The path of a freelancer. Part 1. Tips for beginners

Good day, friends, people, freelancers, aliens.

Noticing the trend in demand for posts on the topic of freelancing, I thought that perhaps it was time for me to make a contribution to this topic. A lot of things have already been said, but, in my opinion, not always concretized into specific points.
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Briefly in a few words about yourself and other things so that the post has some great content: on the last three years in freelance with kopecks. I work not one. Team. United by the Internet and the framework of the CIS. Most never seen, and even with them never called up. There is no office. I have been working and communicating with one of these citizens for 5-6 years. Oddly enough, this did not serve as a barrier. Acquaintances, friends, former associates in work in a team are not and have never been, as there was not this very other work. Yes, there are such strange people in the world who have never worked in an office and are not busy with anything else and this has never prevented me, but rather the opposite.

How I “have come to such a life” and will describe all other history, background and realities some other time if the community deems it necessary (a survey is provided for this case). Now let's move on to what was planned.

“If you're so smart, why are you so poor?” {Unknown user}

“Get rich or die.” {Quote from an unknown rapper to me}

There is no perfect success story, just as there is no algorithm for how to become rich / entrepreneur / to find the girl of your dreams {insert your term}, but there can always be some sort of regulation or set of rules that most people in a given area may consider useful from the standpoint of probability of obtaining the necessary. For freelancing, with its instability and ambiguity, all these aspects are doubly relevant. During the time when we had to tell all sorts of things, we have accumulated our ... regulations and thoughts.

Answers

1. There are no sample answers.

Maybe SEOs (no offense to the latter) and other citizens believe that it is good to hire "schoolchildren", or write the "perfect" selling proposal and zhmakat it on each site. Saves time. Whoever wrote something there is a conversion. Famously 50 answers, 1 worked - enough work.

My conclusion is different - I do not recommend it to anyone. It is better to write 50 good applications per week, at 1 site, 10 pieces per day, if your resource allows. 45 will not work, 5 will work - you will have a good result by the end of the month. It is always worthwhile to at least superficially delve into the essence of the task, immediately ask questions if they are available, clarify with associates, if you have them, do you have any questions. If you are asked to specify a price - specify, even if the description is stingy and few details. Also with a term. Not enough details - ask. If you don’t know what to specify, think about the price tag for a typical service position, say, “online store”, “landing”, “corporate portal” and specify the price OT with a margin of 1/2 or 1/3 of the amount, or how much you like.

2. Terms of Reference

No TK? Do not ask him to the forehead. If it is not, then it is not. It is necessary either to accurately clarify its availability and in passing to offer its preparation for a small amount of money together, or limit it to the last one. Leave the request where it is not, on the basis of considerations “I don’t like this type, a project without TK ...” - you’ll not get an answer with high probability, and if you don’t like this type, then it’s better not to leave an answer. Is always. About this further.

3. "I do not like this type"

You do not like the customer? Description of the project? Avatar? Feedback? Something else? Forget about this project and look for another, no matter what the sum is there. Call this mystical coincidence, or pure coincidence, call it what you want, but in my experience cooperation on such projects to a project at some stage, often not initial, always, absolutely always, ends badly for reasons that are not obvious at the project consideration stage ( “Remarkable examples”, also somehow in subsequent posts). There is no universal method of working with 'tugolom "people. Therefore, they don’t say“ Do not go, kill! ”- don’t go, not the case.

4. Responsiveness

Track real-time projects on freelance exchanges or someone from your peers to puzzle this task for a small% of each such that goes into circulation. Try to write as quickly as possible the answer to projects you are interested in, without at the same time damaging their quality.

If a person has indicated a mail, phone, skype - be impudent and write to him. In particular, if he is explicitly asking to do something. There is an opinion that this is not worth doing, it is not cultural, etc. I will say this - I did not find an unequivocal answer to this question for myself. All people behave differently. Someone reacts, someone answers, someone does not like this approach. Often, you can immediately agree and get a prompt response or refusal, for example, if the budget did not suit you and don’t waste more time. Someone likes to debate and generally talk about everything on the phone, even if you yourself called him, someone does not tolerate such a definition. What format is suitable for you can be installed only by experience.

If there are already> = 10 answers in the project, do not leave a request if you do not have a portfolio for 1000 works and not 600 reviews of course.

Posted 5/08/14. If the customer has a name, please contact him by name. A few stand out just because of this against the background of template applications.

Money matters

5. Budget and money

Determine for yourself the minimum rate and never go below it. At the initial stage of recruiting experience and feedback, you can dump a little, but in the end it’s worth staking this rule and not deviating from it. Leave the small-scale editors to the hungry students. Save your nerves and the nerves of the customer, who expects a different category of performers and give extra money to those who really need it.

If the customer is not satisfied with the budget and you can not agree with him - forget about him and do not bargain. Go on.

If you work in a team, especially distributed - make it a rule that the price is determined by the performer. Rates and interests of all may be different. There is no market price. You can make an online store on OpenCart for 20,000 rubles, and you can for 100,000, and you can spend so much more on a license for 1C-Bitrix, with the same task. Get yourself a standard formula and plus all other percentages on top. If the price has already been determined by the customer - put it in its formula into parts. Do not quote on the CIS stock price per hour. Only fixed.

