My First Year of Freelancing
8 months into my first year of freelancing in the UI space:<p>* Closing in on $250k revenue<p>* 2 major clients, 4 smaller, short-term engagements<p>* 100% utilization rate (no downtime between clients)<p>* Successfully raised rates with all client projects (avg: 19% &#x2F; engagement)<p>* Closed via a sales funnel of: 5 new prospect outreach &#x2F; day, 2 proposal follow-ups &#x2F; day, 1 existing (or prior) client referral &#x2F; month<p>What worked:<p>* Networking aggressively (see sales funnel)<p>* Setting up a 3-prong presence of blog + personal site + consulting site<p>* Pruning and refining available code&#x2F;assets for portfolio<p>* Pricing &#x2F; week &amp; value-based, fixed-cost pricing<p>* 100% money-back guarantee (no one has asked for it)<p>* Having an accountant<p>What did not work:<p>* Thorough proposal &#x2F; contract documentation. I figured having detailed, in-depth scope of work showing I had knowledge of their industry, problems, etc, would help close deals. The teams that closed the fastest already knew they wanted to work with me, but the ones that weren&#x27;t sold couldn&#x27;t even be sold with excellent SOWs and proposal documentation.<p>* Having a lawyer. For a one-man consulting shop, you really don&#x27;t need one. Most standard SOW&#x2F;Contract&#x2F;IP documents are easy enough to generate&#x2F;find yourself.<p>* Toptal &#x2F; Upwork &#x2F; any of those race-to-the-bottom sites. There&#x27;s great arbitrage if you&#x27;re international like OP. But I&#x27;m in the US, and it&#x27;s not worth the effort for US rates.<p>* Meetups. I just didn&#x27;t invest time in them (yet). I think the next leap in rates will come from becoming more &quot;well known&quot; through blogging and speaking engagements, which this is a key area to invest in.<p>* All this &quot;double your rate&quot; business. Sure, I imagine this works if you&#x27;re used to pulling in $50&#x2F;hr, and I imagine Brennan Dunn and the sort are marketing themselves at more commoditized development. But trust me, people ran away when I doubled my rates. I had to find a sweet spot and build up my rates slowly per client rather than just assume I was wildly undervalued.