I share my struggles as a freelancer when I wanted to quit my high paying job in an MNC to start freelancing and work from home.
Every venture off every entrepreneur, freelancer, or blogger in the initial stages will have struggles.
I am sharing my struggles as a freelancer when I wanted to quit my high paying job in an MNC to be a freelancer and when I started freelancing.
My last job was in C#, but before C#, I was working in C++.
I was in my third job already before completing my 12 months of corporate India. I moved from Visual Basic in the first job to Web and SEO in the second job to C++ in the third one.
A few months into my third job, I ran out of reason to make a switch again. It is when I was determined to doing something of my own.
1. Quitting Job
The biggest struggle for any freelancer, primarily a developer, is to quit the job.
It took me a very long time before I could quit my job. When I was all set and ready to quit, I was given a big fat raise not because I resigned but because my employer moved me from being a contractor to an employee.
The contractor means I worked in Lexmark but was on Payroll of RS Software. Lexmark decided to make me an employee of Lexmark. It meant I almost doubled my salary, which made it tough for me to quit.
I decided to continue because I didn’t want to sound foolish, who quits the job when the salary almost doubled amid the financial crisis.
As I decided to continue, things become tough to be a freelancer because it raised the bar of my income level that I need to achieve as a freelancer.
2. Choice of Technology
The technology where I have most experience was C++, MFC, and Win32.
The last technology was in C#, and it was enjoyable working in C#. However, the love and fun were the first struggles of my freelancing steps.
- Should I freelance in C++, where I have a maximum experience of 2 years? I also loved C++ when in college as well?
- Should I continue freelancing in C#, where I have more recent experience? Should I keep doing the job for more time to get more exposure to C# if I want to move with C#?
- Will opting for a new technology like ASP.NET or Java, which is more in demand on the web, be beneficial? Java is a more obvious choice for a C++ programmer.
When I became a freelancer, I hired a Mumbai based company that can create a clone of RentACoder.com, and I called it GlobalDevelopers.net.
The company handed over to me a complete shit of code for $600. Moreover, it took ages to make any changes needed. Instead of telling them to make changes, I started doing it and found their shitty code. It was my first hand in PHP.
3. The First Client
Once you have so much technical expertise, finding your first client is almost impossible. No one can be an expert in C, C++, Win32, MFC, Java and get clients in PHP.
So you have to make a choice. It is a struggle for a new freelancer who is just starting. An expert who can handle a client’s requirement for a website without any prior experience is challenging.
I had to make a choice that I thought is good and will have enough clients. I knew any one of the programming languages that I chose would be the right choice in the back of my mind.
I was moving towards PHP due to the website that I was working on but had some experience doing C++ homework help projects in RentACoder.com.
But after a lot of struggle, I had my first client in PHP, and it was because I could show my client a sample of my websites.
I still remember my first client rejected my proposal because I did not know what he wanted but saw my sample as promising. He informed me that he would hire me if the person he selected couldn’t get things done as needed. In a few days, voila, the other person, wasn’t able to deliver what the client required, and this is how I got my first client.
4. The Marketplaces
People think that things are a lot easier after you have your first client, but it is wrong.
If you don’t have your first client, you know freelancing is not working for you. You can make a move in the direction of getting clients. Once you have your first client, the freelancer’s struggle moves on to regularly finding a continuous source of clients.
For me, it was, will Elance be a good source of clients or RentACoder a better choice?
Your first client’s feedback may not be enough for you to convince the second client that you are an excellent developer. So should you be trying other freelancing sites?
Things are still the same, where you have even more choices to decide. Will it be Upwork, Freelancer.com, or PPH or any other best freelancing site?
5. Understanding Client Requirements
As a developer making a move towards freelancing, you may not be able to judge the whole project’s complexity straight away.
I had a lot of issues.
A simple example can be when a client says they want to clone a website, and you may understand the client needs the functional aspect of the site. However, the client may wish to both functional and design.
Once you show a client your ready prototype, the client may give feedback like nothing has been done because the site does not look like it wanted—the point when you understand the complete client’s requirement.
6. Language and Dialect
Technically you have started understanding what the client wants. However, things can get tricky when you have issues understanding the language and dialect of foreign clients.
Even today, I have issues understanding some of my clients’ English language from Spain or Germany, where they speak English a lot differently.
7. Building The Website
2004 was the age of user-generated content and niche communities. Clone of RentACoder did not work out, but it helps me convince I should not be re-invent the wheel with the forum, but the struggle was with the forum software’s choice.
Free or a paid one. When you have burnt your fingers trying to build a website, the obvious choice is a free one, but I wasn’t convinced with the free choice of forums scripts.
I wanted the site to be like the forums I was regular on. I was a regular member of SitePoint forums and high rankings forums. Sitepoint was on vBulletin back then, but the top-ranking forum wasn’t on vBulletin, but it wasn’t on phpBB either.
So I was sure I had to go with a paid script.
So after doing a lot of research and reading many articles and solutions, I finally decided to go with vBulletin.
