Drawbacks of Freelance Web Development
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Drawbacks of Freelance Web Development
1–10 of 25 posts
Re: Drawbacks of Freelance Web Development
#2I have been freelancing for 5 years and agree with most of this. Thinking about it all the time is absolutely true, and my clients call me at weird times also.
I think you can make more money free-lancing than you can working for someone else if you are good at business development, and although it is difficult to scale, if you have talented friends, building a consulting business in a major metropolitan area (NYC,SF, Chicago) is probably easier than building a startup.
It would be mucher harder to do from Italy because of the time difference and a lot of high-paying clients expect you to be on site at least some of the time.
Re: Drawbacks of Freelance Web Development
#3I have been doing freelancing for last 3 years and i agree with you but i think you can avail opportunity to scale your business if you are lucky to get big clients because you become a business for others and as every business man wants to scale his business so i think its solely you who can show a big picture to a client. If his business grows following your picture so as you.Its my point of view though i am not that much experienced as you are but i think that should work in this way (mutual benefits). Above all i am happy to see a post in English by an Italian :p . Its my 2nd month here in Italy and its hard to find an english speaker here. :-(
Re: Drawbacks of Freelance Web Development
#4In my freelancing experience it's possible to scale the job by creating teams of developers per project and coordinating them. The problem (if it's a problem) is that your not a real freelancer anymore: you have obligations to those developers and you have to care about them, so you're more like a company boss. You might also have to become a real company, if your country's fiscal legislation favors that. Still, you can't have more than a few projects at the same time. I didn't make so much extra money when I had a couple of loose teams over the Internet: the profit is linear with the number of the developers. I think one must go all in and become a real company with as many devs as possible, but that's a different life.
Re: Drawbacks of Freelance Web Development
#5I have been doing freelancing for last 3 years and i agree with you but i think you can avail opportunity to scale your business if you are lucky to get big clients because you become a business for others and as every business man wants to scale his business so i think its solely you who can show a big picture to a client. If his business grows following your picture so as you.Its my point of view though i am not th…
In this kind of job is not so difficult to find people that speak English here in Italy, but most devs read and write (especially read) much better than they speak or understand.
Re: Drawbacks of Freelance Web Development
#6Switzerland is very close to Italy. I don't know if you are willing to move but if you are, you could easily work here 3-4 days a week (60%-80% emploment), make more than enough to live, have no clients who call you at night and build your own product/company in your spare time.
At least this is what I am doing right now.
If you look for a tech-job in Zurich, check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" on https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t... or send me a mail to the address in my HN-profile.
Re: Drawbacks of Freelance Web Development
#7Why not re-use software you made or others made. Use open source platforms like Wordpress. At our company, we didn't find any good platform for building modern social apps out of reusable components and have the whole thing be maintainable (Drupal came the closest) so we built our own. It has been open sourced so everyone is free to use it. Get a project, assemble it from pages and tools, collect the overhead :)
Re: Drawbacks of Freelance Web Development
#8Another angle is to progressively fire your smallest clients and get referrals from your larger ones.
You can scale to 880$ per hour or whatever it was using this strategy.
It could be hard emotionally to fire nice clients, so keep a good list of devs handy who you can send your undesirable work.
Last thing is to read patio11's guide about freelancing -- its a very relevant read.
Re: Drawbacks of Freelance Web Development
#9In the context of HN: a huge upside of freelancing is that it puts you into direct contact with the types of problems that would make great B2B and bootstrapped startups.
I know a number of developers that were able to shift themselves from freelancing to running a SAAS via productizing their consulting work.
Re: Drawbacks of Freelance Web Development
#10Awesome read, thanks so much for posting.
Have you ever hired developers to work for you? How did that go if you did?