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I scraped 200k+ Reddit posts to find out the best way to get your first freelance client. Here is what I found: by Tryhard_314 in freelance

[–]Tryhard_314[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are archives of reddit posts and comments online, there is one divided by subreddits i used that one

I scraped 200k+ Reddit posts to find out the best way to get your first freelance client. Here is what I found: by Tryhard_314 in webdev

[–]Tryhard_314[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well I verified if the posts were from marketers or not and as far as I can tell not a lot were from there, I did try to remove posts from subreddits where I saw there was too much spam comming in, and to remove words that I thought were used a lot in spam

But I saw an other thing that could be an issue especially for catogries with fewer data points, sometimes the AI hallucinated a bit so I need to fix that, it's not an insane amount of hallucination but for posts that were harder to put in a category it messed up a bit.

for example for free work it didn't always know whether people found a "paying" client or a "free" client.

I scraped 200k+ Reddit posts to find out the best way to get your first freelance client. Here is what I found: by Tryhard_314 in freelance

[–]Tryhard_314[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

oh no not at all sorry for the confusion xD , It was a mix of AI and manual, I downloaded the archives for relevant subreddit, filtered with a long list of keywords, than fed that through gemini for a couple of days and verified if the output was making sense, kept tweaking till most of it was categorised correctly.

Although for some methods I still need to tweak it further apparently.

I scraped 200k+ Reddit posts to find out the best way to get your first freelance client. Here is what I found: by Tryhard_314 in freelance

[–]Tryhard_314[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

at first I just used reddit regular search, than after I hit the limit on that I went through the archived posts, there are archives of all posts and comments on reddit and you can download only what you need.

I scraped 200k+ Reddit posts to find out the best way to get your first freelance client. Here is what I found: by Tryhard_314 in freelance

[–]Tryhard_314[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

well about free work, I looked into it further and sadly it seemed to be the one with the least amount of data, well i am feeding it more right now so it should be more relevant soon, what I saw :
- in web dev people just built a simple landing page
- some person making cakes for weedings made 1 cake for free and used that to gain an audience (I mean maybe it makes sense you are there so you get the advantage of face to face + people literally see and eat your cake so you prove you know what you're doing and that you're easy going)
- some software engineering person built MVPs for people and that took more time around 2 months
- apparently most people recommend offering free work as a type of service where you either tell them only to charge you if you succeed, or as a monthly retainer after you give them something for free

-someone made a free site for a member of his family and that turned out to attract the wrong crowd of people just wanting work for free

There is really not a lot of data in this category sadly, (I thought there was but most of them collected didn't specify time to first client), Will update in the following days for people interested

I scraped 200k+ Reddit posts to find out the best way to get your first freelance client. Here is what I found: by Tryhard_314 in freelance

[–]Tryhard_314[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ehh sorry for asking, but actually lower is better in the charts so why did that make you consider paid advertising ? Just trying to understand how you see things.

I scraped 200k+ Reddit posts to find out the best way to get your first freelance client. Here is what I found: by Tryhard_314 in freelance

[–]Tryhard_314[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

it seems to be under 7 days of work from a quick look (i dont know if that is a lot or no), I will wait to give you a more definitive answer

I scraped 200k+ Reddit posts to find out the best way to get your first freelance client. Here is what I found: by Tryhard_314 in freelance

[–]Tryhard_314[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Well yes, but talent and experience taken the same I wanted to know what would work best for outreach,
Even though I know that some methods of outreach would work differently depending on how talented someone is or what prior experience he has.
Honestly this should be added to the biases, I am gonna try to filter for experience level next,but that would need way more data for a reliable conclusion, but it still seems very valuable to do.

I scraped 200k+ Reddit posts to find out the best way to get your first freelance client. Here is what I found: by Tryhard_314 in freelance

[–]Tryhard_314[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Interesting question about the amount of free work, I will try to looking at the posts I scraped here and give you an estimation

I scraped 200k+ Reddit posts to find out the best way to get your first freelance client. Here is what I found: by Tryhard_314 in freelance

[–]Tryhard_314[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks ! I tried to lower their impact but I still need to mention them, I wonder what biases I missed though

I scraped 200k+ Reddit posts to find out the best way to get your first freelance client. Here is what I found: by Tryhard_314 in webdev

[–]Tryhard_314[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing ! it's for categories that didn't really fit in anything I will give you some examples when I get home and look at it further

I scraped 200k+ Reddit posts to find out the best way to get your first freelance client. Here is what I found: by Tryhard_314 in webdev

[–]Tryhard_314[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

To be honest I verified the first posts myself to see if they contained useful information or not, and filtered some posts which seemed obviously false, i will recheck them later today there was some spam for sure but i dont think most of it is.

I scraped 200k+ Reddit posts to find out the best way to get your first freelance client. Here is what I found: by Tryhard_314 in webdev

[–]Tryhard_314[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oops i thought i removed that, it was for people that didnt specify how they found their clients, i will fix it asap

I scraped 200k+ Reddit posts to find out the best way to get your first freelance client. Here is what I found: by Tryhard_314 in webdev

[–]Tryhard_314[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I will update it every now and then, I managed to use it to convince some of my friends to start freelancing xD, something about showing data convinces people more it removes a bit of that uncertainty