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Comment by balajiviswanath | Hacker News Reader

I run a small web development business to help fund my startup goals. One tip is to try to tapping the freelancing marketplaces such as oDesk. I have started on oDesk about 2 months ago and now I'm getting enough work to even turn a few potential clients away.

Service business can be grueling and your projects can quickly turn into nightmares if not planned well. The small businesses who want the websites from us can be very vague in what they want, and might not appreciate some of the great stuff that we do (like getting the Pagespeed score above 90) while appreciating lame stuff like those landing page flash intros.

In the initial phase (first 3 months) take more well defined tasks that can have less margins, but can help you appreciate the hardships in the business. As you mature, you can take up more complex projects that can give pretty fat margins.

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Aren't many of the freelancing marketplaces garbage? I don't want to work for $10 an hour with the risk of not getting paid.

Which marketplaces are better or worse than others? Is oDesk different from the crapfest that is eLance?

Not necessarily. I had a few bad experiences with vWorker, freelancer and other market places. oDesk is slightly better than the lot. In oDesk the initial 30 days was working on low priced contracts and couple of times with clients who didn't pay. It was a little painful learning.

But, then I got a little better at identifying the right set of clients and now the I set rate at $33/hr and most of it in hourly contracts that are guaranteed payment. I also take fixed price contracts from clients with whom I have existing relationship. Many guys I know are charging $60/hr and having a good practice.

The thing in the initial phase you come across a lot of noise and as you find out the 1-2 good clients from the 10 shabby ones, you get repeat business from them.

The difference between freelance marketplaces and direct sales is that in the former the clients have a real need, while in the latter the we have to convince the potential leads of the need to have a good website with proper attention to typography, speed and ux.

What kind of software are you writing? Is it mostly web oriented? What languages are you using?

I typically use PHP and many of my sites are built on Wordpress. I have previously done Web programming before realizing that it can get pretty expensive in terms of maintenance. With quality, premium plugins and themes, you can get a quality site out in about 6 hours and charge $300. I tweak the CSS and PHP of the existing themes to get close to the customer needs and have built a KB and a process internally to reduce the full site development 6 hours what it used to take 25 hours or more.

That is working good so far. It is also easy to maintain, I have WP_MU setup and can update a large number of sites in parallel.

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