Freelancing

Greetings to all those who was long waiting for me to post something.
..well, the others are welcome, too. :)

I was in transition for about a month. My IT consulting business seems to be working fine, getting bigger very slowly, with little to no effort from myself. It doesn't bring much money, though, so I sat down and started to think of another ways to earn some bad-needed cash ^_^

About two weeks ago I decided to try freelancing once again.
I tried it about 1.5 years ago, and was scared off by those damn cheap-as-hell Indians. And my business model was different, actually.
I was hoping (stoopid, stoopid!) to arrange several projects and pass them to programmers I know. I still have an .xsl sheet with about 30 programmers willing to freelance from time to time. So, I find a project, talk over the matters with the buyer, pass the project to actual developer, and get the difference between arranged cost and the developer cost. Great idea, huh?

In reality, that didn't work at all.
Developers like to get freelance jobs, but only if you can assure them the job is yours. And only if they don't know it's offshore freelance. If they do - they charge two times more with no questions asked.
Buyers like to be sure their project is in good hands and it will meet their needs in both time and quality.

And I am in between, trying to assure the buyer his project will be delivered on time (how the hell can I know? I'm not developing it, and the person I've found is not working on ME), and trying to assure the developer that the project is already ours. While often having little to know experience in whatever requirements the project has. For example, I'm not a web developer, and only know basics of PHP. Yet, there are quite a lot of PHP-related projects out there in the web.

Basically - I'm trying to tell both sides that everything is fine, while I myself am not very sure of it. And when I'm not sure I'm doing the right thing - I'm performing awfully bad.

Yes, and those damn Indians.
If they were not in this world - well, I suppose I could make this model work. But they just pop out everywhere, offering twice as less as you do, with those supid offer templates like "our blahblah company is a PIONEER in whatever you need, our blahblah great coders can do this whatever project in no time we suffer to meet your needs blahblahblah and blahblahblah". Damn them. >:-E

So, it didn't work for me that time. Why did I think it would now?
Well, to tell you the truth, I didn't think at all. I just sat at my computer, registered at 3 or 4 freelance sites, uploaded my complete profile with my contacts, areas of experience, and resume. The next day I started to browse those sites for the projects, and sometimes placed a bid here and there. This time - only if I was completely sure I can pull the project off all by myself.

How did I scare off those pesky Indians, you may ask?
Well, I didn't. They are not too easy to get rid of.
But, as it seems, they are not really a problem. Their main weakness, as it often happens, lies in their main strengh.

They spam.

Every single freelance project has at least one Indian spammer bidding on it. Especially if it's some PHP or site clone or something web-related.
The bids are standart, based on template, and even if there's something like "we have studied your project carefully and we assure you of our blahblahblah-you-name-it" - I started to smile every time I see such shitty template. Sometimes I even laughed on their template pearls, waking my wife in a middle of the night. Stoopid, stoopid Indians. :D

Why did I smile, you can ask? Why the hell did I laugh?
Kekeke..
I don't know, it was just damn funny to see something like:
Buyer: "we need a person in Delhi to do some-desktop-stuff"
Bidder: "our company is an expert in web development. we made 1000 sites last week for buyers form 100 countries. blahblahblah"

And finally, after a night and a day of smiling and laughing, I came out with a solution.
I don't have to spam every single project I meet which I think I can accomplish.
I should better look carefully whether the project is understandable, whether it's lying in my sphere of competence, and whether I have a similar project experience.
Then I make a bid, specifying all these sections in it, so that the buyer can see I'm serious about the project, that I have really studied it, and that I am a person that can and will solve his problem.

Perhaps my business experience have helped to look at things from the buyer's perspective, but this way worked fine.

In just two days I was awarded by my first project, to fix some functionality of a program named ResxEditor. It is an interesting small application with very little code, but extremely useful to its users, as I have found.
Well, I made everything I had to, AND added some additional work to make the code look like it was initially written by me, for, say, a friend of mine.

The buyer, Joannes Vermorel (hi Joannes, if you're reading this!), was impressed by my work, and offered me a stable part-time freelane work in his project, Lokad. That's some really interesting project, however I'd better not rattle about it too much, as it is not launched yet. Not that I already know any "top secrets", but the loyalty is loyalty, hehe.

And, by the way, there's not only single projects on these sites. From time to time I ran into full- or part-time jobs, with requirements meeting my skills, and payment varying from 10 to 60 bucks per hour. Some buyers require developer to come and live at their place, and the others are suited with online workers. All in all, with some time, effort and quality invested, I'm positive I'd be able to find a full-time online job for, say, 2K to 4K bucks per month.

Along with that, I have got a project on some damn-stupid-MSSQL-transaction-log-reading, and though I didn't like the project from the get-go, I have accepted it to make a positive feedback for my account.
Nothing really interesting here, so let's move on to Lokad, of which I have just sweared I won't rattle anymore. ;)

Anyway.

Joannes offered me $8 per hour, with approximately 10+ work hour per week, or 2+ hours per day, if you're not listing weekends. When I have calculated the financial outcome, it was clear that 16 bucks per day is not much (now I really hope you're reading this, Joannes ;)), and i'm not willing to work 8-hours day anymore. So, if I want to raise some solid bucks online, these are not the terms I'm looking for.

From another perspective, this offer gives me several bright opportunities:
1) As I don't have to spend much time on it - I can continue to either freelance, or look for a nice-payed full-time online job, or both
2) As I don't have to spend much time on it - I can finally start to implement my software-selling site which I was thinking of for the last two years
3) The technology used in this project is really amazing, and I'm going to grow big in terms of both software development AND management. Especially - online software development management. :P
4) There was something else I don't remember. Perhaps it was Joannes being such a nice person?
Ah, I dunno, it's too hard to remember everything when it's 5 am, when you have just finished to refactor that damn program you were looking at for the whole last year, and when you are going to get some dead-sleep.

Ouch, that last sentence made me finally understand it's REALLY time to go get some sleep, and even my beloved blog is not going to stop me from that.

Good night, everybody!
See you soon.. er.. sometimes. :P