by Varun Mayya
You can play it for as long as you want. Platforms are great training grounds when you start, but when you get good at it, two things happen. First, you get to a point when the game becomes easier; you get projects every couple of months and have a good inbound stream of income. You can stay at this level for however long you’d like, but whenever you feel like moving to something bigger, start keeping an eye out. Platforms are only one source of projects but there are many other sources out there.
There’s a whole world of businesses out there that have never heard of Upwork and could use your services. It’s up to you how you discover them and pitch your value. These are outbound proposals. In the next few chapters, we’ll talk about how you can increase outbound proposals with cold emails, as well as inbound leads by establishing an online presence, or a personal brand.
Learning to write proposals and managing client expectation is a skill and you’re going to get better over time. As you get better at your skill, your process will improve and you’ll understand your working style better. You’ll also understand how to best deal with clients and how to avoid disaster.
Repeat Projects and Referrals
This is the #1 source of new projects if you play your cards right and successfully deliver on your promise. If you’re delivering value to existing clients and creating outstanding work, they’ll be more than happy to refer you to their friends and other business owners. Repeat projects and referrals will drive a huge chunk of your projects in the future, so try to keep your clients happy and go the extra mile. On the successful completion of a project, feel free to directly ask them for feedback on your work, about similar future projects, and whether they’d be willing to make referrals.
Personal Connections
Do you know someone in your own network who could use your help? This could be a family member or a friend who owns a business and needs your help. Or, it could even be local businesses near you. Depending upon the people you know and the country you live in, you could have varied success at this. Personally in India, I had no success with this during the first four years of freelancing. But, as the demand for my skills caught up in India and I grew my network, this started to increase until it made up more than 90% of my projects.
Online Directories
Try to visualize what your ideal client looks like and think about where you can find them online. If you’re a content writer for start-ups, try looking at ProductHunt or other start-up directories where you can find potential clients. If you’re a 3D modeller, hang out in game development forums online and have conversations with people there. If you’re a marketer who’s worked on running ads for local businesses, look up Craigslist and see if there’s anyone looking for what you offer. Get creative.
When things go bad
As you work on more projects, you’ll understand what kind of clients you like working with and the kind you don’t. Some clients will be a delight to work with and some clients will be a pain. That’s totally normal. The clients that might be a delight to work with for some freelancers might be a pain to others. It’s about finding and working with people who enable you to produce your best work.
There are particular types of clients that you will enjoy working with and types you will want to keep away from. The only way you can find out is by working on all kinds of projects till it becomes obvious to you. Observe your working relationship, the way it makes you feel, the things that are important to you and the things that irk you.
Saying No
Initially, you might feel like saying YES to all projects that come your way to build your portfolio, and that’s great! Over time, you’ll start figuring out what good clients look like and the red flags that mean a bad client. Also, remember that your goal should be to one day stop using a freelancing platform and be able to land clients on your own. To do that, you need to create an awesome portfolio. You cannot have an awesome portfolio with 200 flyers for different small businesses. Pick clients that will give you opportunities to showcase your skills on bigger and better platforms. A $5 an hour project from Google is better than a $100 project from an unknown client. Why? Because simply having Google on your portfolio will help you land massive projects. No client needs to know how much you billed the previous client.
Firing Clients
After working on a project, you might start to realize that you hate working on it. This might be because of the client’s style of working or it could be because of the nature of work, or anything else. Projects like these drain your productivity and you’ll most likely end up procrastinating.
Have a talk with your client and very clearly tell them what’s going on. It could be that it simply isn’t working out for you or that you have other commitments that are preventing you from completing the project. The earlier you clarify, the better it is. The client might have deadlines that they need to hit, and they can start looking for other freelancers. You can even make a referral if possible, making the transition easy for them.
Community
Find other people like you and talk to them. There are online communities, subreddits and Facebook groups you can join where you can ask questions if you ever feel stuck. The situation you’re facing is probably not unique and someone has probably faced something similar before. Reading about how other freelancers work and their processes helps you understand your skills from a professional’s perspective and helps you in refining your own process. So, read and research as much as you can!
Chapter 6
The Freelancer’s Mindset
“People with goals succeed because they know where they’re going.”
—Earl Nightingale
Setting targets
How do you know how well you’re playing, if you haven’t set targets? Targets help you make sense of your progress and help you move forward and discover what your bigger goals are.
Tangible vs Ambiguous
Let’s take an example to understand how to effectively set targets and what makes something tangible or ambiguous. If you’re in your early to mid-20s, your targets probably sound like this:
– Travel the world.
