Ask HN: How do you find clients?

In regards to getting more developers on board, are they other freelancers that you got from Elance, Odesk etc? What is your process on ensuring that the job was done right?

Great advice, especially those three main points Market, Market and Market!

It's not exactly people i met on Elance etc., but i met the through someone else. But they were on those marketplaces, so technically yes.

Managing is hard when you're not doing the work, and the quality of the final product will differ. Especially when you're subcontracting, the person you dole out work to will for obvious reasons be cheaper than you are. Hence their quality of work would usually be lower, unless you found someone better than you for much cheaper. But then in that case they will realize that soon enough and leave.

You can minimize it by making sure the tickets etc. are atomic and unambiguous enough. I use mockups, screenshots a lot(especially since i work with english-as-a-foreign-language people). Initially i put in a lot of time QAing stuff. But i was proving to be a bottleneck where i would interact with the client, then divy up work to the devs and then QA it back. I just didn't have the hours to do all that. So i've been making clients become more involved in the process. So allowing them to help out on testing, project-management side and trying to make my presence minimal. Also all communication is kept on tickets, and linked to exact git commits for it. So i can catch up and see where we are, even drop right down to the code to see what changed.

To be honest, it's still a work-in-progress. It's been taking more and more of my time to manage stuff than code productively. So sooner i'll have to think of getting some help on that end.

If you are willing to work for less than stellar rates, I have found work through oDesk and Rent-A-Coder (now vWorker). If you live in the US and have kids or want to be comfortable, its going to be really hard to make enough money on those sites. But if you are like me and are just trying to get by, you can find work that pays enough to live on on those sites. If you live in a place with a significantly lower cost of living, I would definitely take advantage of sites like that without hesitating.

What I do is I find the rare project post that contains an actual specification of some sort which doesn't seem completely ludicrous and is something that I can make a fair start on within 1-3 days of work. I build out a prototype hitting on a few of the major technical aspects of that spec. A significant portion of the time I win the bid after sending them a link to the prototype or a video of it in action.

Another place I found a client was on reddit. Someone posted a job as an ad at the top of the page. It didn't have a real spec but it did hint at some specific technical aspect of the project, so I built a quick prototype based on a related open source system. Then I told them that I wasn't interested in a regular job but rather wanted to work in a freelance capacity (because that is what I wanted).

So once you have got a good portfolio, make sure that you do build your personal website. It took me a weekend to develop my own ( http://akshayagarwal.in ) and the rewards have been excellent because any potential client would want to have a look at what you have done already and when he sees that you have a proven record of awesomeness, the deal is yours! Also, make sure to maintain a decent and updated LinkedIn profile because thats where I get a good amount of leads. You should also have some cool sideprojects open sourced on Github, they dont need to be big, they can be just some minor hack that you did over a weekend but it helps you demonstrate your love for programming and technology. Lastly, network, network, network, its the biggest investment you will ever make in your business.

I can confirm this. I wrote quite a bit of open-source software that has attracted thousands of users over the years and now my clients find me instead of the other way around.

You need to do more than just write the software though -- you need to be active in discussions where people are looking for software like yours, because that's often how people end up arriving at your software. Ideally the software you're building also supports some other software with a decent user base rather than trying to do something completely independent; that way you have a pre-established target user base who may already be looking for your solution.

Additionally, I started out doing contracted development work, and now I mostly do consulting. It's less stress and easier to predict how long it will take. And I get to spend my development time on my own projects.

A final note: if you contribute to other open-source projects, sometimes you can get in touch with the primary maintainer and have that person forward you work they don't have time to do.