There are doubts about the price and other things - discuss with partners. There is no clarity on the essence of the problem - discuss the possibility of its expansion in the process with the customer in advance.

Get yourself all the popular details and identify on sites and systems. QIWI, Yandex.Money, card / bank account, WebMoney, Skrill / PayPal (for foreign customers).

6. Advance or transaction through the resource

It does not matter whether you plan to just start your freelancer journey or continue and how often you see the messages “work without prepayments” and how true they are - this rule should be observed ironically, if you don’t want problems and time wasted, always take an advance of 30-50 % for any task, or conduct a transaction through the SBR and its analogues. If the customer is not satisfied with such conditions, better find another. If the project is large - break it into logical steps on the same principle.

If you work in an informal team, then all the money should be collected on the same requisites, from one person and they should be known to everyone. Calculation within the team I recommend to carry out purely upon the completion of the task and the receipt of all funds. Illustrative examples and answers to the questions: “why? what for? how-so !? ”- - || - in subsequent posts if the community wants it.

I will give just one example here - once, through the confluence of a whole group of partly not quite obvious circumstances on a long-term project from a local customer, I had to return 40,000 rubles in fact from my own pocket, after not too pleasant conversations.

In progress

7. Our deadline is everything

They voiced the deadline - keep within, even if you work with an extremely loyal customer. For reliability, always take a deadline with a margin of several days or a week, voice it to the customer, and put yourself and your people without a reserve. Do not overload if the term is on. Yes, it is dangerous for the reputation and the overall picture, but your victorious 20 hours online per day does not guarantee a positive result, and lack of sleep and other problems will earn you money. There are things more important than work.

Once in 1-3 days, hold a detailed discussion in skype, fix the formal part in a few words in your tracker.

8. Task Manager (Tracker)

Record all tasks, all information, in one place, especially if you work in a team. No, I do not mean skype and notes on paper. Take advantage of any popular CRM that you like, refer to the development of 37signals, write your system "by yourself", put MyLife Organized and write everything there. Give as limited specialized access to the customer as possible so that he can follow the formal side of the process.

If you have a team - ask her to fix everything there. Make auto-import of projects from the sites directly to your tracker, additionally filter them, let people view the stream of projects, subscribe to RSS and send interesting projects by tags, put aside applications in your internal system. Envy statuses, statistics on deadlines, deadlines, activity of people, finances, who earned much, make graphs, record information about customers, keep an archive of projects, make a summary of current work, etc. etc. as far as fantasy permits, hands and means. You can take redmine, JIR, bugzill, track, megaplane, or some other system as a basis.

For ourselves, we made our own similar decision. From scratch, on php.

Resources

9. Portfolio, logo, hosting



“You want to offer me a service, but you don’t have your own website even in the format uberdeveloper.narod.ru ...”, paraphrasing a well-known phrase - get yourself a business card site and upload examples of works there, briefly describe who you are, your work regulations may be typical services.

Try to make an original design, say in the style of cubism, put there a couple of "cubic" (let's call them that) cats. Everyone loves cats. And who says he does not love, he doubly loves. In general, everything as a reasoned on a different topic Freud.

Do not write template phrases about “young developing company” and stuff like that and don’t really shake “Lurk” on “crowds that are trying to stand out from the crowd” - this rule does not work here and in general, read Lurk less.

Make a recognizable logo and name - place it in your work whenever possible.

On the subdomains of your portfolio or resource, you can keep test versions of sites, if suddenly the customer does not have hosting.

10. Negative feedback is good?

Never warm your mind and people on this subject and stop being afraid of negative reviews. Often they can play into your hands, with or without your comment. It is not always possible to please everyone. Not always and everything can turn out. People may be wrong, customers may be inadequate or not in the mood and further along a long list. Problems should be solved as they become available.

“If you know how to solve a problem, then there are no problems. You do not know - there’s no need to strain ”. {paraphrasing the Dalai Lama seems}

Here the main thing is that positive feedback should always be more than negative. About the rest you can forget.

11. Comprehensive specialization

Limit the circle and stack of technologies, CMS, architectures with which you work and work only with them. If you work in a team - write down a public list of who is most experienced on a 5-point scale, what is most interesting to whom, this is important, links to the most interesting previous projects, outside the team, if you had contacts (skype, phone) of your companions. Find out if your associate is ready to sign a contract with the customer, if it is required and you do not have an LLC. Can he give a discount? Say at a rate of 10-20% if the customer gives you a project iron within 24 hours?

Work "beyond the scope" of your overall activity should not be loaded into your newly created portfolio. Let it be not thick at first, but it will be really yours.

Never involve outsiders to work on projects. You can have a crowd of people recruited in freelancing according to certain parameters, but these should be exactly the people you recruited, who are constantly in your team, exhibit some sort of periodic activity, have common interests with you, even if they are monetary and respect your regulations.

12. Get a library

Store there interesting books, links to habr and so on, which can be useful to you and your team from the perspective of recruiting experience and expanding horizons.