– Make enough money to not worry about food and shelter.
– Save up for a car.
While these might be alright, there’s no tangibility here. If you really wanted to travel the world, you would eventually end up doing it when the time was right. But when it comes to holding yourself accountable, it helps to set tangible targets and goals, with realistic timelines and numbers.
This is the only way to get things done and avoid distraction and confusion caused by abstract targets. Don’t get me wrong; big targets are perfectly fine. But unless you attach tangibility to them, you will be disappointed every now and then because you will constantly feel like you’re not achieving anything. Looking at the same targets above, here’s how some of the smartest people I know would frame them:
– Travel to Paris and see the Mona Lisa within the next four years.
– Make at least ₹3,000 a day within the next four years.
– Save ₹8,000 for every month in a fixed deposit at 6% return in order to afford a hatchback within four years.
This way of thinking might make life sound extremely mechanical. But when you set clear, tangible, achievable targets, it sets you up for a life with less stress. There’s still plenty of room for spontaneity! The biggest cause of stress is ambiguity—not feeling in control of your life and worrying about things you have little or no control over.
Coming back to freelance, setting targets will not just help you learn and grow but also help you stay motivated. While everyone should have their own targets—these are the targets we think are achievable in three months, six months, one year and two years.
Freelancing Targets
Within 3 months Learn your core skill and land your first project
Within 6 months Land upto 4 supplementary skills and touch $25 in hourly billing
Within 1 year Consistently b
ill $40 hourly and have a pipeline of steady projects for 3 months
Within 2 years Reach the upper limits of your industry’s billing rate, have a 3 month consistent project pipeline and start building side projects and passive income
Surprisingly, everyone at SIZR followed this timeline independently. While we did make our share of mistakes, it was remarkable how, at any given time, we were all on the same trajectory and learnt similar things. I think this is a very good timeline to have and if you have a full-time job, the six-month to one-year mark is probably when you can think about quitting.
Common questions
What is the Ceiling? How Much Money Can I Make if I Get Really Good at This Freelance Game?
While Forbes predicts that half of the American workforce will be freelancers by 2020, the question is how many freelancers will make top dollar. We know freelancers who work exclusively on platforms and make over $200k a year. There are freelancers who work in their own networks who make millions of dollars a year. Of course, there’s a category even beyond—some making 8 figures a year. Most of these people also end up diversifying, using their skills to build side projects, selling merchandise, software and tools, building small businesses and more. In fact, at that level you would become more of an entrepreneur than a freelancer.
At SIZR, we used to do similar things—we built small tools and software for business on the side. We had already started building Jobspire at some point and we were selling stuff on an e-commerce platform we had built—a smooth, diversified flow of money that continued to bring us returns even if all us decided to go away on vacation for a month or two.
The Full-Time Freelancer vs the Pocket Money Freelancer
So far, all our discussion has been focused on how freelancing replaces your primary income. There’s also the possibility that you could use your skills to make supplementary income. This is also perfectly legal as long as you are not stealing clients from your company or working on something that directly competes with what your company does. The pocket money freelancer is a hybrid, someone who devotes a small amount of time to freelancing. Most of us started out as pocket money freelancers until we gained the confidence and the portfolio to do it full time.
The biggest problem with being a pocket money freelancer, however great your skills are, is the shortage of quality projects. Most business owners who are serious about projects would prefer to hire full-time freelancers rather than extending deadlines for part-timers. However, shorter 2–4 week jobs are great to make supplementary income. It’s best to use a freelance platform as your primary source in such cases and explore additional sources when you feel ready for it.
Why Should I Freelance When I Can Get a Stable Salary?
The answer to this question depends on where you live. If you’re an Indian like me, freelancing is a no-brainer and you can easily expect to make 3–10 times more than your current salary assuming you are an average 20–25 year old. In the United States, the “job for life” may be a thing of the past for most people, but at least for the next five years, salaried employment is more secure than freelancing. You get a regular pay cheque, and as long as you do a good job, you can rely on that pay cheque each month. Even if you get fired, your employer will usually have to give you some notice or provide some compensation. Not to mention perks like insurance and other benefits.
However, in India that situation changes. The average IT software professional at the beginning of their career might make between ₹3 lakh and ₹5 lakh a year. Non-IT roles make even less.
Let’s do some quick math to show you why freelancing in India makes sense:
At 52 workweeks of 40 hours each, there are 2,080 working hours per year. If you subtract vacation time, sick leave and public holidays from this, it comes up to around 1,800 hours per year.
