Ask HN: How do you find freelance/contract gigs?

I have been lucky, in 15 years I have been without work for probably a grand total of less than 6 months and the longest period was probably only 3 weeks. Often times it is not a complete lack of work but more a situation where one project ends today but my next one does not start until the week after next. Usually not enough time to squeeze in something else so I fiddle around learning stuff and take time off.

I dont think there is a secret recipe for staying busy other than the very basic truths. Meet and make friends with other people in your space and be a good person. Be on time, work hard, be honest and fair, respect people. Even if you fail people will give you lots of latitude if they personally like you.

I sub out work on occasion and have tried things at a few different levels. I have hired people off ELance and ODesk (which almost never works out); hired people I was introduced to and hired people off of CraigsList. In all of that certain truths remain, people who cost more money usually do that because they are better. Mostly at this point I hire other people like myself that have been at this for a long time and bill about what I do. I worry less about their work. In fact where possible I just bring them into a deal and let them work directly with my client. That way I am not in the middle of anything, I dont deal with money etc. Since I am not really trying to be a big firm making money off of people, skimming 15-20% off the top is just not worth the risks that come with it. Everyone is happier this way. I sometimes get asked if I worry that the person I bring in may steal my business and while the thought does cross my mind it is not the right thing to worry about. If that happens then I have to question what I was doing wrong that the client felt better using the other person more than me.

I go to 8-15 hackathons/year. But maybe it is Atlanta's ecosystem or my lack of telling people about what I do, but I am have yet to get a lot of client work out of winning these types of events. I think winning def helps my portfolio, but I haven't seen much in cultivating relationships.

Do you have any advice on how to leverage these experiences more?

Dont win, (or don't compete); just contribute. Be an asset.

Remember, most people in jobs will be threatened by a strong and assertive leader - they want someone they can control and extract value from, not someone who might take their job. Understand and embrace that fear and position yourself to handle it.

Yeesh, probably shouldn't work with that guy :(

That's what I get for posting while distracted. Thank you for the correction.

curtis makes some excellent points about the whole concept of freelancing and how to make real long term work by bringing real value to your customers. These will generally not argue on price since they understand and see the value that the price is getting them (either increased income or decrease cost). With that said, I personally would not think recommend the paid hourly work even with the structure of milestones. I have experimented with both hourly and fixed bid (as well as spent a couple of years working in business to understand their view point) and here is what I have found out from my own experiences (which should not be generalized of course):

* sometimes (read quite often in my experience) a high value solution to a client takes you a very little amount of time if you bill hourly you sell yourself short against the only measure that matters for your clients and that is how much value did this project bring me

* Hourly billing tends to make clients cut projects before the actual objective of the project is achieved so that they can save cost and what this means to you is that for this client (and anyone they talk to) the project was a- a failure and b- not completed by you

* Hourly billing allows you to choose to be lazy. What this means is that you will not take the time to assess the project and its scope because heck your are being paid by the hour and if you are lazy you get in trouble

* Clients need to assess risk to reward ratio of any project they take (just like you should) an open ended project is not a good thing for them. Without a cost it is difficult to assess whether a project ROI is useful.

Now with the above said there are times when billing by the hour is the only course of action. In my experience these are as follows: * Old clients that have learned that you bring high value who want to grow their business strategically and want you to add iterations to them. These you can bill by the hour because there will be alot of time set aside discussing strategy and building for future and changing things. The key here is that they know you are worth it. * New clients where are referred to you who do not know what they want. This is when a client can not tell you really why they want the project or what is its success metric. I usually stay clear of this unless I am sold on what the vision is since it is difficult to define success.

Warning however must be said you have to stand your ground when it comes to fixed bids scope. You can change scope a bit if a new change takes out an old one but you have to be firm. In my experience a fixed bid project without a defined metric of success is doomed to cost you more then its worth.