I know I'll get heat for this but I am trying to get up and running with my freelancing career. I am tired of 9-5 jobs and they stress me out due to toxic culture in the current country⁶. I have currently two jobs. 1 is part time, 1 is a freelance. I was wondering what are the best ways to get western clients as, truth be told, they usually pay more. I am currently in UAE and was wondering what is the best way to go about it. Unfortunately I don't have that big of a circle when it comes to connections. I do have a LinkedIn and have good amount of connections there and I am thinking of cold messaging but regarding marketing, how do you guys market yourselves?

Sorry in advance if this makes you angry as that isn't what I wish for. I am new to this and wish to learn more from you guys. Thanks!

PS: I am a software developer. Mostly working in MERN, but I can work with basically anything. From AWS to mobile application development (Kotlin / Swift). That's a long way of saying a Full Stack Dev I guess.

I'm a software engineer and I've been freelancing since the pandemic. I'm looking for my next role now (probably full time, maybe more contract work) and I'm not sure how to list my freelancing experience. Right now I have it as one job listing with bullet points for each gig.

Is that how you guys typically do it?

I've seen a few posts about the place of people claiming using AI is saving them entire days of work a week, but I'm yet to really find something that helps more than slightly. I'm curious how folks are really finding AI in terms of what time it really saves them, and what tools and processes they'd recommend? Thanks!

Since I'm good at excel/google sheets I started making content about it and have been getting 10s of requests of people asking for custom ones, I have no idea how to have an efficient system for taking orders and having some sort of contract, please give me your best tips 🥹

Any tips on how to navigate banking for sole proprietors these days? I’ve heard both good and bad things about Mercury and other neobanks — Is anyone currently using them?

What's the fastest way to get clients as a newbie? Do I need to get courses and certificates first?

Has anyone had success in productizing their services by having clients pay a flat monthly rate with unlimited design requests (one at a time)?

Hi all,

I've been freelancing for about 8 years now, and I must be completely stupid, but I just can't get myself to click a button every time I start working on something. So I loose track of how much time I actually spend doing things and probably end up underbilling because of it.

Now, when I work, I always connect remotely to some online desktop, using RDP or Horizon.

Does anyone know of a simple Mac app that just records when the RDP or Horizon app is active?

Ideally that wouldn't be a massive app with online reports and team sync and what not.

Thanks

I’ve been freelancing since around just before the pandemic and despite what was happening in the world I was absolutely flourishing as a freelancer.

Since then it’s been a gradual decline and at the moment seems worse than ever.

It’s a bit bitter to consider but when I started I was loving it but now it seems like that was a special time for freelancers and it will not be like that again.

Are we in a down turn at the moment and will it pick back up or are we in a more permanent down turn for tech with the increasing tools that allow non designers to create / AI coming down the road too.

Can any more experienced freelancers give there perspective or possibly even some words of encouragement …

I'm having issues with some clients and potential clients never answering their phones or returning calls. These are people who have spoken to me about starting a project but will never answer their phone at the time where I've said I'll call or they'll never return a voice mail.

- Had one person ask me to call them at the start of the week. When I called, never answered.
- Another person asked me to call them after a certain time. I emailed them with the day and time I'll call. When I called, never picked up or returned calls.

- Another person asked me to call them the next day. Called multiple times, never answered.

- Another client has wanted to start a new project the last 3 months. Taking forever to get paper work started and when I call him to check in, guy never answers phone or calls back.

I understand people are busy, but I don't know how they function in business. If they treat their customers like this, I don't know how they get any work.

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Last month, one of my retainer clients emailed me saying they would like to move to an hourly or fixed price contract from a retainer that I had in place with them. I replied back with the updated rates and flat price for the projects. However, they have still not got back to me over email if they would like to move forward with that (been 4 weeks) while I am still waiting for them. I had a meeting with the same guy I sent email to last week and he said he'd get back in a week but he still seems to have been skipping this.

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I used to send them bi-weekly invoice and I have halted sending them invoice for a month now. What should my next step be? bug the guy again asking to reply back ? or send them the invoice as usual until the things get confirmed?

After 10 years of working in PPC/SEO (client-side for 2 years, agency for 8 years) I'm finally going freelance.

