Who am I?
● Loc Nguyen
● Active in the local community
○ AngularJS-OC, ReactJS-OC, PeopleSpace
● Consulting on a lot of things *
○ AngularJS, ReactJS, Node, Ruby, Cordova, APIs etc
● 1st client in 2012 when startup gig didn’t work out
Agenda
1. Why you should and shouldn’t freelance
2. Your gameplan
3. Favorite freelancing resources
4. AMA
Should you freelance?
● There’s a lot of money for you
● There are a lot of people who want your help
● You control your working hours
○ Great if you have a family or want to pursue hobbies
○ Take a month off if you want
● You are in charge of your own career
○ Pick the technology you like to work with. Clients pay for your
education.
○
Congrats on the career change!
● You’re now in sales.
○ You’re hunting for all that money from all those people
○ You need a pipeline to qualify and close deals
● But wait, you’re a marketer too.
○ People have to know you’re for hire
○ How’s your copy writing?
● And you’re also in accounting and collections.
○ Uncle Sam needs his cut
○ Sometimes clients “forget” to pay invoices
● Feast and famine
income
● Drive your career and
pick your specialties
● Learn a ton of
entrepreneurial skills
● Steady paycheck &
raises
● Health and retirement
benefits
● Narrow and
straightforward
responsibilities
The 5 Things We Want in a Job
1. Work with great people
2. Make a lot of money
3. Solve interesting problems
4. Short commute
5. Reasonable hours
But we can only have 3 at a time.
1. Work with great people?
2. Make a lot of money
3. Solve interesting problems
4. Short commute?
5. Reasonable hours?
Very meta.
But how do I you started?
Personal Branding
● Build trust – pull prospects to you
● Be visible
○ Present at conferences, lead meetups or volunteer as a
speaker, be a face in the community
○ Blogs, social media, e-mail courses on your specialty
● Start immediately ;)
○ AngularJS-OC, ReactJS-OC
○ Product Managers of OC
○ PeopleSpace Community School
Positioning Your Brand
● Specialize and be known for something
○ less competition, higher rates
○ the ideal client will gladly pay for an expert consultant to
solve their expensive problems
● Position what you do
○ I’m a UI consultant who fixes interface problems causing
customer drop off.
○ I didn’t go to a “full-stack” doctor for my ACL replacement
○ My son was not delivered by a generalist
Marketing Your Expertise
● Push your service to prospects
● Tell people you’re for hire
○ connect with family, friends, past co-workers and bosses
● Learn great copywriting; copyhackers.com
● Go to networking events, don’t be pushy
○ Hear people talk about their problems
○ Offer a valuable freebie if they email you
■ lead self-qualifies and takes the first step into your funnel
■ don’t send lame emails the next day, e.g. “Great meeting you, let’s talk
if there’s anything I can do.”
What is valuable freebie?
● Something useful that demonstrates you’re legit
○ Web page UX teardown
○ Copy suggestions
○ Page load and rendering time measurements
○ Analytics suggestions
● Makes you memorable compared to everyone else at
the networking event
What should your rate be?
● Yearly salary / 2000 hours
○ $100,000 / 2,000 hours = $50/hour
○ This doesn’t account for health and dental, 401k, PTO,
training and other “costs of employment” your employer paid
● A decent rule of thumb is to double that to $100/hour
○ You are not billing 40 hours a week for the entire year
○ But taxes and other costs of self-employment :(
○ Decent but probably bad rule of thumb
● Work for free or for a good rate. Discounts devalue.
Should you work on fixed bid project?
No.
Weekly > Hourly > Fixed.
Where to find your first clients?
● Did you start branding yet?
● Referrals from updating your friends, family and past
colleagues that you are solving the problem of
________ for customers who are _______.
● Sub-contract to build a portfolio and network
○ Are you going to email me about this?
● Job boards, RFPs
○ Too much work and hard to qualify the leads
Should you jump in?
● Beggars can’t be choosers
○ You’ll start taking on bad clients if your cash flow is bad
● Risk tolerance
○ I had to consider mortgage payments, a son on the way,
health benefits for the family, and wife not working for 6m
○ Mitigated the risk with a long runway of savings
● Moonlighting is a low risk way to get your feet wet
and build that runway
Where I’m at Now
● Hate bookkeeping and collecting money, can’t justify
outsourcing yet. Definitely the worst.
● Cleared enough to survive a 6 month dry spell before
touching the runway.
● Subcontractors helping so I can take on longer term
projects and work on sales and marketing.
● Binging on learning the psychology behind sales and
copywriting, struggling to apply it myself
Picks: Books
1. Get Clients Now - how to start a sales
funnel for dummies
2. Double Your Freelancing Rate - how to
maximize your earnings
3. The Brain Audit - the psychology of
making a sale
Picks: Podcasts
1. The Business of Freelancing
2. The Freelancer’s Show
3. Working without Pants
Hello
E-mail me at [email protected]
Tweet me at @locn
Connect with me on linkedin.com/in/lochnguyen
Email me your questions and/or market your services ;)
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