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

Finding Your First Clients As A Freelancer

conceptcupboard.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–23 of 23 posts

Re: Finding Your First Clients As A Freelancer

#21

Post by scottydelta »

tdumitrescu wrote: post #16
scottydelta wrote: post #4

I 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: $…

Yes, you cant be more right about 90% interview invitations being spam. Sometimes I wish there were a way to send a message to the client when they fix a budget to $5 for a script and $75 for a SDK. but the thing is once you have done few projects on Odesk, its easy to get more. for eg, the Diffbot client invited me to write python sdk even though I dint apply for the project and I think that was because of review left by my previous clients. and take a suggestion, dont take small projects like fixing js code, fixing server bug which yield 20-30$, have patience and try for something worthy of your time.

Re: Finding Your First Clients As A Freelancer

#22

Post by thedawn »

Ruska wrote: post #8
thedawn wrote: post #2

Finding your first client is always an hard mission. You need to be creative and sometimes think out of the box. Mainly your first clients will come to you from mouth to ear and they will probably be friends or friends of friends. My advice is to ask for low price then the market at the beginning, it will gain those clients that will want to earn your low price. Give the best service you can and they will pass your n…

Also, don't underestimate the value of making sure a client is happy. My first client required little more than setting up a WordPress theme and doing some design tweaks. I bent over backwards for them, and now about half of my clients are referrals from that first client. I'm not saying that you should do everything for everyone, because some people will be unreasonable; when you're first starting out it's probably…

Agree, at the end of the day your happy clients will be the best advertising for you, so happy client is the most important thing for sure.

Also I would say that using platforms such as FB and publish there to all your friends that you are starting your own business may help you spread the word.

Post reply on HN