Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How do you find clients?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 84 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you find clients?

#61

Post by bdcravens »

hackernews wrote: post #53
jnbiche wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, which language?

It's ColdFusion. At a former employer we hired him on as a contractor and in the ~3 months he was on contract not a single line of code was ever produced even though there were promises made every week. Would not use again. That said, as a past CF developer there is TON of ColdFusion work out there. Sure it is not glamorous but there are a lot worse things you could be doing for $$ :)

I have certainly had a few failed projects, as I've taken on too much work before. As some of the commenters to the OP pointed out, this is a challenge that many freelancers face. Indeed, as with any mistake, we learn and grow.

That said, I feel you are calling me out in a public forum is a bit inappropriate. To say I didn't produce a single line of code is a bold statement. As you called me out in a public forum, I'd be interested in discussing publicly. As your statement has the potential to cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars over my career, I realize personal litigation is an option, but I'm a civil person who would prefer healthy discourse, even when my character is attacked. However, that doesn't seem possible, as I have no clue who you are. I have chosen not to hide behind a made-up identity. You, however have the username "hackernews": I assume you are an employee of YCombinator? I doubt it, and to that extent, your username has the potential to be a libelous misrepresentation of Paul Graham's brand.

If you do not have the professional integrity to identify yourself, feel free to let me know who you are at a ColdFusion conference; I am a speaker at many of them.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find clients?

#62

Post by corkill »

Most business owners are not looking online for a website/marketing guy, they typically chose based on recommendations and people they already know. This means there are much easier ways to get clients than seo or adwords.

Focus on people already spending money on marketing. You can find this out by looking at local publications, look at their google adwords spend, look at their website etc.

I'd also add check you are selling the result people want not the service. Selling a wordpress site...so is the offshore freelancer for $5 an hour.

Selling a 10% increase in profits through effective online marketing, bingo (of course you need to be able to actually deliver). When you do this you need a lot less customers and they appreciate you a lot more.

Cold email to a niche with your offer and educational content works a treat. Also networking events, partner up with non competing services etc.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find clients?

#63

Post by binarysolo »

marcamillion wrote: post #55
binarysolo wrote: post #41

Hrm, surprised nobody suggested Craigslist. I bootstrapped myself into a data scientist/consultant with gigs from Craigslist. (Well, grad school helps too, but the initial contract leads were pretty much all from CL.)

What was the response rate for you? Because I tried this, and it turned out to be pretty low - like 1 - 2% (which was on the high-end). So just to get a response, I had to send 50 - 100 emails. Maybe I am misremembering, but it is something like that.

Weird. For me it was literally like 10 out of 10 replies. Though I pretty much had it set to search for "data scraping", "data mining", "data science", "big data", "machine learning", and "data analytics", then have it forward gigs/jobs/etc. to me via RSS.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find clients?

#64

Post by mgkimsal »

boopsie wrote: post #59
mgkimsal wrote: post #21

networking and word of mouth - both take longer, but will have longer term results. I made a couple connections in 2006/2007 that I can directly attribute $200k in income to, because of their word of mouth referrals. That came just from local meetups and such. There's plenty of people I've met which haven't directly contributed to my bottom line, but to try to look at everyone as a potential $ is a wrong approach. I…

I'd add Jerry Weinberg's _Secrets of Consulting_ to the reading list. It had a major impact on my ability to turn my tech skills into a business. For example, it helped me understand that the right answer to a client request is, "Yes, I can do that. And this is what it will cost."

I was in a meeting last week and person A said "can we do X?" and person B said "Anything's possible, it's just a matter of time and money, right Mike? That's what you always say, right?" and she laughed as she said it. I've trained them well. :)

I don't quite have that as a standard reaction to all client requests all the time, as I'll often ask more questions and try to engage them a bit first before the 'this is what it will cost' bit, but that's generally the direction I go in.

I think tech people have a hard time with this response because they're often unsure of their own skills. At least, I know that's the case with a few friends of mine who rarely think about "the business side" of things. I've done this long enough now where i know that anything someone asks me for can be done, it's just a matter of figuring out how.

However, the flip side of this is that I've seen the result of people (and possibly even been this person) just saying "yes" to everything, building it, and it not really working. I do think some customers have been burned by that - a dev who claims to be able to do anything, then delivers them crap, charges a fortune, then leaves a mess for someone else to clean up. After they've gone through that a couple of times, they're wary of anyone who claims to be able to do anything.

I've learned to try to be more cautious how I phrase my abilities, because I know how it can appear. In general, anything someone wants done, I can make happen. It doesn't mean I will be the one doing the work, but I can bring in the appropriate skilled people when needed. That's a function of age, in that my network is more useful than it was 10 years ago, and possibly wisdom. 10-15 years ago I'd always try to build everything myself, and sometimes ended up with subpar stuff.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find clients?

#65

Post by timjahn »

I started back in the day with MySpace, then Craigslist. Over time, I built up word of mouth referrals and also did freelance work for a bunch of agencies/companies for a period of time, sometimes finding them through (crappy) recruiters.

If I were starting today, I'd use matchist (matchist.com, the new startup I'm building). Our goal is to become a trusted referral source in your inner circle.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find clients?

#66

Post by lgieron »

binarysolo wrote: post #41

Hrm, surprised nobody suggested Craigslist. I bootstrapped myself into a data scientist/consultant with gigs from Craigslist. (Well, grad school helps too, but the initial contract leads were pretty much all from CL.)

