Actionable tips on how to get started as a technical freelancer

1. How to get Started with
Freelancing
For Tech Professionals
By Loc Nguyen, lochnguyen@gmail.com

2. 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

3. Agenda
1. Why you should and shouldn’t freelance
2. Your gameplan
3. Favorite freelancing resources
4. AMA

4. 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.
○

5. 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

6. ● 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

7. 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

8. 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?

9. Very meta.
But how do I you started?

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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.”

13. 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

14. 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.

15. Should you work on fixed bid project?
No.
Weekly > Hourly > Fixed.

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. Picks: Podcasts
1. The Business of Freelancing
2. The Freelancer’s Show
3. Working without Pants

21. Hello
E-mail me at lochnguyen@gmail.com
Tweet me at @locn
Connect with me on linkedin.com/in/lochnguyen
Email me your questions and/or market your services ;)