A106 - What should you be able to create as a web developer before starting in your freelance career? - a podcast by Jason Resnick

from 2018-07-23T11:30

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Having a track record of solid, reliable, work will go a long way to helping you close sales. Having just your own website won’t do.

You’ll need to do a bit of hustling, maybe even barter with some folks and trade your skills for an opportunity.

Reach out to some local agencies to see if they have any overflow work. Agencies aren’t the most ideal to work with if you want to drive the ship of projects, but they are an amazing starting point to build up a reputation and place in the market.

The idea is to get work that you can do and build up a nice track record of good work.

SOME THINGS YOU’LL WANT TO KEEP IN MIND

When you start this journey, you’ll want to make sure:


  1. You can showcase the work on your own website.

  2. You can talk about the work you are doing.

  3. To try and stick to the same type of technology, or same industry, or even same location.

  4. The smaller the project, the faster you can deliver. The faster you can deliver, the faster you can tackle the next project and build a track record quicker.

You’ll want to get #1 and #2 in writing on your contract.

#3 is something I wish I had done early on.

The reason why this is important is so that when you start your own sales, you are solving a problem that you have solved before over and over again.

So as an example…

If you are taking designs from an agency and building out landing pages for lead magnets and the delivery of that lead magnet. That’s the solution you can pitch over and over again to any business.

If you are building out Laravel apps with Vue for startup Saas companies. You know have a track record for both a technology and sector of business.

These 2 examples are much more marketable and easier to target potential clients than if you are just a generalist developer who builds PHP, Ruby on Rails, Laravel, but also plays around with various front-end technologies.

The generalist web developer will always be compared to the next developer on price.

Creating a specialty for yourself makes your solution appealing to businesses that need it and they will compare your price to that of their expected return.

This is all well and good, but you do need the skills to do web development in the first place.

Further episodes of Ask Rezzz

Further podcasts by Jason Resnick

Website of Jason Resnick