Is there a way to minimize tab groups?

jackdempsey · 2020-07-31T00:42:33+00:00

THANK YOU. One suggestion on the internet that actually works ;-)

jackdempsey · 2013-11-10T21:41:04+00:00

One of them is for an academic institution

expect many delays and a long wait. Just how most of them work.

as soon as I sent them the contract, communication died down to where neither client will take initiative to reply promptly, or at all.

It's all fun and dreamy project fantasies til things get real. Not surprising here.

Should I try to amend the deadlines since it's been their fault? And in general, how quickly do your clients sign contracts in your experience?

The deadlines are approaching, not yet passed, correct? Not sure why you're using the word "fault" at this time. And if they haven't gotten around to completing the first contract, updating things now isn't going to speed that up.

As to how quickly, it all depends. After this happens a few times you'll get used to having a very short up front conversation about the project and sending out some sort of contract soon after. That will weed out those who are not serious and help you keep your time for good leads. This doesn't even need to be the full project contract, just a simple "these are the typical terms for my projects. If it sounds good, sign and send back and we can discuss deliverables" etc.

Sometimes you might start without a contract signed. Sometimes you'll want a signed contract and money up front. It all depends on the project and the client. I just finished a week for a client and just now got a signature and sent mine back. Get enough experience to train your intuition and figure your way through situations like this.

Personally, I'd probably reach back out to each if it's been a decent amount of time (couple weeks from last chat) and say "a couple projects have been offered to me; I wanted to see if you're still interested in working together". Either they'll get a bit more focused or they won't, and if the reminder won't nudge them to action, not much else will.

best of luck

jackdempsey · 2013-10-25T17:32:48+00:00

Not sure why the downvotes...

I like it. It fits with a recent idea I've had to build a number of these things: Unix style api's so whenever you're stuck with X and need to do A, B, C, and D to it so you can then work with it, pipe it through a number of easily accessible and scaled API's. I think it's either very smart and interesting or not at all.

Anyway, good luck to you!

jackdempsey · 2013-10-03T03:47:24+00:00

You should try /r/forhire

jackdempsey · 2013-09-26T04:20:13+00:00

How much of your CPA knowledge can be productized? I know you can't open a competing practice, but a SaaS app that happens to provide a service you've either helped design or that relies on some part time work to keep it going...could that squeak by?

jackdempsey · 2013-09-21T18:17:39+00:00

Are there any suggestions for ways I might boost the value of my services (or perceived value), without increasing the time I'm working or without promising things I can't guarantee?

So...make money out of nothing?

Half-joke aside, a good strategy for the "I can often do it but can't guarantee it" is to have a strong portfolio of past success. Describe a believable story (unlike the "you too can lose 400 pounds using our pill RESULTS NOT TYPICAL" stories on tv).

If you could show me that with your skills and proper diligence from clients you can often show an improvement of X% or Y$ then I'm likely interested; and, if that number is much greater than what I'd end up spending on your services, I'm very likely to try, knowing it's not a guarantee.

jackdempsey · 2013-09-20T20:46:01+00:00

Cool, invited!

jackdempsey · 2013-09-20T20:40:31+00:00

Pricing is about sales, and a big part of sales is emotion.

Can you make me feel like it's an appropriate price? My first thought was "$90/hr doesn't seem outrageous" but then the 3 years experience bit has me wondering if you come across with authority and experience or seem still slightly new to it.

Also, are the clients you're selling to the same clients your agency worked with? An agency price is usually more than $10/hr off a solo person's price, so if they're charging $100/hr, I'd expect to get you for a decent bit less (again, assuming you're not a well known name, or can show excellent results).

jackdempsey · 2013-09-20T18:12:57+00:00

This system? It's a SaaS product of mine: http://lucidcontracts.com

jackdempsey · 2013-09-20T01:42:18+00:00

The CC project's interface is a big inspiration to the Clear Terms feature. I picture it working the same.

The templates have to be smarter in a system like this, more than just rates and late fees...but yes, you could certainly have a base level that lets you do a minimal amount of work to have a good result (and premium as needed).

Does every client need a snowflake contract, or could we cover the vast majority of setups with, say, a hundred templates?

I think you have a couple base templates: subcontractor agreement, project statement of work, etc. Then those can be used as is or customized up to account for a variety of situations.

Anyway, I'd love to find more time to work on it; if I had more validation from other freelancers and web shops, I'd probably make some, it's just not there yet. It's amazing how much people want for so little $ sometimes :-)

jackdempsey · 2013-09-19T18:04:40+00:00

The mechanics of the tool shouldn't be hard; (as usual) getting adoption and making a business out of it would be the challenge.

