Whilst on my web development path I inevitably got involved with some freelancing work. But I had no such freelance web developer advice, so I had to learn on the job. My future self takes a look back in time at some of the things I did wrong, and considers some of the things I could have done better.
Find your niche
Most businesses aim to solve a problem. If you find the ‘itch to scratch’ in a decent market, you can do well. As a web developer, that can easily become a very broad brush. It’s a saturated market that becomes abundantly clear when you visit websites such as people per hour. As a freelancer I sold websites to various business owners, like most web developers out there. The basic problem I was addressing was either:
- You don’t have a website. To get more customers/sales for your business, you’ll need one. Add various other benefits here for a business website, there are many.
- You already have a website. Though it’s perhaps a bit old and is missing something like being mobile friendly. Add various other benefits here, or ways you could improve their website, for them and their visitors.
I never really found a niche. I served anyone I could find with a need for a website. The other problem with this approach was the long turnaround time. An average brochure website for a business would take about 2-3 weeks. I was just one freelancer, working for myself. I was responsible for prototyping, design, content architecture, SEO fundamentals and deployment. After that I’d usually have to wait a little to actually receive payment. Down the line, the customers lifetime value would drop to occasional work such as maintenance and website hosting.
Trying to sell websites as a freelance web developer was hit or miss, mainly because everybody does that. In itself that’s not much of a niche, and the competition would generally be huge. Serving local customers was easier, but the work would dry up eventually unless you started to market yourself further afield. A sustainable niche would have made my work more regular and reliable.
I would have told myself back then that I needed a niche, a target sector to offer my services to. To drill down to specifics and really get to know a specific target audience. A niche would have allowed me to sidestep most of my developer competition, and focus on customers more interested in what I had specifically to offer them. I also needed to take a fresh look at how I actually provided my services to my customers. Which comes to my next point…
Think like a business person
One thing I’d say to past me is, “try to make more money, but with less effort”. The process of selling websites as your main product takes a lot of time, mainly due to the amount of work involved in creating a new one. The websites I sold were bespoke to each individual business, and as such there was no real room for quick -out of the box- template stuff. I would have benefited from learning about different business models. “I built you a website, here’s the bill” is the usual developer standard. But there are many ways to alter the business model e.g a subscription based service. This would also benefit in a more stable and consistent cashflow.
Think like a business owner
How much does it cost to aquire a customer? What’s their lifetime value? How can you improve cashflow? These are some of the questions I’d be asking my past self. I’d probably not really know the answer to any of them. But you can work out the profitability of your business by looking at things like this.
I kind of ran like a business when freelancing, but didn’t focus too much on the details such as turnover etc. I probably would have increased my profits if I’d spent some time learning about the basic business process, specifically when it comes to money. Nowadays the availability of training resources online has matured a lot since I first worked as a freelancer full time.
With paid work, stick to what you know
Of all the freelance web developer advice I can give, this is probably the most valuable.
It’s tempting to take on any dev work you’re able, especially when you don’t have much on your schedule. It’s easy to think you can apply your skills to any field within web development. What could possibly go wrong, if you can just pick any open source platform relevant to what you’re tying to build, and learn it as you work? This happened to me with a full blown e-commerce website. And I had to happen to me twice, in order for me to learn my lesson.
I had played around with open source carts before, they were generally bad. I opted for opencart. Magento wasn’t really a thing at the time and opencart seemed the most user friendly platform available. The project quote was larger than what I’d normally charge, so I picked up the job mainly for the money. As you do.
To cut a long story short, getting the payment process working was a pain. The customer wanted to have dynamic options, sub options and so on for each product. And the site needed to be pci compliant. I worked through the issues as and when I had them. But the whole process was time consuming, stressful and unpleasant. The site was put live, and it worked fine, but the work just kept coming in.
In the end I had to let the customer go, just because the time involved made them an unprofitable burden. In a way I did them a favour as they’d be better off with someone who really knew what they were doing. A lot of the problems I faced was down to lack of knowledge. Lack of payment integration knowledge. Lack of PHP knowledge, and so on. Trying to be a less stressed developer also takes a look at some of these issues.
Trying an alternative e-commerce solution
From that point, I tried to avoid e-commerce sites, until I was tempted again by a large budget. That time around I tried a different platform, Shopify. I figured that it would be better to use than opencart. I found the support to be hit and miss there, but shopify seemed a better fit to get any support I may need.
Turned out I was wrong. The templating system became a problem, it was essentially a whole new language to learn. Another problem was due to it being an entirely hosted service. Navigating the file structures via the browser was a pain, and there was no way to work with it locally without jumping through a few technical hoops.
I bailed this time around, though I made sure things were right with the customer. I paid a shopify expert to finish the last bits of work that needed doing. It wasn’t cheap, so I ended up not making much money from the project when I parted ways with the customer.
Moral of the story? Don’t pick up work that needs skills you don’t have. Don’t be tempted by money. It’s really not worth the stress for you or your customer. If you really want to pick up a risky project, quote for just the bits you can do. Be honest with your customer about what you can do, and outsource any work that you can’t. And make sure your outsourcer knows what they’re doing. You can always get a quote from the outsourcer, and bundle it with your own service, if you want to keep your invoicing simple with your customer.
Note that I’m not bashing the platforms I wrote about. It was purely my own lack of knowledge, incompetence and greed that lead to my downfall.
Get your marketing chops down
I feel I did pretty well in this department, in terms of copywriting and methods I used to get business. My only issue was with who I aimed my marketing at. My target audience was simply “local small to medium businesses”, which wasn’t really enough to make me stand out from my competitors. If I worked with a specific sector, I could have stood out more from other developers.
Promote benefits, not features
As I mentioned at the start of this article, most businesses solve some problem for somebody. The most direct way to communicate this is by promoting the benefits of using your product or service. It’d be tempting to say, “well my product does this, and that and so on”. But at the moment of deciding to purchase, the buyer only needs to know how it benefits them.
How does it address their particular need? Translating features to benefits would be better to attract the attention of your buyers. When you write a benefit, think about why a feature would benefit your target audience. For example:
“Your website will be mobile friendly.“
vs
“In order to increase your potential customer base, your website will work on any screensize available. Search engines love mobile optimised websites and has the potential to increase it’s visibility within search results, which would increase potential traffic (and customers) to your website.“
The benefit here is that you get more traffic to your website. And once you get visitors on your website, it then becomes easier to sell (you already have their interest at that point). Obviously, benefits would be different depending on the goals of the business.