to work with the best clients, and I want clients to receive the best work possible. I have just started the process for joining the toptal Web developers network to pick up additional work, look forward to the challenges of the screening process and hope to make it through!

Do What Works For You

If you enjoy working in your local area, then get to work building relationships and a pipeline of backed up work as far as the eye can see with people in your area! But if you plan on going national/international, consider giving toptal a shot and show them what you’re made of.