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Ask HN: Do Americans stand a chance on freelance sites?

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Re: Ask HN: Do Americans stand a chance on freelance sites?

#51
If you are very new to the industry, you might face some difficulty initially since people are not sure if its worth paying you more when there are others who are ready to do same work at cheaper rate.

But if you have good portfolio, audience, contacts, you won't face much problem.

If somebody is cheaper, there's a reason why they are cheaper. If you are good at what you are doing, people will be happy to pay you what you are worth.

Good Luck :)

Re: Ask HN: Do Americans stand a chance on freelance sites?

#52

Absolutely. Just make a point of never competing with the $10/hr crowd. Take a minute and read a few of those cheap bids. Do they inspire confidence? If you were an employer, would you honestly believe that the person who wrote that bid is capable of building the thing you're trying to build? Of course not. They all sound like a bunch of desperate children trying to get away with something. If you want to take work f…

Are you assuming that all $10 code is bad? What if its done in India by an awesome engineer and his $10 equates to $45 here? So he is actually a high end developer there competing with someone here.

I personally took on a project and didn't like it a bit, so I passed it on to India. That was the furthest my $200 ever went on a $5k project. It was not poetry, but no better or worse than the average. My advice, don't swim upstream and complain about the currents, this is your cue to scale, an opportunity for you to shift away from one man gigs to bigger projects where you outsource and code review, and program parts that interest you yourself, all the while making a lot more money.

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