Harmless advice from an electronic freelancer. What is our brother doing today and is there light at the end of the tunnel?

In my first article in the cycle, I talked about the fact that there are places in Russia, as if specially created for an electronic freelancer. The second article tells about personal experience in the role of freelancer for five years. Rise and fall of my microbusiness in this area. I specially singled out the third part of the story in a separate post - for those who do not have the time and desire to read stories, who value only specifics.



So, despite the fact that today my business is clearly at an impasse, I’d venture to give some advice to an electronic freelancer. By the way, many of them will be useful in other fields: (unfortunately, I did not find structured lists in the Habr interface, so I had to portray the attachment as ___)

• During the development of an electronic product, one has to deal with a large number of very different operations, so it is better to work with a small team of two or three permanent employees. The efforts of a larger team in this mode will be difficult to coordinate, it will be necessary to change the structure of interaction and it will be difficult to call it freelancing. In my case, the team consisted of two people.
• Most of the working issues can be solved in the remote access mode. For the organization of collaboration is quite enough free tools. We used Google Drive to store and co-edit the documentation, use Skype for communication and screen sharing, in special cases to explain the details of the circuit trace or help to install / configure the Teamviewer software. However, from time to time to meet and maintain personal communication is a must!
• Be sure to make plans! Without a detailed plan, it is impossible to determine with sufficient accuracy the time and cost of work. It is easy to get into trouble with very unpleasant consequences. Plans are especially needed when you conduct several projects in parallel at different stages of implementation. We used an old version of Microsoft Project in our work. It helped a lot, especially the Gantt Chart. The development process is clearly and in detail described, it is a pity only to print it out can be difficult. Do not take the time at the initial stage in order to correctly link tasks to each other, this will in the future allow you to simply make adjustments to the plans taking into account the shifts of the subsequent stages. Remember, even an inaccurate plan is better than no complete plan!
• Never forget advertising. Even at times when things are going well and you are fully loaded with work. Try to use various means to advertise your services. Personally, we used the following:
• ___ Presentation, telling about our capabilities, for showing to potential clients and partners.
• ___ Advertise with your own site. To maintain interest, the site must "live." At least monthly supplemented not only with news, but also with information. And of course, promotion will not hurt.
• ___A mutually beneficial cooperation with partners. In our case, it was a collaboration with a contract manufacturer of electronics.
• ___ Promotion of their services through personal connections.
• __ Presence in the thematic forums. As a customer search, forums do not work well, but they allow you to expand your social circle, which can later help a lot. The world is closer than you can imagine!
• ___Yes, I understand that the list is not complete and now I am working on expanding the channels for promoting advertising of my own services, I would be very grateful if you would suggest in the comments how to expand it.
• Never work with a client without having compiled a detailed Technical Specification. In most cases, when asking for help, the client is very poorly aware of what he really needs. The elaboration of TK is very important, at this stage the following can be found out:
• ___ There is already an analogue of the product and the development simply does not make sense.
• ___ For unique one-off orders, you should not design everything from scratch, but rather act as an integrator and develop only individual elements.
• ___ The idea is not feasible within the budget.
• ___ The client laid down clearly inflated requirements for parameters and individual nodes. If you refuse them, you can greatly save on the cost of the device and development.
• Personally, I adhere to the following financial scheme of working with a client:
• ___ Depending on the complexity of the work is divided into several stages.
• ___ For each of the stages, a prepayment of 30 percent is set; In case of delayed payment, the period of work is extended for the period of payment.
• ___ At the beginning, I conduct a free expert examination of the project, during which I call the approximate price and deadline for performing the work with an accuracy of no more than ± 30 percent. Accurate estimates call only during the development of TK and schedule. Work on the technical task is paid - with a 50 percent advance payment. If during the discussion of the TK, the customer refuses further work, the advance will not be returned. As practice shows, if a client with a more or less serious project does not understand the need for a TK and that the work on its compilation costs money, it is more expensive to get involved with it.
• With a few exceptions, it makes no sense to work with projects with a selling price of less than $ 1,000. As practice shows, it is unprofitable. Below is a list of exceptions:
• ___ Maintenance of previously developed products.
• ___ Requests for help from good friends.
• ___ A sequence of small projects with a common goal, which periodically come from one customer.
• ___ It’s probably worth starting a business with small projects in order to gain self-confidence, build a portfolio and work out the technology of communication with customers. Personally, I did just that.
• Try to perform only those jobs in which you are a specialist, or those that expand your professional experience in the desired direction. If the project has a part of works in which you are “not in the tooth with your foot”, or are too routine and uninteresting, but you don’t want to refuse it - you should resort to outsourcing. However, lay on this extra time and money. Communicating with freelancers and even familiar developers is not easy. Getting the desired result from them is even more difficult. Do not buy into too attractive offers to solve your problem. As a rule, deliberately low prices are offered by those who do not represent the scope of work and do not have adequate experience. As a result, except for unnecessary problems at the most inappropriate time, you will not get anything.
• I will be commonplace and repeat the hackneyed phrase - you can not put all the eggs in one basket! You should not dwell on one client, no matter how attractive the cooperation with him may seem. Everything can end very quickly and completely unpredictable way. A client may have financial problems, another partner may appear, after reaching the next stage he may decide to create his own development department, in the end a pot of violets may fall from a height of 22 floors. Even when you have a lot of work, do not stop her search. In the end, you will have plenty to choose from.
• Try to use ready-made libraries to the maximum, do not invent your own exchange protocols, no matter how much the customer insists on this. Agree to such actions only as a last resort and for a special surcharge, otherwise then the grief inventor of the next super cheap implementation of the multimaster protocol will commit serious violence on your brain and most likely as a result will declare that you, having done everything wrong, have ditched his idea in the bud.
• Look for the best components for the implementation of the order, but other things being equal, try to give preference to those with whom you have already worked.
• Do not forget to explain to the client that you do not guarantee the development of a mass-ready device on the move. First you need to make a prototype, then an experimental batch, and only after testing it to start a series. And EVERY stage costs money.