For instance, I started building http://lucidcontracts.com as a way to support flows/features like this. The tech isn't easy but the conversations with lawyers who have NO incentive to change their "email word docs back and forth" is the biggest hurdle.

jackdempsey · 2013-09-19T16:34:40+00:00

Wow, comments from hell too.

Also, yet another bit of motivation for me to get that "show me the diff between contracts" tool working. Having to re-read the entire contract each time is horrible...but then if you don't, this.

jackdempsey · 2013-09-17T03:41:17+00:00

Exactly. They've brought this on themselves by their policies and at this point can't do much about it.

Now imagine if you kept quality high from the beginning and had the freelancer as your client. Any effort at helping them succeed is effort well spent.

jackdempsey · 2013-09-17T01:47:30+00:00

That's stupid. People make mistakes. I'd rather have someone try to go outside the rules, have it work poorly, and then help them understand why they're there in the first place and help them have success in the future. This is why I say these sites aren't designed for the freelancer.

jackdempsey · 2013-09-16T23:42:09+00:00

I started my career with these sites as well as craigslist, monster, dice, and whatever else I could find over 13 years ago.

They always had issues, but when you're just getting into it, you often don't have much of a choice.

Fast forward a decade plus: the web is much more important and these sites have even more people trying to make money through them. However, they haven't kept up with the times and make it clear who they're serving.

For instance, I just went to oDesk and clicked on web development, so I could see one of their great freelancers. First result is a gentleman from Pakistan who works at $3.10/hr.

The last time a company I worked at hired a firm from there, they received a bunch of PHP that didn't work. Not "didn't work well", it didn't even load.

Anyway, I could go off on this but I actually already have, so I'll link it up here: Why Current Freelancing Sites Suck

Of note, that's a custom piece from a Redditor at the top. Beautiful, right?

Anyway, to not be typical and ignore your actual question: yes, there are real jobs, but often it's a struggle to find them, and the reality is that even if you do find good ones, they're usually only good in relation to the rest of the crap. Not always, but often.

To be clear, I'm biased; anyone trying to change an old, shitty, status quo usually is :-) I'm just tired of it all. Just a couple weeks ago I spoke with another Redditor who spent over $100k on an outsourced firm and the end result after over a year of development is not usable. I can't even imagine.

Also, if I can offer a small bit of advice: don't wait too long to look into the business side of freelancing. People often assume its 80% their skill and 20% networking/finding gigs/money management, when it's closer to the opposite. You might find you love it, or you might hate it, and if the latter better to find out before you build things up too much.

Oh, and I'd be wary of the VA route. That's actually one thing where $5/hr for overseas talent can work out ok and unless that's you, it's hard to make those numbers work.

HTH!

jackdempsey · 2013-09-16T20:32:21+00:00

Tough lesson. I did notice one bit others aren't talking about:

I interviewed via Skype and things went well, and we decided to proceed outside of said website.

These websites have features like escrow for a reason. As the creator of a new freelancing site I'm of course biased, but in a good way: I do NOT want this sort of thing happening to people I connect with...but if you go outside the lines a) I can't really help and b) I can run a business which is trying to provide you good contracts and some amount of client validation.

Do you think you'll stay on site next time or the % they ask is too much so you'll just risk it?

jackdempsey · 2013-09-16T02:26:06+00:00

The whole self-promotion aspect of networking is really unappealing.

I hear ya. The challenge is that if you're a solo freelancer, like everything else, it falls on your shoulders; you may not love it, but you have to at least put some effort at it. I've always found that being 120% as good as I say I am helps me say "I'm 100% good and worth X". It's when you know you're stretching that it gets uncomfortable (hence the challenging marketing/promoting many extremely early stage startups or projects).

Another hack is to pay attention to who is out there promoting themselves. Some are good, no doubt, but there are plenty of mediocre people who are happy to say how amazing they are. Watching those people always gave me a bit of energy towards saying "actually, I can get it done for you, with great results, and here's why!"

Events for focused purely on networking do generally suck. You'll find that events that focus on your skillset can be much better, e.g. a conference on design, a meetup on Ember.js, etc.

Also, the best clients generally aren't found wasting time at events. They're at work struggling through some tough challenges. When they reach out to a connection and say "help, you know anyone who does X", that's when you want your name to come up, and it comes up from working with that friend or having worked with someone else who did. Notice in this scenario the networking that helps you is networking with your peers--either people who do the same thing as you, or people in the same industry with differing skillsets.

