Freelancers, how do you get work?

1. (Easy - Lesser Pay) Attach to a Service Company. While I was at Razorfish, I worked with many Freelancers. You have to be one of them. I see them in regular contact and working via these companies in rotation.

2. (Hard - Better Pay) Personal Networked Connections, if you have one from prior jobs, etc. Otherwise, start building this up - a long-tail game that pays off as time passes.

3. (Harder - Awesome Pay) A long-term play is to start building up a following in the niche you are good at. Try to be very good in the sector you want to work. I once started a company and supported it for many years just by the work that came from my blog and public presence. I was focusing only on writing ActionScript topped with the ability to design. If Macromedia (Adobe) had to pick and introduce big clients to a bunch of people doing that, I was one of the ones in the line. I had the opportunity to work with the likes of STARZ, Disney, Pearson, etc. because I was there helping people on forums asking any questions about the topic.

I also had that problem (and still have), but I found my best gig on the UpWork.

UpWork is a race to the bottom, but only if you are unknown and have no reviews. Once you get a reputation, it gets better. It takes a lot of time, and for me, it's still the process. In the beginning, I focused only on getting good reviews without paying attention to the earnings.

I am based in Germany, and as you can guess, the money I earned couldn't even cover the electricity bills. But I got a few good reviews, and suddenly, one great client found me with a lot of work. Not only did he provide me with a lot of work, but he also referred me to other people, and I got more clients.

So, as someone said in the comments "Sometimes its just a matter of being in the right place at the right time or dumb luck."

This is a standard question here and the standard answer is "through my personal network", as if that would be helpful to a person who's asking where to find work.

Cold email... 2/10

Cold phone calls... 4/10

Replying to job ads and offering to freelance instead... 5/10

I’m a big proponent of fractional work - which I define as retained half-time or quarter-time work. It’s more stable than hourly freelance, but gives far more autonomy than employment. Some people work one part-time role, while others work multiple fractional roles to earn more money.

Even if you’re looking for short-term work, I recommend following the Fractional scene because it’s getting more traction among companies right now - so it’s getting more jobs. I have hired four fractional so far this year.

I run a free community for fractional workers, which has a bunch of tips and resources: https://frctnl.xyz

One big takeaway there is to market yourself and post on the monthly HN freelancer thread.

Word of mouth, referral.

Put another way, freelancing means your job is part your vocation and part sales and marketing. You generally need to be proficient at both in order to be successful.

For me, personally, while I was an employee I went to monthly tech meetups—ideally cross-functional, not just programming language user groups—and travel to conferences on my own dime.

Things have changed in the last 20 years, but the principles of what worked for me still apply. I met people from around the world at conferences like sxsw interactive and kept in touch on a nascent pre-celebrity twitter. When I decided to go freelance, I had over 100 acquaintances to reach out to, whether they might want to work with me or to keep me in mind if they eventually had someone to refer. Obviously, the communities and platforms would be different today.

It helps to specialize, so when someone encounters a need for $skill or $domain they think of you. For me, that was data visualization. I also built a portfolio with a lot of automotive work, which begat more work in that industry.

Personal contacts. With this, I mostly mean LinkedIn. Found my last two gigs there. Once because an old colleague was reaching out and the other time when I made a post, that I am up for work. There are also tons of recruiters there looking for freelancers, at least for platform engineering I am getting weekly at least 1 or 2 offers.

In the German market it’s recruiting and placement agencies. Shameless self plug I collected a list of URLs https://github.com/eigenfunk/freelance-recruiting-de

Through my network.

Do a good job for people in the past and they will hire you again when they can.

But there isn’t much good work out there right now. Tech is going through a rough patch for sure.

If you’re somewhere with a tech scene then go to meet-ups. It’s so much easier to meet people and build a network in person. Don’t be the pushy guy looking for work, they will instantly turn people off and they’ll remember that about you. Just be friendly and get to know people and talk about technical stuff. You want to be the knowledgeable helpful person who is easy to get along with so that when someone is looking for help you’re a natural person to recommend.

I don’t know how it is these days but I used to get a huge amount of work through the monthly “seeking freelancers” threads. I’d just post my ad and get a bunch of enquires every month. You can probably find some of those ads if you look back through my post history.

Having a website can help especially if you do something that’s currently hot. I got loads of work by being on the first or second page of google (not even top of the page!) for “[technology] programmer in [town]”. React Native was definitely one of those technologies for a little bit around here, but that changes so it’ll be a little bit luck and a little bit judgement in making sure you describe your self the right way.

Even sites like upwork (rentacoder was the site that was current last time I did this) have worked for me in the past. My strategy then was to be amongst the most expensive for any project and wait for the people frustrated with low quality cheap workers wanting to try the other end.

Do keep in mind that a large part of the “job” of being a freelancer is networking and marketing yourself. It requires constant attention even when you do start to get work (a common pitfall is to get some work and stop looking, then it ends and your back to square one). If you’re not willing to make that as much a part of skill set as the stuff you’re hoping to get paid to do then I wouldn’t recommend freelancing. But if you are happy with that it can be fun and varied and not a bad way to work!

I design hardware and build teams that design hardware, so this may be a bit different than more SW focused folks but I've found LinkedIn Sales Navigator to be a very powerful sales tool. You can basically target potential clients using very powerful search filters, and then from there it's pretty standard marketing as in any business.

All the comments in this thread so far are great, and you should definitely try a combination of all of them.

