Ask HN: Where would you start looking for development clients?

Disclaimer: This is not a sales pitch, I'm not trying to finds clients here.

After years of freelancing / contracting, during the last few projects a nice fellowship of 2-3 (mostly frontend) developers has formed around me. We have worked on some rather serious projects, I am confident regarding what we can offer.

I see all the "who's hiring" posts, but our biggest project is soon coming to an end and I'm almos clueless regarding where I should start looking for companies who would want to contract a small company for custom development services.

We are too small and our projects are usually too long for us to hire a dedicated salesperson.

What are some common ways you've found to work to find new clients?

On Upwork.

I know marketplaces are seen negatively by many here on HN. But I think this approach to work makes total sense.

It is just the most logical thing on multiple levels. First, a structured database of supply and demand. Of freelancers with all their skills and of jobs with all their attributes. Second, to have a standard way to collaborate. All invoices look the same, all reporting looks the same. Makes collaboration so much smoother. Starting a contract is a click. Work gets invoiced automatically. Invoices get paid automatically.

It's hard because buyers (midsize+ company executives who can spend 1M+/yr) who are good at software don't need outside help, so you're really looking for buyers who are not good at software and they hang out at Medicaid summits, not Javascript meetups. To fix this you need a "rainmaker" and that person is the CEO. Since you don't have that person yet, you need to either market yourself to try to attract that person to you, or become that person yourself which is a career change. Of course this is hard, because obviously nobody is handing out million dollar contracts for free. The lifetime value of being a rainmaker is in the 100s of millions of dollars of cashflow, so to beat your competitors you might expect to invest quite a lot even to just get the first few small contracts (which then feed back into your qualifications and help you grow). Also note that the contracts may be unpleasant, the buyers with the money are not hot startups with best practices, but rather lumbering enterprises with decaying systems who have done everything exactly wrong (they don't understand software, remember?)

Wrong thread, I think. You'd be better off in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29067492 or next month's one.

When I used to freelance I divided my marketing activities into two categories: "hunting" and "farming".

Hunting tactics include things like responding to job board ads, reaching out to people you know to see if they can help you find a gig, or going to a conference to try to find a new client. Like real hunting, hunting for clients can be fast, but it’s only successful a fraction of the time, and you don’t always get something good.

Farming tactics include things like writing blog posts, writing books, speaking at local meetups, speaking at conferences, guesting on podcasts, hosting podcasts, and other things that demonstrate your technical competence to a (if done successfully) large number of people. Farming can yield much better results than hunting, but there can be quite a long interval between the time you plant the seed and the time you get to reap the harvest. And just like in real farming, not all the seeds you plant will sprout into plants that bear fruit.

In my experience, farming tends to yield better clients than hunting, although you can't control when the clients are going to come.

I hate to say it but I think your safest bet is for you and your colleagues to each go your separate way (for now) and find contract gigs individually. In my experience it's really hard to find a client who wants to hire multiple people at once. The easiest kind of client to find is a software organization that needs a programmer and is willing to use a contractor rather than a full-time employee.

And BTW, the sad secret I learned about freelancing over the course of ~8 years doing it is that 99% of freelancers are just staff-aug contractors. They're not making great money and they don't have a special lifestyle. The only difference between most freelancers and regular employees is that the freelancers file 1099s instead of W-2s. Not trying to be a downer about it but I think it's helpful to acknowledge the reality of it.

Lastly, I've been asked many times how to get freelance clients, so I wrote a post about it here: https://www.jasonswett.net/my-advice-to-brand-new-freelance-...

Hope that helps.