Odesk and elance are top freelance providers in the US. I have had some success with Guru too.
With all of these you have to weed through the noise to find good clients. It takes time.
Finding Your First Clients As A Freelancer
11–20 of 23 posts
Re: Finding Your First Clients As A Freelancer
#12A friend swears by https://www.elance.com/ (He hires.) What is more interesting is that he knows how long it should take (within 20%) and discards the crazy cheap offers. Much of what he does is 'find' people on elance, takes a gamble, and if it works out, he hits them up again for more work. The more interesting thing about his work process. He always always pays on successful milestone delivery immediately.
Are you sure that applies? The article is about _first_ clients.
In my experience (I only ever dabbled a bit in the elance et al area) that's crazy hard. The prices are insanely low and - worse for this case - newcomers have zero reputation to build on.
So getting a first(!) client on elance seems to be next to impossible unless you want to work for ~free~ for a while to build up a name, a brand.
Re: Finding Your First Clients As A Freelancer
#13If you're a designer looking for work, befriend a handful of good quality developers and likewise - if you're a developer, make friends with the odd designer or two. You will find very quickly that if they have client work, need your expertise and you're their go to person then you won't be short of work.
Re: Finding Your First Clients As A Freelancer
#14I am a freelancer and I would say Odesk is the best place for freelancing. I have worked on both Elance and Odesk. My first job as a freelancer was on Elance and also the last one on Elance. Odesk seems to have more good projects on the field I work on and that is tasks automation on servers. As far as getting the first job is concerned, I got mine by quoting a price of $7/hour(lower than the minimum wage) and sugges…
Could you elaborate on the differences between the two, and why you decided to write off all of Elance after one bad experience?
I dint mean to say Elance is bad or something, I just prefer Odesk over Elance and thats my personal opinion. As I mentioned I find more projects on Odesk that interests me, that is just evident that I was giving my personal opinion.
And if you want differences between the two, I would say the option of using 4 extra credits on Elance to get your application on top is very stupid and Odesk has a very simple UX.
Re: Finding Your First Clients As A Freelancer
#15A friend swears by https://www.elance.com/ (He hires.) What is more interesting is that he knows how long it should take (within 20%) and discards the crazy cheap offers. Much of what he does is 'find' people on elance, takes a gamble, and if it works out, he hits them up again for more work. The more interesting thing about his work process. He always always pays on successful milestone delivery immediately.
Are you sure that applies? The article is about _first_ clients. In my experience (I only ever dabbled a bit in the elance et al area) that's crazy hard. The prices are insanely low and - worse for this case - newcomers have zero reputation to build on. So getting a first(!) client on elance seems to be next to impossible unless you want to work for ~free~ for a while to build up a name, a brand.
I find that if I price myself how a real human with real skills would price that I am inundated with offers. Those places are overrun with spam, so if you can demonstrate that you are not a bot when responding to a post, you should get work.
Re: Finding Your First Clients As A Freelancer
#16I am a freelancer and I would say Odesk is the best place for freelancing. I have worked on both Elance and Odesk. My first job as a freelancer was on Elance and also the last one on Elance. Odesk seems to have more good projects on the field I work on and that is tasks automation on servers. As far as getting the first job is concerned, I got mine by quoting a price of $7/hour(lower than the minimum wage) and sugges…
"I got mine by quoting a price of $7/hour(lower than the minimum wage) and..."
Depressing stuff like this is why I've never used the odesk acct I made a few months ago. I pretty much only visit the site when I receive email invitations to "apply" for a job, which is 90% recruiter spam and 10% unbelievably underpaid. Most recent example: "creating the official Diffbot Javascript client library"; fixed project price: $75. wat
Re: Finding Your First Clients As A Freelancer
#17If you can either show a portfolio of past work or get introduced by a friend, hanging around a tech incubator can also work out. I got my first client through a TechStars investor who introduced me to two founders at TS Cloud last year. I contracted with them for a few months while also looking for other clients, realized I hated freelancing and became their first employee.
Re: Finding Your First Clients As A Freelancer
#18A friend swears by https://www.elance.com/ (He hires.) What is more interesting is that he knows how long it should take (within 20%) and discards the crazy cheap offers. Much of what he does is 'find' people on elance, takes a gamble, and if it works out, he hits them up again for more work. The more interesting thing about his work process. He always always pays on successful milestone delivery immediately.
I found it incredibly difficult to get hired for a reasonable rate using any online service. All successful freelance gigs I've had have either come through referral or cold call.
Granted your first gig should be priced accordingly but when the majority of experienced freelancers work for <$50/hr on Elance it's hard to not stoop that low.
Re: Finding Your First Clients As A Freelancer
#19I am a freelancer and I would say Odesk is the best place for freelancing. I have worked on both Elance and Odesk. My first job as a freelancer was on Elance and also the last one on Elance. Odesk seems to have more good projects on the field I work on and that is tasks automation on servers. As far as getting the first job is concerned, I got mine by quoting a price of $7/hour(lower than the minimum wage) and sugges…
"I got mine by quoting a price of $7/hour(lower than the minimum wage) and..." Depressing stuff like this is why I've never used the odesk acct I made a few months ago. I pretty much only visit the site when I receive email invitations to "apply" for a job, which is 90% recruiter spam and 10% unbelievably underpaid. Most recent example: "creating the official Diffbot Javascript client library"; fixed project price: $…
There's no need to join the race to the bottom. Every now and then there comes a reasonable request, and you can just ignore the rest.
Sometimes it makes sense to try to educate the client about this, for example pointing out that getting an oficial library for $75 can't possibly turn out well for them. Instead of wasting a little money and a lot of time and their users' goodwill, they can find someone that actually cares about the quality and charges accordingly.
Sometimes it works, sometimes not. But hey, that's sales.
Re: Finding Your First Clients As A Freelancer
#20A friend swears by https://www.elance.com/ (He hires.) What is more interesting is that he knows how long it should take (within 20%) and discards the crazy cheap offers. Much of what he does is 'find' people on elance, takes a gamble, and if it works out, he hits them up again for more work. The more interesting thing about his work process. He always always pays on successful milestone delivery immediately.
Sounds interesting, is that through a bad experience at the lower rates? It always strikes me that the rates on these sites seem very low, puzzlingly so even at the top end. Especially as the projects seem to be relatively short term.
IIRC he had anecdotal evidence that the cheaper end was not producing maintainable code. Initial blocks of work on elance are going to be short. It's more of a proving ground. (Consider what type of work you would put on elance.)
Deliver well and expect a client to contact you directly for future work.
If you are hiring from elance, then one of the 'rules' is to make sure that if the freelancer fails to deliver, you could pick up and run with the work if needed. That's the key to making it work.
It's there as a resource to enable him to get on with growing your business.
I hope this makes sense.