Freelancers - what advice would you give me? I'm keen to make this work so any advice is greatly appreciated!

Does this sound familiar?

(Musical arrangements…)

Client micromanaging, asking for multitudes of tiny non-sensical edits, each of which makes other elements of the music no longer make sense and my work look sloppy. I’m over explaining why things have to be a certain way. I just want it to be over so I’m doing all the edits ASAP like a monkey until they hopefully just agree to whatever random constellation of edits it ends up being.

I don’t need advice. Just venting. It will all be over by tonight.

Peace!

How is this usually handled? I’m a web developer. I’ve only had 3 clients on retainer and all 3 would use retainers for smaller tasks such as big fixes, small feature additions, style changes, etc. All were to assist my clients with retainers they had with their clients. Whenever a full build project came up, it was always separate.

One of clients handled it this way at first but then asked to use any leftover hours on an ongoing larger project. The retainer is for only 4 hours a week (my only weekly, the rest are monthly) and there was a stretch of weeks where he used little to none

I pushed back and said the retainer guarantees my availability and quick turnaround for 4 hours a week while projects are more fluid between start and deadline and to mix them would be unfair and messy. I mean, if he gave me 4 hours of work on a Monday, would I not work on the project? And if he strung a few projects together he’d have a retainer without any risk of not using hours.

But I also see his side. I’m doing work for him either way. I can sort of see how he views it as “additional hours”.

Side note: I’ve had to push back a few too many times when, without an ongoing project, he was pushy about getting quick turnarounds well beyond his 4 hours a week.

A person that I wanted to work with offered me a freelance job to handle their marketing, website and social media. However she is not willing to give a confirmation letter saying that she does not believe in all that and only communicates on whatsapp. Should I go ahead with it or insist on a letter?

I’d love to get some thoughts from those of you on a similar journey. I crossed the 10 year mark for self employment recently. I do a mix of graphic design, photography, and video work for clients and it’s gone pretty well. There are busy times and slow times and I try not to sweat the slow times. I’m in one right now and there are a few factors that are making me doubt my future doing this at this point. I recently lost one of my longtime clients to a large design firm (they got a free rebrand from this firm and decided to stick with them…my main contact also retired so that was definitely part of it). Another longtime client has decided to reduce their monthly digital product offerings and that cuts into my monthly income by almost $1k…pretty dramatic loss.

I’ve got a few other good clients but they’re not all stable monthly income. That leaves me having to court and win new clients monthly to keep my work hours filled. I’m terrible at this part of the gig and have relied pretty exclusively on word of mouth and network connections for the past decade. I’ve tried Google and Facebook ads in the past and have gotten zero return from those. I’m working on posting more consistently on social media and I HAVE won some work through posts…mainly on the photo/video side of what I do.

The thought of getting a portfolio together and working an 8-5 grind is incredibly unappealing but it WOULD be nice not to have to deal with generating leads and worrying about where my income for the next month is going to come from. All this to say, I’m at a low-point at the moment and would love to hear from others who go through this. As I get older (I’m in my 40s) I’m also afraid that it’ll be much more difficult to get hired if I do decide to hang up my freelancer hat.

Am I crazy to keep doing this? What works best for you to win new clients?

Hi there,

I'm an early career professional — my contract at my most recent full-time job ended last month so I'm spending the spring working on applying for/interviewing for more stuff in my industry. Amidst that, I've had a few freelance/ad-hoc gig opportunities pop up from folks in my network with their small/growing businesses who could use extra hands on some of their projects and I'm trying to familiarize myself with what might be considered "standard freelance procedures", if anyone can recommend good resources. I've taken on maybe 1-2 very small projects with an industry friend I have, e.g. they just need an extra set of hands at an event or want some help organizing a project/company infrastructure stuff and she's venmoing me for it. I've sent invoices just so there's a papertrail, but that's about it as far as formalities go. All things considered, it's been pretty frivolous — I'm not worried at all about her screwing me over or anything, she's a very reputable personal friend/mentor in my industry. I've known her for years and would never not give her the benefit of the doubt.

