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

Constantly update expectations based on how the work is actually going and based on evolving requirements. If you are T&M or Fixed Fee, you need to always give people your best expectation of progress and where you think (even with a lot of uncertainty) you'll be when the budget runs out. If you do this constantly and early clients feel empowered to make choices (including adding more budget). If you just work until the money is gone either you eat the overage or the client is blindsided and pissed off.

The short version of this: Never, ever, go over budget - always ask for more money or a cut in scope and always do so as early as humanly possible.

If you and/or the client aren't clear on scope or if the budget is enough, don't sleep at night, confront and squash the uncertainty and resultant misalignments or you will get bitten!

> The point is, the client wants a car

Except most clients don't know what they want in such clearcut way before the project begins.

Everyone here covered 99% of the things I would say so I'm going to add a few important ones that people missed.

- Estimation. Devs are notoriously bad at it... so don't think of it as an estimation of the amount of time something will take, think of it as a negotiation with the goal of getting them to agree to the most amount of time something could take. If your estimation doesn't seem ridiculous to you then you did a bad job of negotiating.

- Asshole tax. If you get a client that you think is going to be an asshole tax them for that privilege. +20% at least (make sure you're charging more to begin with as previously mentioned). Now this may seem wrong but if they turn out to be not an asshole (which happens a lot), but to make this right with the universe just do more work and don't bill for it. The idea here is that you still end up being mentally happy to do the work even if working with them is painful.

- Use options to negotiate better. There is a bunch of advice saying "don't charge by project"... hogwash. If you can make more money by leveraging a customer's desire to know ahead of time what something will cost you can make money on that. You can clearly define ahead of time exactly what the project entails, charge a 2X or 3X what it would cost in hourly, and then charge for scope changes (which we all know there will be a ton of). Similarly, when you present a proposal, give at least 3 options: "cheap-ass", "normal", and "deluxe"... you will be surprised how many people will spend extra money because they can (you can do this even if the project is billed hourly). Furthermore... people that head into "cheap-ass" land give you valuable information on how to deal with them - most of the time this means you do the same thing but need to itemize your work more heavily (more on this).

- Itemization. Better Negotiation and billing higher amounts are improved by itemization. they say the person that comes to the negotiation table with the most bullet points to negotiate over will win the negotiation. Billing is just a different negotiation.

- Getting content is a nightmare for web clients. Charge for that... but as mentioned elsewhere make the charge in the form of a discount elsewhere. If the content is delivered by XX-XX-XXXX the project is discounted $XXX. THIS INCLUDES BASE ECOMMERCE PRODUCTS.

- Don't try to hire people to do part of your work until you are REALLY efficient at it.

- Exercising is part of your job if you are 100% on your own. Seriously.

- If a tool will save you time buy it immediately. Avoid free tools - you will pay for them later and it will cost you more.

Never work for free.

I had a guy contact me and con me into developing a feature for him and then disappear.

The other way to put this is, get paid upfront. Estimate your price, triple it, then demand 1/3 upfront before you start to code. That way if the client flakes out on the rest you're at least covered. (Heh... I wrote this from just the headline, before reading the blurb. Your friend who "refuses to take on a project without at least 30% advance" is spot on.)

Which brings me to the next gem: Charge more. The A-#1 mistake most people in every business make is to charge too little. (Flip it over: don't compete on price. Not as a freelancer/consultant.)

What else? Don't work for liars or incompetents.

Also, just because a client has money and is willing to give it to you doesn't mean that you should take it.

Sometimes the right thing to do is sit Gil down and tell him: your project is the Winchester Mystery House and I have better things to do with my time.

(Ah, Gil... what a client. He would come in to discuss the project, and we'd say, "Well, there's A, B, or C?" and he would say, "What about D? And E? Could it also F and G?" and the PM would smile and say, "Sure Gil! We can do all that!". It was the only project I ever worked on that had 100% code coverage. No, really, 100%. Every line. Every single line. Because Gil wanted it. :-)

So yeah, charge more, and brook no bullshit. It helps if you're good at what you do, or at least dedicated.

   It's not a crime if they don't catch you.

With that mentality, you're as good as caught, anywho.