a peak into the restless mind of a freelancer

in the last six months:

i've gotten to travel all over north america and one really mountainous and way over developed country in asia, and now i'm beginning my travels around europe, which is presenting some interesting new freelancing experiences as i have to consider how contracts would work and legally hold up internationally and get paid in various different time periods and currencies.

i've worked with about two and a half clients so far for about 10-20 hours a week, on average. the work has been unevenly distributed. some weeks have been 50 hour weeks while others have been zero hour weeks. there have been many more zero hour weeks than 50 hour weeks.

i've tested out a couple of different billing methods. at first i simply wrote down my hours in a google doc. if i started around 11am and finished around 4pm, then i would write down 5 hours for that day. then i decided to try separating out each feature into its own billable entity. this was a fun activity for self discovery as it really showed me how long each item took me and helped me give better estimates on how long feature development would take. but it was also a pain in the fucking ass and took away from my concentration, so i stopped. after talking to dozens (read: > 12 * 2) of other freelancers, i've come to the conclusion that it's completely reasonable and normal to keep the clock rolling while going to the bathroom, taking a stretch break, taking a minute to check email, and even eat lunch. these are all things that we do on the normal job anyways, so they are just as reasonable while freelancing.

finding clients and starting new contracts has been an interesting battle as well. figuring out how much to charge them has been an even harder battle. for my first client, i ended up building an mvp (-> minimum viable product == a prototype). at first i sat down with him and hacked out some code for a few days. he paid me $1,000 for it, then had me finish the project. man it felt fanfuckingtastic to get that first $1,000. i've never held so much money in my hands that didn't come from a w2'ed job.

over the next few months i finished it for a fixed fee of about $4,000 with a $1,000 bonus. not bad, but it was certainly below the software engineering rates that i've been hearing. every time i meet a freelance software engineer, i ask them how much they charge. i've probably asked about 20 or so people since march, most of them friends or past coworkers. i've heard rates ranging anywhere between $40 and $150, but the vast majority were between $75 and $125. the friend who charges $40 was the only one who charged less than $75 and those charging above $100 were almost always charging larger companies with huge expendable budgets. ~80% of the people i asked were billing between $75-100 for 80% of their projects.

i generally started negotiations at $100/hour and would drop my rate from there depending on how much flexibility the opportunity allowed me, how much i needed or wanted it, and how much i thought i needed to adjust the rate in order to make the deal. because i've been working with very early stage startups, i've more often than not had to drop my rate below $75 or made some sort of compromise. and to highlight the frustrating experience that i've had with successfully negotiating market rates for myself, i had three separate people tell me that i'm underselling myself and not charging enough for my time over the weekend (my rate is currently set at $75/hour), yet i'm having a dismal time finding work at the rates the market supposedly supports. and by dismal time, i mean 80% of my potential 40 hour workweek is never sold. i have guesses as to why this might be, but i'll go over those guesses in a bit.

i've also found that there are a few different approaches to conducting business when it comes to starting freelance contracts, although all contracts generally end up the same way. the first approach is a very casual approach - two friends doing business together without worrying about signing contracts in the beginning, no set hours, and no restrictions on where and when work needs to happen. this is entirely trust based and a contract is generally established within the first few days or weeks of the first code being written. the freelancer is not overly worried about making money in the beginning but rather working on a cool project for a friend. then there's the approach of a more formal businesses - no code gets written before a contract is signed, invoices and payments are sent on a strict schedule. i've started out a few contracts informally, but in the last few months i've decided to move more toward the formal end of things. i hate to start new business relationships out with the signing of contracts, but as i've gotten more comfortable with contracts and felt the ability to understand and edit them more readily, i've decided it's a wiser and cleaner way of conducting business and ensures that both parties are held accountable to their end of the deal. and as much as i love to work with and help friends out, unless you are one of my closest friends, i'm not going to make an exception for you. and by closest friends, i mean someone that i've known for years, worked closely with in the past, and gone to when i needed to talk to a friend in a hard time in life.

as to why i've had a difficult time finding work at the "market" rate: the main reason, i suspect, is that i'm working with early stage startups. one client was bootstrapped aside from about $20,000 in investment. another had received a small some money (single digit thousands) on kickstarter, a (relatively) small grant, and a $25,000 initial investment. another was a small family run company with around $100,000 annual revenue and a small team of part time employees. none of these companies have the budgets that allow them to pay $75+ an hour. these are the types of companies that are lucky if they can pay $25/hour. part of the reason for choosing these types of companies is that i prefer to work with startups: they embrace new technologies like my preferred architecture, node.js, they are flexible for work hours and remote work, and they are fun and personal to work with. plus, i simply don't know many corporate people. most of my connections currently come from friends in the startup communities of the various cities i've lived in in recent years and the accelerator programs i've taken part in.