Related Issues

13. Start group chats, fludilku (if you work in a team)

If you don’t do it yourself, people will write to other places, drugs, groups, discuss politics, girls, cats, rzhak, etc. wherever it is possible and impossible, and you will not solve this issue by any restrictions.

Under the profile questions, on orders - have a separate group. Remove violators from it, make warnings.

14. Regulations for all. Or "BDSM management with leather whips."



Be clear about your time limit and stick to it. We say that you do not work after 6 pm and on weekends. At 18:00 and there is no fire on the monitor - disconnect and go do other things. No matter what time you got up today, whether you slept till lunchtime and how many hours you worked today. Working 12-14 hours a day remotely will not give you great results, but will only bring health problems and, oddly enough, customers. Focus on the result. Forget office regulations, it does not work here in all respects.

If you work in a team - make it public and demand its observance. Ruthlessly remove people who violate important points from it, or any item, depending on what time limit you have, say a moment with deadlines, or shipment of a code to your server once every 3 days, etc. They will not be corrected, but another failed project, for saying that a person worked almost exclusively on localhost, and then went to the hospital for a month (a real example), only aggravates the situation of an already strained relationship, and to avoid unnecessary questions, put a condition to the newcomers - either working this way or us not the way the original.

There may be additional conditions. Take such a point. Breaking deadline? Is the deadline too tight? So by default you can be replaced by another person or removed from the team, or you will need to enter a fine from the budget in order to meet the requirements, or you will need to force someone into the co-operation.

While we didn’t have any regulations, we, in varying degrees, critically attacked various rakes, sometimes several times. Many people left the team because of its presence and ability to comply. But the number of problem situations was reduced to a minimum, if not to zero. People here can be extremely unreliable, including those previously tested, it is worth taking as a fact, calm down and work methodically until you have a permanent staff of adequate members, even if hundreds of people pass through your team.

Our regulations met 5 short points.

Expansion of comfort zone

15. Get Chavo, internal resource, shared domain mail (if you work in a team)

Record there (to the resource) all frequently asked questions, answers to them, duplicate important news. Mail as a portfolio is better to store at one address, preferably concise and well remembered. Mailbox can be done in the spirit of typical support@yourdomain.com. It will be easier to remember.

16. Distribute your functions (if you work in a team)

As your organization expands, delegate authority, assign managers, say 1 freelance platform = 1 manager, let them communicate with customers from the stage how the answer went to work, control the progress of work, but not finance and say force majeure. As the experience grows, the latter can be entrusted to them, and the financial question can be reserved. Issue the duties of an individual person spying on the mail and leaving high-quality applications. In exchange, offer a small bid, if you can and turnovers allow, or offer a percentage of each project that will go into circulation with those applications that he left, explain that you are working on a common cause and if the case is bad for the whole project, then money will be bad for him, for developers, and for you.

An important note is that you should start doing this sort of stuff not from the very beginning, but only when you feel that you have gained experience, you have a relatively well-coordinated team and reliable people who can be charged with such things + have grown to a certain level and there will be a feeling what next one pull all the org. questions will be hard. If you decide to implement it immediately, then you should not be surprised if someone throws you, will not respect or be considered an arrogant and greedy intermediary who simply wants to row the money with a shovel and do nothing.

17. General chat with the customer (if you work in a team)

As needed or with a large flow of questions, taking into account that you are a project manager or someone from your associates, create a common group with the customer and your people. Without the need to do this is not worth it. The programmer must write code and nothing else. If you include him in the chat without any obvious need, then, firstly, you may lose respect in all respects on his part, and secondly, only complicate, but not improve, the project management process.

18. Sites

Start at one place, then expand as needed. Say with freelansim. Then go to fl, weblancer, freelance. How to settle in the CIS - elance, odesk. If you are confident in your abilities and do not particularly like "ours" - start with elance.

Competently fill in profiles everywhere, upload new works in the portfolio, specify prices, contacts, pass tests. If you work in a team - and specify, avoid unnecessary and unnecessary questions.

19. Additional services

Offer support within 3 months after delivery of the project, with the possibility of spinning up something new for a large fee. Subscribe to an affiliate program with a hosting that you like and offer it to the customer, if you need it. Already mentioned earlier discount, if you see any possible.

20. Continuous improvement

If you are a project manager or manager, then read all sorts of interesting profile books, Rework and others like him, books from Mann, Ivanov, Ferber, posts on Habré, expand your horizons, periodically think that it would be possible to improve, spend once a month a small survey in the team, collect suggestions for improvements and implement them, following the precepts of Masaaki Imai and his "Kaizen".

Added 5.0.8.14 21. Regular customers and proposed projects

The moment is quite obvious - as your popularity grows, the flow of proposed projects and projects from regular customers will grow. They should always be put in priority. Somewhere and money can offer more than in any "normal" project, and in the future, and at all can limit the cooperation only with a small circle of people if things go well.

That's all. Leave your suggestions on what you think a newbie who wants to become a freelancer needs to take into account, add to the post with notes, draw up, if possible, a reference list, as well as what you would like to hear about in the following posts if you would like.