Comment by jdhawk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdhawk | Hacker News Reader

Possibly an unpopular opinion on Freelancing work, but generally avoid anything that is highly saturated. Become a very deep expert in something older or niche.

These can lead to opportunities to maintain older software, or work on very specific projects. I did well updating and maintaining ancient Microsoft Access databases for small and medium size businesses who relied on them for day to day operations.

I'm currently utilizing several contractors who specialize in single products, and know them like the back of their hand (Lucine/ElasticSearch for actual full text search, not just elk stack)

There are TONS of "Full Stack" developers out there, so trying to work in that environment until you have a solid client base is, like you said, a race to the bottom.

On the local SMB side, I never told clients I was a Software Developer. I was a problem solver who could use technology when appropriate. Ask some local companies or SMB employees what the most painful part of their day happens to be. Maybe its something you can solve with some out of the box open source, a repurposed desktop as an SMB Server, or a little software development project. These things turn into recurring revenue as you save the companies money and time.

Good niche is intersection of two skills. For example, if you can do biology + programming, you can get jobs in bioinformatics. If you do education + programming, you're looking at ed-tech. Etc.

Being a domain-expert (even an armchair-level one) goes a really long ways.

Niche markets are less efficient. There aren't as many jobs, and when an employer needs you, they /really/ need you; if you go into narrow enough niches, there can be zero competitors qualified for the same position. That gives a lot of leverage. The flip side is there might be zero job openings for months. On the whole, I think that's an advantage, but it can go both ways.

Back in my freelancing days, everyone was doing php3 web development. I did, too, and it worked out extremely well for me.

A very popular market might be saturated, which is a downside. But it might also mean that customers already know that they want/need exactly this, which makes finding projects extremely easy.

If you want to have the best possible salary, go for an obscure niche where you can be the best in the world.

If you just want an OK salary with not too much work, go for the most popular project categories.

Back in the php3 days, there were not tens of thousands of global PHP3 devs competing on Fiver & Upwork.

Don't confuse high demand with oversaturation, or low demand with "niche".

One of the biggest problem OP has is that in his area probably not a lot of people have done anything like what he is trying to achieve. And people from around the world might not be able to give good advice on his particular situation.

I think having a niche or single product focus is great advice!

Imagine if OP:

1) Picked a product/tech

2) Did a deep dive into it for 3 months - setups and teardowns, reading, learning everything in the docs, and experimenting

3) Started writing blog posts about it now - It's never to early to create content! This would help the OP learn and eventually (a long time from now) become a lead generator.

4) Started advertising as a specialist in XYZ

There are lots of opportunities to become an expert in something. People that really get themselves out there create courses and learning communities for their specialty. It would require some work to find the right niche.

You give good advice: avoid over saturated fields unless a specific customer wants to hire you but gives you a heads up that you need to ramp up.

Contributing to open source on github may also help. Just cloning other projects is not impressive to potential customers, but small (perhaps learning) projects of your own offer some verification of your ability.

While it might be possible to start a small business around a web service, it seems to me like it is safer to continually study and improve your skill sets and learn the skill of figuring out what customers need and do that for them.

I started my freelancing career with XSLT (XML transformations) and got a Google Summer of Code stipend 2011 and a job offer right after that. Riding this train since 2011. Although I'm doing XSLT very seldom nowadays it got me my foot in the doorstep, guessing with a common programming language and not going niche I would have never made it (thinking that Asian and Russian programmers are much better in broad known languages than me).

For full-time work, there's the specialist-generalist tradeoff. Specialists tend to make more money, but it's harder to find a job, and the skills might have a shorter shelf life.

This is true, I made at least 10x OP's amount servicing legacy Adobe Flex applications and later on leading the transition to JS.

However, it might be difficult to get a good lead on that.

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