8. Information Overhaul
Once you have a choice, typically, we tend to search for each choice’s pros and cons.
It is not that you will find like one is better than others, but you will find someone who prefers one over the other.
It is true to this date. I prefer Moosend over others. The struggle increases many folds because there weren’t many individual bloggers who you can look up to.
It was an era of SEO and affiliate marketing, and often, websites were referring products that they can get paid for. So you have to learn to weed out those product reviews that weren’t genuine and were only for the sake of affiliate commission.
The information and answers within forum discussion or in Yahoo answers and that too, not as detail as they should be why someone prefers one over others.
9. Social Pressure
Once you are a freelancer, you work from home. When you tell someone you work from home, they tend to think you aren’t doing anything. It is one of the worst struggles of a freelancer.
Now it’s pretty easy to say you work from home. However, it was almost impossible to convince someone that you are doing proper work from home back then.
I even thought of renting a place to call my office. Then I decided against it as it was an unnecessary expense. In Kolkata back then, I was horrified about traffic jams and wasting so much time to get started working.
10. Manage Finance
When money begins to flowing in, you have to decide how to make full use of it. Things got bad for me.
Money was being deposited into my bank account on a more consistent and regular basis. However, I was horrible at managing it.
I remember I had a significant fat tax that I needed to pay once because of my negligence to invest in tax saving scheme.
I am still learning the process, but I can say that I was horrible back then. Even telling myself terrible at managing finance may be an excellent way to put it.
Some expenses blunders. Some bad investments and a lot of negligence.
Even experienced people struggle to manage money and finance, and glad I started it.
11. The Learning Curve
Being a developer, you have to always keep up with things and not be complacent about working currently. Your focus shouldn’t be only on working now but should also focus on your learning curve.
We move to new things when old things have gone out of business, which has often happened to me. I was forced out of vBulletin and into xenForo and not out of choice but out of compulsion.
As a freelancer, you have to decide to make a move and not wait till you are forced to make a move.
There is no room for complacency in this technology era, and it is even valid for jobs.
Some of my colleagues were in the firing line and were considered well settle in their jobs. A situation where if you are doing the same work for an extended time and if your salary keeps on increasing, you can have a tough time when it becomes inviable for a business to pay you more or pay even what you are being paid. It is when you are fired.
Keep learning and evolving.
12. Managing Personal Life
As you start to get more and more clients, you begin to make more and more money, and naturally, your working hours stretch beyond a point to the limits.
It can mean you have less time for your health and family.
Balancing work hours and calling it a day is tough for a freelancer, and I am sure every developer freelancer has struggled with it.
I was in a situation where I started at 8 AM and worked till 10 PM. Slowly I managed to limit my time to my clients.
To make the situation worse, clients are in different time zone, and they may start things when you are leaving. The client may not remember your time zone all the time, and so you have to let them know that you are available only from so and so time.
13. Jack of many trades
If you are a developer, you will still have to know the basics of slicing a PSD and design and how to use photoshop.
As a developer, if your clients want you to replace the logo on the site and if he has it in PSD, you need to use Photoshop to extract the client’s correct size logo.
I am not a designer and cannot make those pixel-perfect designs, but being a web developer needs to know web design basics.
Knowledge of web design does not mean I can take up web design jobs. If you don’t define your expertise, you may be working in many different technologies because you may be the preferred freelancer for your regular clients.
I don’t do web design or SEO work for my clients anymore. I have so many clients who want me to be doing SEO, but I limit marketing and SEO to only consulting clients.
14. Payment Methods
If your clients want you to use a particular payment method, there is very little that you can do about it. You have to sign up for the new payment method and deal with all the paperwork so the money gets deposited into your bank account.
Some methods have high charges, and there is very little that you can do about it.
When I started, I only had PayPal, but many of my clients wanted me to use Moneybookers (now Skrill), and so I had to get the account with them, get it verified, do all the paperwork done to make sure I got the money into my bank account.
The same was the case with Payoneer or Wise or any other payment methods. After using Wise, I would love all my clients to be paying with Wise but haven’t had any clients willing to use them.
15. Global Currency Fluctuations
When I started freelancing, $1 was around ₹50+. It then went all the way down to ₹45, and I made a lot less than I was making though I was working the same amount of time and the client paying me the same amount.
I was lucky enough that it started moving higher and today is close to ₹68. It has been a uni-direction since ₹45 to ₹68 for USD, but it will not always move in a direction that may suit an Indian freelancer.
In 2014, I had big clients where we agreed on an hourly rate in pounds. USD to INR was moving higher (went from 60ish to 65ish), but GBP to INR was moving down (moved from 102 to 90), and I was making a lot less per hour for that client than those who were paying me in USD.
The global currency fluctuation helped me immensely keep my hourly rates in USD terms under check for my clients, but someone who is trying to be a freelancer today may not see a similar trend in his local currency to USD.
Over to you
Have I missed any of the struggles of a new developer looking to be a freelancer?