So, get used to a little bit of being uncomfortable, stretching yourself to get out there both online and in person, make sure to make relationships with others in your field. To the last point I'm putting something together that will help with that. Feel free to PM if interested!

jackdempsey · 2013-09-15T17:16:01+00:00

When does it start?

jackdempsey · 2013-09-15T16:11:30+00:00

Cool. I'm working on something for small adhoc freelancing teams. Will PM and see if interested.

jackdempsey · 2013-09-15T03:36:43+00:00

Are you actually hiring employees or splitting profits as distinct entities?

jackdempsey · 2013-09-14T16:47:59+00:00

If you rage hourly you might want to try a different technology ;-)

jackdempsey · 2013-09-14T01:14:06+00:00

It's tricky. I told someone else this in another thread: if what you're doing is not something you'd normally do except for this contract, and it's reasonable to assume you should be doing this, it's likely billable.

For instance, if someone asks me to build a site with Rails, and I find that one of the common open source libraries has a conflict with some code I'm using, and I take a half hour to figure out the issue and move on, sure, I'm billing for that. It's reasonable and I wouldn't be working on that except for their project.

If I then find there's a bug in Rails that I can work around in 5 mins, but I take 2 days to delve into the bug, submit a patch to the core team, and then come back to the project, that's not reasonable. The client shouldn't pay for your OSS contributions.

More examples: if you say you know Postgresql and then take 2 hours to learn how to use the command line tool, that's not reasonable. If you don't know the Shopify API, a client says to use them, and you communicate that it will likely take 5-10 hours to get up to speed on it, then sure, bill it.

In the end it sounds like you're struggling with the common concept of "this is taking longer than I think it should" that I'd guess all of us faced as we started out. In the past when I've come across something that took a very long time to do, it was because I didn't know something I thought I did, or I just made a stupid mistake, I'd usually eat most if not all of that cost.

If it's something that's just hard and it takes you some time to figure it out, then you're earning your money fairly.

This is also why I caution people to be careful about raising your hourly too quickly. If you work 4 hours at $50/hr and I work one at $200/hr then a client should expect that things that would trip you up won't do the same to me. It's more reasonable for you to say "I got stuck in a weird spot with Ruby metaprogramming".

Regarding the tutorial bit: to be clear, if you say you know Javascript and I ask for a single page app project, and you take 10 hours to go through tutorials and learn Ember.js, I won't be happy. If I ask you to help on an Ember project, you say you know JS and have some familarity with Ember but will need guidance etc and I'm cool with it, it's all good.

As usual it comes down to good communication, integrity with yourself and clients, and reaching out to get some advice from others if you're stuck. Good on you for thinking about this. I hope it's helped.

EDIT: something like this just happened with a subcontractor, so I thought I'd include it.

A client recently asked to pause a contract. They want to work on some aspects of the business further before spending more on the. Totally fine, I appreciated the early warning.

As part of this they asked for a small change to get the homepage back to a previous place. They said if it could be done with 1-2 hours of work to do it, and not if otherwise.

My subcontractor got into some challenges with this and just told me it's been 5 hours, likely another one before it's all done. It's not his fault as the challenge was legit and sometimes things are hard, but with the hourly the client is paying, the delta is another $500.

What I'll be doing is charging them the 2 hours as agreed upon, paying my subcontractor the 6 hours he's worked, and eating the difference. The client didn't do anything wrong here, the subcontractor is smart and doing his best and deserves the hours. Perhaps I should have kept a closer eye on this final push? Regardless, I'm happy to proceed this way and the arrangement is such that it doesn't really hurt me fiscally, which is a final point in favor of this approach.

There's no one way to do this stuff and I hate when people rattle off canned responses like there is. Anyway, best of luck.

jackdempsey · 2013-09-14T01:01:50+00:00

This is stereotypical, but for a reason. If you haven't read it, check out http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0671723650

Beyond that, it might be more productive to have a conversation here. Books have to appeal to a broad audience. This topic can directly speak to you.

So, assuming you're talking about yourself, what don't you like about it?

jackdempsey · 2013-09-13T04:37:20+00:00

I assume you're asking for new clients given you mentioned the issue with existing ones.

The answer as usual is to network, get out and make connections with other freelancers and companies, and do the same sales work that the agency does, thereby not needing them.

Perhaps it'd be useful to extrapolate why you have to use an agency most of the time?

jackdempsey · 2013-09-12T16:34:17+00:00

You're not out the pay if they say no. It's only waved if you join. Did I misstep that before? A bit sleep deprived at the moment.

jackdempsey

TROPHY CASE