Hey, that's what I'm bootstraping myself into right now - I'm currently three months into my first data science consultancy job (more on the programming/infrastructure side of things - extracting/preparing data, launching large distributed jobs etc.). I'd be delighted to talk with someone who's been in this market longer than myself, but can't really contact you (no e-mail in the profile) - please give out your e-mail address (either in public or just e-mail me) if you'd like to talk.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find clients?

#67

Post by mgkimsal »

Schwolop wrote: post #51

The best way I've found to get freelance jobs is to tell people that yes you are unemployed but you're not interested in the kind of work they want done, even though you could do it in your sleep. Then when they push back, quote them an absolutely ridiculously high rate that they wouldn't possibly accept. Then, for some reason I haven't quite fathomed yet, they often say "yeah, that's fine. See you this afternoon." T…

It's not necessarily just 'rich' people/clients, but the effect is more easily seen there. What you're really talking about is 'value' pricing. Figure out what value something has to someone, price based on that value, not on the value or cost of your time, and see what happens.

I did a job for someone that took 20 minutes (including time to invoice) and I sent an invoice for $200. My understanding was that they'd had a couple people trying to fix the issue for an entire day before that, and they had a TV deadline (ads going out that night with a link to a broken website). $200 was nothing compared to the time cost of adding more people who couldn't find the problem, or having their client paying to send people to a broken site. The fact that it took me 20 minutes didn't factor in to their thinking when paying the invoice.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find clients?

#68

Post by abhishekdesai »

I wrote a post on this long time back in 2009. Built a company from 4 people to more than 60 developers based on some of the fundamentals mentioned in the post. Pasting it here.

--------------------------------------------

With my three friends I am running an IT service company for more than 5 years now. We have learned things the long and hard way during all these years. There was actually no single person to guide us regarding any aspect of the IT business though we have had many well wishers so far.

So to help entrepreneurs who are also planning to start their own company or who have just started the company I am planning to write series of articles which can help them in this journey. So here is the first one for you guys.

During these 5 years we have faced many challenges technically as well as in managing projects, clients and people. But one of the most challenging part of our business right now is scaling. We plan to double the revenue and increase the profitability without increasing head count considerably. We have around 70 people team right now and we plan to maintain the same. So now one of the challenges is to get quality projects from which you can earn more.

Following are few ways using which you can fetch software development projects from the market:

1) Contacts. Contacts. Contacts. Exhaust all your contacts for fetching the first project for your company. Do it for free if needed. You have to have experience to fetch some serious work. In your initial stage, contacts are the best thing you can have. This is perhaps the best time to use your family contacts and relatives.

2) If you are couple of years old company, make a list of all old clients and send them personalized mail saying if we can be of any other help.

3) Join the bidding site such as oDesk and Elance and start building a great profile. oDesk is my favorite site for getting new work as it has a unique model which makes a win-win situation for both buyers and providers. The other best thing about it is that you mostly get hourly projects over there and weekly payments. Payment for your work is guaranteed. Elance is good for bigger size fixed projects. There are many other bidding sites such as Guru, Rent-A-Coder etc but these two are my favorites.

4) Become a Microsoft Partner and access their database of companies. Email them, call them for building relationship.

5) Get your company or yourself registered on Facebook and Twitter. Use their search functionality to find out what people are looking for.

6) If you have little extra money try Google Adwords for keywords like "hire a programmer", "companies in india", "outsourcing" etc

7) Get it from most popular classified site craigslist.org

8) Tie up with local partners who can outsource you projects.

9) If you are a new company start developing on the latest technologies. For e.g. Developing iPhone Applications will get you far more projects than developing in PHP or .NET right now.

These are just the few ways and there can be many other ways to fetch software development projects. Please leave me a comment if you have other ways of fetching the projects. We all will be happy to know.

--------------------------------------------

Original post: http://abhishekdesai.com/how-to-fetch-software-development-o...

Re: Ask HN: How do you find clients?

#69

Post by bdunn »

One thing I really emphasized in my book on pricing freelancing services (ships today, btw: http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com) is to build a sales-driven website. Look at your favorite SaaS product's marketing site: captivating headline, bulleted copy of benefits, a clear call to action.

Way too many freelancers/consultancies botch this up and don't build their websites with conversion rates in mind, and worst of all, don't ask for visitors to contact them (the call to action).

Also, use wording that resonates with businesspeople (who hire you) instead of just technology. i.e. Are you a Wordpress developer, or do you help brick and mortar businesses get more sales (and happen to use Wordpress to get there?)

Instead of just listing out some screenshots of sites you've worked on, talk about how you helped your past clients. Continually emphasize your abilities to deliver business value.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find clients?

#70

Post by yahelc »

aantix wrote: post #57
yahelc wrote: post #17

Adwords worked best for me by crafting ads targeting specific niche specializations that would grab long tail traffic. In my case, it was converting websites to WordPress. I didn't need every single person looking for WordPress work; 50 clicks per day worked out just fine for my capactiy. By some optimizing, keeping my bids low, and disabling Content Network, I was able to get CPA to ~$10; as long as I was converting…

Did you rely on any particular tools for optimization? How did you decide which initial words to target? Was it solely based on pricing?

Just Adwords and Google Analytics.

Web Development keywords tend to be expensive, so it was cheaper to focus on many long tail terms rather than compete for "wordpress", "web development", etc.

I started out with hundreds of terms related to building and converting sites to WordPress , and used Adwords and Google Analytics data to kill off any term that was costing me significantly without bringing in any leads.

Incidentally, I started out with Content Network enabled, but found that it brought no leads and cost more than search clicks. Not sure if that was click fraud or what, but killing Content Network was the best optimization decision I made.

Post reply on HN