It's been a while since I've needed to do this, but regarding the 'personal network' - back when I started freelancing I'd go to meetups that weren't directly related to my set of skills, but my skillset could be somewhat needed. If you're a dev and you go to developer meetups, there's a strong chance a lot of the room is doing what you're doing and looking for what you're looking for. Instead, attend meetups where people are likely to need your skillset but won't have it - agency owners, startups, SEO events, whatever.

It's kind of obvious in hindsight, but you have to fish where the fish are. If you're a guy looking to pick up girls, a sports bar filled with guys is probably a terrible choice of a night out. If you're a girl looking to pick up guys, maybe it's a great choice.

Be brave about conversation (you have nothing to lose!), introduce yourself to people, then just listen and ask questions. People love to talk about themselves, listen to their work and problems (of course talk about you, be natural, just talk less than they do!). Thank them for being really interesting to talk to, get their contact details. If you think there's work there, email them the next day: "It was really lovely meeting to you and chatting. I've been thinking about your problem with X, I'd probably approach it like Y. If you want to grab a drink and chat it through, we absolutely should."

There's little worse/more off-putting than meeting someone at an event and they immediately trying to sell themselves. Establish a rapport and follow up after. Even if you have nothing to offer you can contact them and say it was lovely to meet them. Some of the best people in your network will be the ones you meet like this, stay in touch with, then remember you when the timing is right (and vice versa).

Just my 2c! Good luck!

I published open source plugins for a popular tool and blogged about niche topics a decade ago. Not sure how practical that can still be today. Now I just wait for recruiters to approach me or go through recruiting agencies job ads.

Via personal contacts. If you had a reputation of getting shit done at past gigs, your former coworkers should be lining up to contract you to fill in urgent business needs, or to get their new startup off the ground.

Upwork also plays favourites to agencies - there appears to be some sort of non-transparent relationship there that they don't want the general public-marketplace knowing about, but if you use Upwork long enough you'll hit its various boundaries and faults; I'm guessing they don't disclose this in their public documentation to shareholders - as would match the other unethical-shady pattern of behavour I've experienced on that platform.

LinkedIn job search. I filter by contracts, part time, remote …etc and apply even if it’s not a perfect fit. In addition, specific tech job boards. I got a couple contract/freelance gigs this way that since 2018. The same clients keep giving me jobs in and off. I noticed it’s a bit harder now than it used to be but that’s probably across the tech market.

You learn to market your services. If you don't know how to market, there's plenty of resources out there.

I've started at 2018, mainly used a similar site to upwork but local to my country so less competition and most of the time when you find a client from there, they refer you or use you again

Of course adding there to your profile skills, portfolio etc, sending your CV and website can really help

Once you have a website like this or a few, always keep hunting for work. You can fail to get one for 2 weeks but then find one that will last you few months of work

Normally as a "freelancer" you get make much more money with the same time of work, if you work fast try to always get a fixed price project and finish it ASAP. If not you can use a client or a few hourly and over the time to look for those fixed price

If you new to this, you gonna make a lot of mistakes estimating costs on those fixed price projects, we all do. We learn over time :)

80% of clients came from recommendations from two people. One was a VC, the other was a designer/PR/marketer who'd take projects that needed more people.

It's hard to find these kinds of people in the first place, but do things well and the connections will come.

The basic problem is not seeking freelance work....seek instead of offer a service...

What is the difference?

1. If seeking freelance work you get put at the bottom of the pay stack! 2. If you research the target buyers and create a buyable sellable service then the pay lever is back in your hands.

Look even Setty states this implied in all the books he has authored.

Now the third point:

3. Product as a service means you have recurring revenue which means less searching for work or in short words. Yes, at first you have a lot of marketing work resulting in 80 hour weeks...but over time that decreases as you get more recurring service contracts...

Pardon me for widening the question, are there part time maintenance / weekend gig ? I often think I'd enjoy non architectural short jobs to save more money...

there aren't a lot of options these days for good paying freelance gigs. Sometimes its just a matter of being in the right place at the right time or dumb luck.

I was lurking in an open source project's Discord and one day someone asked if anyone was willing to customize a feature for them. Turned out I also wanted the feature myself. So I replied to them and business was conducted via GitHub Sponsors. They also offered to pay via cryptocurrency. I wrote the code, sent the patch to them via Discord and eventually got a version of it upstreamed.

I'm the founder of https://fractionaljobs.io - we help talent (e.g. engineers) with senior-level fractional gigs. We've placed maybe 5 lead engineer or CTO roles in the last couple of months.

Happy to answer Q's if you have any.

I made a website for the guy repairing the roof and one for the dude reading the heaters once a year and when I complained to the owner of a local self service car wash the Hoover had swallowed my euro we got talking and I made a site for the car wash too. Oh and Upwork sends a mail every six months reminding me that I have an account there.

I started with Fiverr and UpWork (when it was ODesk) many years back and built a profile of highly satisfied repeat customers. These days, I get most of the work through existing customers or referrals.

Make offline social connections. Many people in your community don't bother with sites like upwork. There is less competition offline.

giving talks and more talks and more talks at MeetUps and similar events.

Or organize your own.

Then underpromise and overfullfill.

Use then these contacts for

a) more talks b) new clients

repeat.

Also set up a newsletter / mailing list. Start collecting emailadresses immediately.

Some other platforms besides Upwork:

contra.com

flexjobs.com

careervault.io

weworkremotely.com

pangain.com

justremote.co

himalayas.app

angel.co

remotive.com

authenticjobs.com

remocate.app

trulyremote.co

jobspresso.co

remoteok.com

dailyremote.com

workingnomads.com

virtualvocations.com