Now, remember that you’re not going to spend all your time freelancing—you might spend some time applying to projects, sending invoices, marketing, paperwork, etc. Let’s assume that it takes up 25% of your time, which means out of 1,800 you have 1,350 hours available.
From a billing rate perspective, let’s consider a goal of $40 an hour with a steady stream of projects. Multiplying your hourly rate by 1,350, you should be making $54,000 a year which translates into roughly ₹3,500,000, which is almost 10 times what the average salaried IT professional makes in India.
Making $54,000 a year would be considered lower middle class in America, but since you’re competing on a level playing field, the internet, you can make the same kind of money sitting at home in India. Of course, as you fine-tune your craft, you can start making even more per hour, and at $100 an hour billing rate—standard for a good back-end developer, you could be making $135,000, which is a whopping ₹8,778,000 per year.
In the United States, $135,000 would put you in the upper middle-class category but in India that kind of income would allow you to easily retire within a decade. At its peak, SIZR was billing $100-$150 an hour, but what we found at that point is that instead of selling services, we could sell products to developed countries, effectively reducing the total amount of effort we put in and have a passive stream of income rivaling what freelancing brought us!
Will I be Good Enough to Make $40 an Hour? How Long Will It Take?
Assuming you have good communication skills, you pick a Pyjama Category, other than data entry, and are prepared to make certain commitments, $40 an hour is a very achievable target within one year. I may sound like a broken record, but $40 an hour is a middle-class income range in America and you’re competing on a level playing field. However, to succeed, you need to commit to a few things:
You follow our approach to tangible goal setting and set clear three month, six month and one year goals.
You follow high quality learning material and work on your skills.
You develop a passion for building things and learning how technology works.
You follow our advice on bidding and building a personal brand.
You build a network of likeminded friends and keep yourself motivated, but more importantly, disciplined.
Before we go ahead, I want to tell you a story about one of Jobspire’s first interns—Yash. Yash was a bright young kid who came to us in his second year of college for an internship. At that point, he wanted to get into a company like Google real bad and was hoping that we teach him enough so he could apply to a bigger company. What happened over the next few months surprised him but not the Jobspire team.
Despite being an intern at Jobspire, I recommended that he learn how to build a website and freelance by himself. One thing I notice a lot of the times when I recommend people to freelance is the apprehension. The uncertainty and the thought that is always at the back of their minds is that this might not work out because nobody around them has done it or has succeeded at doing it. What I did at that point was to open my browser and place in front of his eyes my entire PayPal history. The easiest way to convince a human being is not argument but proof.
Yash decided to give it a shot, taught himself how to build a website in a month and bagged his first project in his second month interning with us. It was a $6 an hour project, but it wasn’t the money that changed Yash. He had proved to himself that this worked, and that is the most powerful thing you can do for yourself. In the SIZR circle, we call it the First Project Effect and simply landing and completing your first project will give you such a different perspective of economy and time as money, that you end up planning the rest your life completely differently! The most fearless entrepreneurs I know went through some variation of the First Project effect—whether it be building a website or selling raffle tickets.
Today, Yash runs his own start-up, and regardless of whether it succeeds or fails, I’m proud to be one of his mentors. Both of us know what brought him here—his first project! The point I’m trying to make here is simple—if freelancing scares you, successfully land and complete one project. Trust me, everything will change.
Chapte
r 7
Your Personal Brand
“All of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me, Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called you.”
—TOM PETERS
Once you’re a couple projects in and have spent some time freelancing, your next goal is to get a consistent pipeline of projects to keep you going. One way to do this is to focus on the number of inbound queries you receive and reduce your reliance on outbound proposals. This saves you the time you’d normally spend on finding leads and bidding for projects.
That sounds great in theory, but how do you reach a level where you receive a couple enquiries every week?
Authority
Consider this situation: Melissa runs a health blog for millennials to get started with dieting and healthy eating. She normally publishes two articles a week and has seen a huge uptick in the number of visitors over the past three months. She wants to take it to the next level and get a freelancer onboard to help her with article research and content.
She posts a job on Upwork and also asks her network for recommendations for a content writer. She gets about 30 proposals on Upwork and a couple of recommendations from friends and other bloggers. She narrows it down to two candidates:
The first is Arun; an applicant on Upwork. He has a good profile, decent work history and a portfolio of articles he’s written for his clients in the past.
The second is Kyle, a freelancer recommended by her friend. He runs a blog with resources to help other blog owners write better content and build better relationships with their readers. Melissa goes through his blog and finds great suggestions on how she can scale her own blog. He’s also written an e-book on managing your blog’s content publishing calendar which she immediately downloads and reads.