too, it's worth mentioning that i don't exactly understand the economics of freelancing. i hear numbers from popular-ish web dev ruby on rails firms charging $175/hour and friends of friends charging $250/hour for standard run-of-the-mill software development. i mean, don't get me wrong: they're *really* good, but at that rate, if you pay someone to build you a very simple app and it takes them one month of full time work, it's going to cost you $150 * 8 * 5 * 4 = $24,000. that's crazy, if you ask me. that'd be $288,000 per year. you could work one month out of the year and live an incredibly comfy lifestyle lounging on the beaches of thailand. or you could work for a year and then take a decade off. or work for four years and fully retire. yet, somehow most software engineers that i've talked to (and the same exact ones that say they charge these rates) accept full-time, salaried positions for something like $80-150k a year. what the fuck?! the math doesn't add up to me. and on top of all this, who the fuck pays a university dropout $24,000 a month? i'm happy for it, but i sure as hell don't understand it.

occasionally when i ask for the typical rate of $75 to $100/hour that i'm told i should be asking for i get a response along the lines of "what the fuck are you smoking that's ridiculous" and i want to respond with "i know, i think so too. glad i'm not trying to hire me" but instead i keep a straight face and pull through the negotiation. other times i've been lucky enough to come face to face with someone that replies "sure no problem, i used to charge twice that" and signs the contract without a flinch.

on top of all this, i've taken some time in my travels to realize that couchsurfing and staying in hostels is absolutely not conducive to being focused and productive enough to do good programming work. it is conducive to save money. but since i was not making much money, i felt the only option for me to travel was to stay in hostels, on couches, and camp. i've learned that there are two ways to go: option 1) make a little bit or no money for awhile and spend as little money as possible while enjoying travel as a cheap budget traveler, or option 2) make a lot of money and spend a medium to large amount of money to stay in decent airbnb rooms for long enough periods of time to get comfortable and focus on work.

but the thing about all of this is, i have the technical experience of most 30-plus-year-olds and some of the the wisdoms of someone at least in their late 20's, yet i'm (intentionally) still in the world-exploring, career-exploring, traveling stage of my life. i'm not even close to being ready to settle. i like to go out and be silly. to be immature sometimes. i love hanging around youthful, unambitious people in their 20's. the kind of people that you find on couchsurfing.org. hippies, basically. the kind of people that spend all day surfing, playing cards against humanity, and can't go a weekend without lurking off into the mountains to go camping. people that are silly and still excited to make young foolish mistakes. i'm simply not going to find these jovials on meetup.com or staying in hotels. not that they aren't there, but rather that all of the settled down careerful marrying-age soon-to-have-babies people outnumber them. no, instead you find hippyass youngsters on grungyass couchsurfing.org. (although you'll still find a lot of people attempting to live un-grungy lifestyles on couchsurfing as well… they just haven't realized that it doesn't work yet, and it's one of those things that works until you realize it doesn't work). i'm 23. i don't want to grow up quite yet. it's hard though, when 80% of my friends are 5-15 years my senior.

i accidentally chose a lucrative career. it was truly an accident. had i realized that the potential of making so much money would distract me so much from having the romantic, experimental, rock climbing bum, creative, bipolarartistwriterentrepreneur lifestyle that i wanted, i would never have gotten into it. but my naive 13 year old self just had to get addicted to writing code and be so damn good at it. so fucking good.

and it's been a messy, dirty, grimy ride this year. i'm okay with this. but being okay with messy doesn't make the mess less ick. while contracting, i've misplaced thousands of dollars (of my own money, don't worry), failed at writing off a lot of taxdeductible expenses, and flailed like the biggest noob ever invented at handling accounting and budgeting. in all honesty, i have no fucking clue what i'm doing when it comes to negotiating good deals for myself and i have no clue how to explain to my client that no, i'm not able to get your server back online so your customers can pay you because i'm stuck somewhere on the slopes of mount fuji in the rain and i hardly even have a computer nonetheless internet and my couchsurfing host keeps us so damn busy with activities that i might have five minutes to spare until tomorrow which is actually yesterday in your time zone and allthewhile there's this girl i like so i'm going to allow myself to get severely distracted by her okay talk to you later kthxbye.

but despite all of that, i've managed to produce some pretty fucking good products. while i may not know exactly what i'm doing, i'm damn good at winging it. i've architected some really beautiful solutions to complex problems in the last four months, and i've churned out sexyass production level design and code all in less than 150 development hours per client (so far). i'm talking, i took my clients from “i don't have anything to show my investors and i'm completely fucked” levels to “okay i might actually have a chance to pull this shit off maybe my investors won't haunt me in my grave” levels.

some days i want to stay in bed and can't find the motivation to get up. some of those some days i don't actually make it out of bed. other of those some days i pull through and get up anyways. it seems that travel and freelancing have their updowns just as being a founder does. with travel, there is no stability - not emotionally, not financially, not locationally. you never know who you'll meet or where you'll be in a month. you'll never know when tonight's bed is going to call you up and say “hey, i accidentally brought the key with me to venezuela, you're gonna have to find somewhere else to live for two weeks” or “hey your flight was delayed by 48 hours and yes we'll reimburse you for the cab ride but no actually we changed our mind that $150 cab fare is your disease to keep” but you also never know when you're gonna meet a beautiful girl that says “hey, spend this weekend with me in new york?” the ups balance out the downs, so it all pays off if you wait long enough.

all the while, don't be too patient. you certainly gotta give life a nudge once and while when it gets snagged on a twig. or a failed travel plan. or whatever it is that things get snagged on.