Within the last week I've recieved a bunch of emails asking how to start as
a freelancer. I figured I should just post my reply as it might be helpful
to any of you looking to do the same.
Disclaimer: Anyone that wants to cry about the whether this is the proper
forum for such, look at your check and anyone that disagrees with any of my
assumptions herein, I can only speak for what I myself know empirically. So
if you don't care, delete this email..
This is what I generally suggest, as it is how I started doing contract
work.
While gainfully employed build yourself some apps (shopping cart, message
board/forum, chat room, contact manager, content manager, security sandbox,
etc). Also play the buzzword game and develop these apps for Flash and WAP.
Just look around the web and figure out what is common to most sites.
Then I looked at the job board (currently there are 1187 jobs at
http://www.houseoffusion.com). Wherein most of these jobs are for fulltime
people, I found that the progress at these companies suffers while they
looked to hire fulltime employees. So I would either email or call them and
tell them that there is no way they could pay me what I make freelance (most
of the salary base is laughable at best), but I would like to do thier
outsource work while they are looking for thier staff. Some people are
idiots and think yer crazy, others are desperate and see the value of such
an offer; most fall in between. But here are the facts. My numbers might
be off, but I heard that there are some 300,000 coldfusion servers installed
in the US and only 450,000 developers. That would mean 1.5 developers to
every box. Most hosting companies put up to 100 clients on every box. Do
the math, 1.5 developers per box and 100 clients that need new or continuing
development. Before I hit this winfall of work, I was finding unfilled job
listings that were a year old.. The stats are totally in the favor of the
freelancer. So before I quit my bi-monthly check I started taking some of
this work on the side and doing it at night. When my side work began to
outweigh my fulltime gig I gave my employer like a month's notice, trained
my replacement and began coding fulltime on my own.
The reason I subscribe to fusebox's methodology, is because once you have
the basic modules built you can cut and paste these modules together and
build a nice little business. So something that should take a non fuseboxer
a month or so to build, you can build in a few days and have any
personalization done within a few weeks. Then I charge people like 50-75%
of what they would be charged by Viant or some big web company. Upon
completion of your first app for a client they generally find you are more
cost effiicient and faster than hiring a full time employee. This
methodology works for any small web company that develops coldfusion as
well.
There is an incredible market for mid size apps. Every dot com needs one and
most institution businesses (corporate money managers, hotel chains, etc)
need the same. Once I put this whole formula together I figured why stay in
a job where my salary is less than 50% of what I bill? Someone might respond
"well you end up giving half of your income as a freelancer to uncle sam so
why not stay with the security of a bi-monthly check. My response is call
Mick Snyder at Entertainment Financial Services (818) 986-8888. He is the
premier independent tax accountant for the record industry and just loves
web developers. Also, I don't think the market can bear high priced web
development. Dot com Tech Stocks are overvaluated and on the decline, so
anyone that still wants to play that game is going to need a good cost
efficient solution. To anyone that might respond, "well I make a buck a year
in my current gig", I would have to reply that I live in Los Angeles and
can't live on anything near that..
I also found, that companies that prescribe to "JAVA scales better than CF"
also require this sort of service, in that it takes incredible development
time to build JAVA apps. So my pitch to these companies is "Let me build
you a quick CF solution that you can use as a facade while your JAVA
developers run thier course." So far only 15% of these JAVA clients stayed
with Coldfusion, but what do I care what thier ultimate solution is? I am
not selling them on a development platform I am selling them on a
intermediate solution they can show thier investors. And chances are that
anything really big is going to require Viant or Figleaf anyway.
So far as the actual web design goes, I have the asthetics of a gnat. So,
if needed I send this work to the web companies that employ me or the
company I used to work for. There are plenty of design companies that need
work, so finding someone to pair up with shouldn't be a problem.
So far as the work load that I outsource to other developers, I intend to
slow it down for about a month as the two main companies that I get most of
my work from and I have decided to tune some of our modularity up and build
some in-house browser interfaces like the example I posted using tags and
CFASSOCIATE for dynamic navigation.
I am unsure how most freelancers work, but I have a team of 3 developers
besides myself that work together on projects, 5 web companies that
outsource to us and 3 graphic artists that we outsource to or code for. I
do know however that Mark Warrick is putting together a conglomeration of
cfer's at http://www.fusioneers.com/
My family is pretty healthy, so my health insurance is Kaiser Permanente.
It's an HMO that is non-profit so in general they are not motivated to the
horror stories you generally hear about HMO's. My wife just gave birth at
Kaiser and it went just as smooth as her first birth at Cedar Sinai but cost
15 grand less.
Hope this helps.
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