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Ask HN: What mistakes did you make when starting as a consultant/freelancer?

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Re: Ask HN: What mistakes did you make when starting as a consultant/freelancer?

#271

Post by kffcc »

sjy wrote: post #11
mattferderer wrote: post #3

Hire a good tax person immediately. Maybe hire 2. A significant amount of your income earned is gained through having someone walk you through handling taxes & health insurance. I'm not suggesting cheating on taxes. There are common practices such as knowing how to best incorporate your business for your situation. How to best pay yourself (dividends vs income) & how to handle your personal & company expenses. This c…

What country are you basing this advice on? I think it’s good advice, but if your income can increase by 20-30% as a result of optimising your business structure for tax purposes, that’s a dysfunctional tax system. I’d like to believe that in some countries this advice is not necessary.

In France this is good advice too. If ones doesn't like doing tax things this is generally good advice.

And don't be the cheap client yourself in that regard 120€/hour for a good/excellent freelance accountant, I never want to go back to less experienced/professional/passionate ones.

Some examples: When you open a one person business in France there is a program to give you a 0% tax rate in the first year, but you need to apply and for that you need to know it exists.

Employing yourself can cost you 70% taxes. At the start when you rates might be low you can pay around 25% with the right corporate structure, instead of up to 45%.

edit: typo

Re: Ask HN: What mistakes did you make when starting as a consultant/freelancer?

#272

Post by mattbgates »

I think there are three mistakes I'd make:

1. I wasted a lot of time as a freelance web designer trying to get clients and convince them to go with me. I think someone would tell me they wanted a website. Without taking any payment at all, I'd setup a demo website. It wouldn't be a whole lot, but I'd setup at least half the pages with lorem ipsum, only to have them tell me they'd get back to me... or take forever for us to get the website done.

2. I always undervalued my work thinking that they would go to another client. To this day, I still am a culprit of making this mistake. It's not that I should overcharge a client, but for a lot of the bullshit they put you through, back and forth, meetings... etc. I was giving away a lot of free time.

3. A lot of times I'd have clients going into their website and making their own mistakes.. nothing that was my doing.. nothing that even required me, but oftentimes, I'd rush to fix everything for them. Soon as I stopped rushing.. I realized a lot of the time, clients figure it out themselves, especially the usual minor mistakes they'd make.

Re: Ask HN: What mistakes did you make when starting as a consultant/freelancer?

#273

Post by swah »

JUSTed wrote: post #86
super-serial wrote: post #20

I tried freelance and realized I hate it more than any other type of programming work. I can tolerate being an employee where I do what I'm told. After a month I get a feel for the environment so it becomes low stress and then I can keep my head down programming. Or I can tolerate selling software or having a SaaS. If I'm CEO I decide the direction of the product and then just have to handle customer support. But the…

You should only have to do that in the beginning and strive to earn more so that you can hire an accountant or a firm to keep the booking and calculate your taxes for you. Invoicing is a matter of minutes and some apps even do it for free. Once you've set up your templates for each type of contract and document, you should be good to go. The only true problem in freelancing is generating new (good) leads. That's it.…

> Admin stuff is a piece of cake with today's technology

Do you mean something like deploying every client with the same stack which is easy to admin? I noticed I started this freelancing thing not giving a second thought about how I would mantain systems running for my clients. I should at least include some kind of monthly fee... (otherwise documentation so they can admin it..)

Re: Ask HN: What mistakes did you make when starting as a consultant/freelancer?

#274

Post by fierarul »

ScottFree wrote: post #256
fierarul wrote: post #64

The common rule around here is to charge more. This is also promoted a lot by patio11 on HN and on Twitter. I would counter this with the fact that sometimes it could backfire. Just like in a job negotiation, a contract negotiation might end up with no contract at all. So while it's nice to hear about this, applying it in practice generally works for new customers while the original/current customers are paying your…

"Charge more" is rhetoric[0]. If you look closely at those posts where patio11 advocates charging more, his reasoning for doing so is that most highly skilled developers undercharge for their services. His advice simply doesn't apply outside of that context. [0]: If you don't know the difference between Rhetoric and Dialectic, I urge you to read Rhetoric by Aristotle. It will help explain some of the problems you may…

> his reasoning for doing so is that most highly skilled developers undercharge for their services. His advice simply doesn't apply outside of that context.

Being highly skilled is a personal auto-evaluation. One might (perhaps wrongly) believe this and still not manage to raise rates.

> I urge you to read Rhetoric by Aristotle. It will help explain some of the problems you may or may not have when talking with non-technical people.

This is an interesting piece of advice. You think this would be a common trait among technical people?

I never did read Rhetoric, perhaps I'll find time over the holidays.

Re: Ask HN: What mistakes did you make when starting as a consultant/freelancer?

#276

Post by safareli »

wensley wrote: post #101

Lots of advice to raise your prices, which I agree with, but just be careful if quoting for a dream project or something in an industry you want to move into. I recently quoted for such a project, with a higher price than usual but not unreasonable at all. Heard nothing back from the client for weeks now when discussions were previously going well. I feel like they have taken offence at my quote or something. I am a…

Something as short as "Have you given up on this?" might work
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