That said, on the mere basis of professionalism and keeping loose ends tied up, I'm starting to think I'd like to know how to navigate the art of freelancing a bit more proactively than reactively as it applies to the work I'm taking on. If I were to sit down and "pitch" to her what all I see myself doing and coming into agreement re; a title, a rate, freelance terms, etc., what bases do I need to cover so I don't end up shooting myself in the foot anywhere while also not overshooting the runway/going to overkill with it all. Trying to learn where I may need to keep loose ends tied up across the board is the gist of this.

Wondering particularly about some of the following.

• Would it be dumb not to write up a simple, one-page boilerplate contract just agreeing to intent to be in professional business with one another in like basically any instance of working for pay? What all would need to be included on there, ala what terms are essential to have in writing and what can be worried less about? How hard should I push if she (or anyone I work with in this manner) doesn't want to include or worry about talking through/coming to proactive agreement about any given term or thing?
• Do I need to worry about self-incorporating in any capacity, even if I'm only making a two-tree hundred bucks or less per month at most? This is really nothing more than a small side hustle. Do I need to be prepared to ask for a 1099? Or even a W-2? Do I give her a W-4 or is that overkill/crazy/not even applicable? What else would be standard protocol here?
• As someone who has a pre-existing professional industry relationship with this person, what should I know/expect about having a concrete 1:1 with them to chat through some ideas so we're on the same page ahead of time? I can infer that (on the basis that freelance is freelance) everyone has their own way and style of doing things — but are there any surefire rules or recommendations I should be aware of when I'm communicating and launching into this sort of relationship with them?

TL;DR - What obvious yes/no rules/standards are there to freelance work that y'all can share? What easy-to-consume resources might you have? Like I said, this is only taking up a few hours per month at the moment — trying to stay away from the 10-hour "everything you need to know" book and more in the realm of "this is a good YouTube channel that will answer most of your questions if you sink 30+ minutes into it".

Let me know if I can answer any other clarifying questions. Thank you, thank you! 🙏🏻

On fiver I’ve contracted someone to build me a simple iOS app I can deploy on the App Store. I have a personal developer account that I would like to use to I made sure to specify that I needed certificates/signing so I could deploy the app, they said since I had windows that they needed to log in to my Apple account to sign the app. I realize this is required by Apple but what’s the standard for this type of situation? There has to be another way, because there’s no way I’m just going to send my login credentials to this person

What resources best helped you when you first started? What advice can you share that would be useful for a beginner? Do you use cold outreach and or a script? Is it better to find potential clients in niche communities? Does upselling other services hinder or benefit a business model?

After more than 12 years of freelancing, I am considering getting either a remote part time or full time job. I am so sick of having gaps where either clients don’t give me enough work, or new clients don’t come so I have to settle for the ones that I do have but have low budgets so they can’t pay me enough. I can’t even budget myself correctly bc I could have two great months, and then 4 awful ones. I dont remember the last time I took a real vacation bc of money and always being on my laptop for clients. Im just sick of the instability. Anyone else feeling this way?

Hello, freelancers.

I am an 3D/VFX artist, I used to learn 3D modelling and texturing, but now I'm working on VFX, including both video editing and also composting. Also working on FX simulations. I've started learning python few days ago aswell. So I think it'll be good idea to atleast see what kind of people wants in this field, even ready to take few free freelance gigs to head start learning.

But I was wondering is it a right approach, or should I take few more months to become atleast a mid level artists before I start asking for gigs? And also is it good idea to do 1-2 work for free?

Hey there,

So a little backstory for my question. I started freelancing while doing my masters degree in Business Analytics with a background in Information Sciences and graduated 4 months ago. I decided to focus on my business and really go for it as I was afraid that whenever I would work in a full-time job, I would get too comfortable staying there. I found an area where I can provide my services with my knowledge that also has lots of potential of growing, I work predominately automating business processes, integrating cloud solutions and implementing effective customer relationship management systems.

Now fast forward to the present and I have acquired some valuable long term clients that regularly provide me with work. But I am trying to figure out how to take this to the next step and start looking for a way to generate a guaranteed income when i'm not actively working. I learned that to generate a retaining income you will need to provide value that is measurable in metrics for your clients to trust and work towards a goal. The client should consider your services an investment for growth rather an just an expense to hire you for your services. However I see that i have a lot of issues figuring out where to start with this.

Does anyone here, especially one of the more veteran freelancers have experience on this topic?

