Episodes

If you're a freelancer, you may be tempted to apply to job openings looking for employees so that you can convince them to hire you instead. Is that a good idea? And, more generally, why do companies hire freelancers versus employees?

A lot of people will tell you that, as a freelancer, you should create and maintain a portfolio that you can show to prospects. But is that really good advice? Link Picks Local development with PostgreSQL containers Enterprise Release Management...

As a freelancer, it might not be clear what kind of title to give yourself in "official" venues, like LinkedIn or on business cards. What should you put there to best represent yourself? Link Picks: A developer’s guide to GitOps IT Environments:...

This time around in our community speaker series, we talked to Reuven Lerner about starting a Python training business. Hear about how he got into tech, into training, into business for himself, and, eventually into a specific, stable, and profitable...

Someone in our community asked whether it was worth it for freelancers to gain recognition by giving conference workshops or online workshops. I generalized this to the subject of "should you give talks as a freelancer to generate new business?" Here...

There are a lot of factors to consider when leaving a salaried job to go off on your own. One of the perhaps lesser considered ones is what, exactly, does this mean for your career. Is starting to freelance a lateral career move, or is it a career ad...

n this installment of our community speaker series, we talked to Marg Reffell about her experience starting a web development agency and then evolving it over the course of time. Included in this is how she arrived at a decision to scale in the first...

In sales lingo, "win rate" is the percentage of prospects you talk to that eventually become customers? How can freelancers improve the rate at which they close business so that their time doing sales is more efficient? Join us to learn more. -----...

When you're first starting out and building your website, how should you position yourself? Specifically, should you talk about yourself as "I" or should you talk about yourself as "we," the way an agency or larger business might? I definitely have a...

In this installment of our community guest speaker series, we talked to Swizec Teller about balancing serious side hustles with full time employment. He has balanced a career working for startups in Silicon Valley with building info products and busi...

Not all clients are created equal. Many are great, but some you'd rather avoid. How do you tell the difference ahead of time, in order to avoid the headache of having nightmare clients? ________________________________________________________________...

If you're used to salaried employment, especially in the US, you're used to having a lot of stuff taken care of for you when it comes to benefits. Medical, dental, vision insurance covered and mostly paid for, retirement savings, and more. But what d...

I get a lot of questions about freelancing, but this is both one of the most interesting that I get and the least-asked. When should you quit freelancing? People set out with nothing but plans for success, so the "when do I do something else" is infr...

Invoicing Basics for New Freelancers ------------------------------------------------------ This Week's Picks Deploy a Django app with Kubernetes in 20 minutes Data Compliance: A Detailed Guide for IT Leaders Episode 15: Simple Cookie Based Authent...

In this installment of our community guest speaker series, we talked to Cory Koehler about how he went from being an employee to running a collective of application development freelancers. A lot of folks in our community are interested in exploring ...

Subcontracting? Bringing on a VA or a bookkeeper? As a freelancer, when does the time come to start hiring people to do other things? Join us to learn more. This weeks picks: This Appium tutorial that explains how Appium helps with cross-platform mob...

If you're a new or aspiring freelancer, this is probably one of your worst nightmares. What do you do when a client won't pay? What options do you have and what recourse? Picks -----------------------------------------------------------------------...

In this video, I field a specific question about how to structure pricing for an offering around legacy code remediation. But because that's very specific, I lead up to it, spending most of the video talking about the different pricing models and opt...

As a freelancer, winding up with bad clients can be the bane of your existence or even drive you back to the salaried world. So what can you do to avoid having bad clients? I walk you through my tactics to help toward this goal. Picks -------------...

How do you go about building an audience to help with your marketing efforts for your business or freelance practice?  I'll go through all sorts of things that you can do in general, but the most powerful thing you can do is find a niche and be speci...

How do you go about closing the deal as a freelancer? Do you agree to interviews? Do you have some kind of sales that you do? And, in either case, how does negotiation work during the process? In this video I walk you through how all of that good stu...

Have you historically been a salaried employee, but are curious about dipping your toes in the water of freelancing? In this video I take on a "compare and contrast" of freelancing and salaried employment, and how to figure out which makes the most s...

It's near universal to wonder whether and how to incorporate when you start a freelance practice. In this installment of the freelancer Q&A Facebook Lives, I walk through the options that you have, and weigh in on what I'd recommend, base on my exper...

Another episode from our Q&A series, where I take on Q&A about business and freelancing from authors in our author pool. If you're going to moonlight or go into business for yourself freelancing, should you use Upwork or sites like it? I think there ...