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Now many electronics engineers with rich experience, industrial freelancing or having their own small businesses either go to the rank of wage workers or migrate to China. There are very good reasons for this (I have to repeat this part of the text from the previous article):

• In recent years, funding has been reduced for the development of various state funds. As a rule, it is difficult for a freelancer to get a grant for a multimillion-dollar order, but it’s quite possible to participate in the development of individual sites. So, for example, I had to develop laboratory equipment for projects mastering money through the Rosnano line and there was an offer from Glonas, which, however, had to be abandoned - they managed to waste too much time and money until they came to me.
• The development of devices that are planning to produce large quantities in China, usually give the same Chinese, because they often agree to compensate for its cost after manufacturing a certain number of devices (usually from 10,000 pieces) in-house. Not always it ends well for the customer, but most understand this only when they step on the rake themselves, often more than once. I had to bring the electricity meter board to mind. This is a rather complicated digital-analog device, which Chinese kulibines seem to have completely ignited in the autoroute mode, and not bothering to create trace rules. The result was deplorable.
• A couple of years ago it was possible to earn money on cooperation with offices that work for the state, or military customers. It was possible to act as a consultant and developer of individual units. Now, in this area, they have tightened the screws, made terrible secrecy and there is nothing for our brother to catch today. My old clients now offer only a permanent job, but since problems with traveling abroad, even on vacation, serve as a free supplement to it, I still answer with a polite refusal.
• The overall deterioration of the investment climate in Russia is affecting. Domestic investors prefer to withdraw money from Russia, foreign ones are wary of investing in it.
• Recently, a huge number of ready-made solutions have appeared - demo boards and various universal programmable modules at affordable prices. It is often simpler and cheaper to assemble a ready-made solution to a unique task than to develop a special device. The development of the actual electronics is reduced to the creation of a constructive, but unpretentious unifying and matching boards.

What is left to do in such conditions freelancer?

After long and hard thoughts, I decided to suffer a little more, at least until the New Year, until all the fat was eaten. I start crisis management, namely:

• Tied with the policy of working on one client. Returned to a contractual relationship with his strategic client.
• Engaged in a serious processing of the personal site.
• Expanding the range of its services:
• ___ I purchased a three-dimensional printer that will allow you to quickly create not only prototype cases, but also quickly implement complex constructs.
• ___ I had the opportunity to organize production not only from a Russian contract manufacturer, but also in China.
• I conduct an experiment with job search sites for freelancers. While I collect information, but in the future I am going to try my hand at executing the projects exposed there and use the work of freelancers to solve certain tasks in my work.
• I am trying to take part in the organization of a design studio for the withdrawal of projects on Kickstarter.

Let's see if it will bear fruit.

In conclusion, I want to thank the habrosocommunity for my unexpectedly warm attitude to a series of my previous articles. In the near future I hope to continue this series with more substantive articles. I will allow myself to run a couple of polls in order to find out which topic is of the most interest and what, in your opinion, to do in the current situation.