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So, I am a 3d animator. I was working with a client on a simple moving animation for their logo. This is only my second client.

Some context: the client originally did not ask for their logo to be animated. When I asked if they wanted animation in our emails, they said to just recreate their logo. I put in the contract no animations, which they “read” and signed. When I sent a watermarked approval draft, the client said “this is animated right?” and I kindly told them no, because they did not ask for animations and so I did not put that in the contract. Client gets VERY pissed off at me. I offer to do the animations for them at a slightly discounted rate.

Before this started, they sent me a downpayment which was half the price of the original logo-only contract.

Now, I’ve done the animations for them, and sent a watermarked video a while go for approval. I’ve since checked in twice with no replies. Do I consider this a lost client? I have a termination clause in my contract. Do I ask them if they want to terminate? Do I ask them to pay for the rest of the services rendered? Thanks in advance.

I realize there are a lot of variables i.e. how long have you worked with this client, how big is he contract, was this a one-time occurrence, etc.

Simply being an asshole isn't usually enough, since I can easily push back against assholery. For me it's usually when a) they are quick to blame you for their mistakes, b) they are chaos agents and c) always in a major hurry but getting paid is like pulling teeth.

Curious what others' red lines might be.

I am a US citizen currently living in Canada with my boyfriend. I am a temporary resident so I have to go back to the US for a bit every 6 months. There are freelance positions based in Canada that I have been wanting to apply to, but I am not sure how that works with taxes? Also I don't have a Canadian work visa of any kind. The freelance work I have been doing is still based in the US, but some US positions I have applied to have questioned why I have a Canadian IP address. Which country might be best for me to apply to? Would taxes be complicated in any way?

Hey all,

I am intending to do freelance work for a fitness company through Upwork. I am required to send workout videos for them to edit and distribute to their members. I have been told that these will be shared to members through email/WhatsApp.

Is there a way of ensuring these cannot be shared to external sources (distributed by the company/clients to third parties)? What privacy measures can I take to ensure they are only available to the intended audience, and sent out only on my confirmation that I am happy with the final product (how they are edited etc.)? Would it be wise to request a contract of some kind to establish these terms clearly?

Any advice would be very much appreciated. Thanks all.

Looking into trying it out bc I find myself doing a lot of resting during the day and maybe having a stricter schedule would help out. Also what planning methods do you use? I've tried Notion many times and I just never look at it during the day. I used to be a bullet journal girlie but times have changed LOL.

I'm a freelance consultant and I'm struggling to find the best form tool to collect information from customers.

I am looking for something that allows a potential customer to take a "quiz" that would provide a rating on their current processes. They would go question by question, and at the end they would get their results as a score. I can get close to what I want with Typeform, but what I'm looking for are customized results. Examples:

• "To the question A, you gave answer Z, which is not the best choice. Here is a link to resources on how to fix this."
• "To the question B, you gave answer Y, that's great! If you want to take it to the next level, here is a link to resources on how to fix this."

On and on for each question, and they have the results emailed to them.

I want to embed this in my site for leadgen capture, but I also want to save the information in a spreadsheet or other manner so when meeting with the client, I already have the issues in their processes that they've noted.

I've tried a bunch of different tools but can't seem to find the one I need. Does this exist anywhere or does it need to be custom built?

Hi! I have a small web development agency, basically just my wife and I. A new client (who will be paying me for work) is now asking me to send her a 1099. Shouldn't she be the one sending me the 1099 though? Maybe she is confused and actually wanting me to send her a w-9 so she has the necessary info to issue the 1099 at the end of the year? Or does she want a prefilled 1099 or something like that? I'm very confused, what do you all think?!

Hey guys!

I've been freelancing as a Copywriter for 2 years now, and I've noticed that almost all of my invoices are paid late. After speaking with other freelancers (mostly in design, coding, and video), it seems like they're facing similar challenges with getting paid on time.

That's why I teamed up with two software developer friends of mine to create a tool that makes freelancers' lives easier. Our focus right now is on addressing the payment issue by enabling freelancers to get paid upon delivery of their work through a secure link (similar to WeTransfer but with mandatory payment to unlock the content).

I'm curious to know, what features would you love to see to increase your productivity?

Additionally, since our goal is to support freelancers, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could try out our solution and provide feedback to help us improve.