Becoming a Freelance Web Developer – When To Quit Your Job
Are you a developer, coder, or engineer? Are you looking for the right time to quit your job? you're not sure what is required for you to quit the job How to do it? When's the right time?
Well, in this video, we're going to cover exactly that. I'm going to tell you when to quit the job, what you need and what the steps are for you to quit the job so that you can get a freelancing career, freedom and eventually also a business.
Why should you believe anything that I say? Well, I used to be an employee, and then I became a freelancer. And now I run a business. And I've coached over 200 people to do the same. So we have quite a lot of data on this.
So
First of all, let's talk about experience. How much experience is enough for you to be able to say "I'm good enough to be a freelancer, and I can build a business"? Well, honestly, you don't need too much experience, because the level of freelancers isn't that much higher than the level of employees. What is required is to add a few skills on top of your technical skills, and relearn a few other technical skills that are related to what is currently in demand on the marketplaces that you will be using for your business and for your freelancing.
You want to go on freelancing platforms like Upwork.com and Fiverr. And you want to check what is currently in demand by typing in keywords related to what you currently know. For example, if you're a web developer type in all the most common web development platforms, like CMS solutions, for example, WordPress, Shopify, and so on. There's a list you can find on the internet. And you know, Squarespace. Even I know, it's not very glamorous and not very custom. And some people even call it "not real development work." However, that is what's currently in demand.
There's also very custom stuff in demand, like creating a whole SaaS platform or custom web applications. However, if you're just starting out, maybe you want to stay away from that, because the complexity is very severe. Okay, it's a very deep and broad subject, where you have to be excellent at closing deals with clients. So what you want to do is start with something relatively simple, like WordPress development, or Shopify developments, or just a very simple template-based mobile app development if you're in mobile apps, for example, instead of going into custom now.
If you have a lot of experience, and you just you're looking at this and you're saying “There's no way I'm going to do WordPress development or Shopify development or anything like that, it's ridiculous. It's way below my skill level,” I totally understand. It makes sense. If you have crazy good experience, you can actually get into custom web or get custom app development. And it can be viable for you. I've seen people get into it, and on week 5 or so they already get like a $20,000-$30,000 project. But they have 10+ years experience of dealing with clients, in their job and 10+ years experience of being a developer in general, and a full-stack developer at that. So they can jump in at any point in the business and fix anything right.
Now, of course for them, it's much easier if you're a junior developer, and you don't have that much experience talking to clients and doing various projects from scratch, definitely start with something relatively simple, like a pre-existing platform, like the ones that I mentioned, or other ones. Now you can go into freelancing platforms type in the keywords related to your skills, and the platforms that are currently in demand based on that and figure out if there is 20 job posts per day, in a 24-hour period on the freelancing platform like Upwork, to make it worthwhile pursuing those leads. Because essentially, a platform like Upwork is a tool for you to generate the leads. What you go do there is you create a profile and you send proposals to enough people on a daily basis so that you get 4+ sales calls on a weekly basis. Once you get to that level, you can close one sale per week at a 25% close rate. Once you get to that level, you can replace your job, put an income as a freelancer, and then you're ready to go.
What about time? How much time is required to test all this and figure out if you can already quit your job as a developer employee? Well, you need 20 to 30 hours per week to test out freelancing and running a business before you have confirmation or you can have confirmation that actually works. Once you've successfully closed 2 to 3 projects as a freelancer or an agency owner, then you have enough proof and you should quit your job because if you spend 20-30 hours a week, and you can get a few sales a month, what's going to happen when you spend your full time and all your focus and creativity on it? You're going to close a multiple of that, right? And then eventually you can start doing things like hiring teams, outsourcing, automating building systems, and creating a very systematized delivery process for whatever it is you're selling.
Now, if you're going to do very high-end custom development forever, which is also viable, that's a different path, but perhaps for a different video because it has its own set of rules of how it works And there's longer sales cycles, meaning that for clients to buy something very expensive, that's $20,000 to $30,000, you're gonna have to wait probably for several months, and it's a multi-month sales process. That's not very attractive for beginners, I understand. It's even scary for some people, which I also understand. However, as a beginner, you can compensate by going for easier niches, easier industries, where you can still grow up in the industry as time goes on, and get to the higher end project.
Even in WordPress, which I'm not like the biggest fan of by the way, but it's just an easy industry to enter, you can get sales that are $3,000 to $20,000 if you talk to the right people. It's just not at the bottom of the pyramid. It's not at the bottom of where people start. It's at the very high end, if you can get projects like that. So hope that makes sense.
What you should do next is you should
- The Upwork algorithm explained so that you can get (more and better) jobs on Upwork:
- Python Code-With-Me Tutorial:
- Full Upwork top-rated guide:
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