Ask HN: Freelancers, how did you find your first paying client?

A friend of mine was doing a video shoot for some church organization. They needed a new web host and some changes on their website, so he referred them to me. Through them, I picked up another client or two with which they were associated.

From there, someone familiar with that church group learned about me via them and asked me to help with a project he was doing.

From my work there, that client ended up funneling several clients to me.

As far as money goes, I think I started at around $20/hr and began raising my rates to $30, $50, and now $75-$100/hr depending on the project. For a while there, I had too many smaller paying clients coming to me but no real way to scale it other than just funneling them off to someone else and losing out on the potential income. Raising rates helped with that filter that out. Now if I get overwhelmed, I can actually afford to subcontract out to other folks that I trust without taking a big hit. I have collected a small list of people that I trust (a programmer or two and a graphic designer guy) that I use when I need them.

I still work a full time job, so I just try to balance my freelance gigs as best I can. My hope with raising my rates is that I can plan an eventual transition into full time freelancing.

I had a previous venture into freelancing many years ago, but only had one or two clients. I had worked out a residual payment sort of deal with them based on the amount of users they had paying each month. This was my full time job for a year or two until they lost their main source of users.

This ended up being much more of a rambling session that I intended. I guess my main point is, "by talking to people." Talk to your friends. Talk to colleagues. Talk to folks at your social gathering place of choice. It seems that someone always knows someone who needs some sort of work done. They may not be willing to pay top dollar, but to get your foot in the door I think that's okay.

While I don't suggest this to be universal, I think you'll find that the majority of freelancers don't have first clients, they have first favors: a buddy who needs a website, an old acquaintance from high school or college who remembers you being the one who knew what RAM was an acronym for, etc.

I'd say, broadly, there are two types of early freelancing requests:

1. The prospective client knows exactly what the finished product needs to be. He does not, on the other hand, know what technology is necessary or how long/expensive it will be. (These are the clients who say sentences like "Hey, how much would it cost per month to have a web page?"). These are typical first clients, who aren't quite aware of the gulf between "how much effort it is to set up a five-page Wordpress" and "how much value a five-page Wordpress brings to a small services firm," and tend to think of technology as an investment.

2. The prospective client who has read an article or a book about something like SEO or social media or something like that and doesn't really know what it entails but feels as though they need it. These people generally think of technology as a cost -- or, at the very least, they don't know exactly what they'd be investing in.

To answer the question: I got my first client way back in tenth grade by being referred by a non-profit for which I had set up a Wordpress account; I got in touch with the non-profit through my high school's web design club; I heard about the web design club through one of my buddies in Algebra II.

It was very clear that a friend's workplace could leap 40 years into the future with a basic user database and eCommerce platform, so I explained the financial/productivity benefits at a party and offered to do it at a really low rate.

Other clients have come from telling friends I was freelancing, especially developer friends who will refer you when they're too busy to take on new work. If you have no developer friends, show up at meetups, design events, and start introducing yourself to others as a freelancer. You shouldn't start hard selling in social environments necessarily-- make authentic connections with people you vibe with so when they have some work down the line, they think of you.

For me it has boiled down to what is effectively networking, though the term/concept as I understood it from afar always made me nervous and misanthropic.

Its essential for freelancers, though.

I watched a lot of Ramit Sethi videos on youtube about social behavior in negotiations, networking, and how to not being a weirdo in otherwise anxiety producing environments. These helped immensely. And the amount of free info is amazing.

Money in the bank: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb03mTqI2Io&feature=c4-overview-vl&list=PLFECEFDAC97C06DE7 ↗

The hard part about freelancing is that more often than not, paying clients want to see your portfolio. Now when you are starting off, most of the time you will have little to nothing to show(or atleast I did :P).

I started off by helping out student organizations in my university and building websites for them. I then used those websites in my portfolio. Within the universities, some organizations caught wind of my work and asked me to build their sites for them. Soon, I had people tell me that their family/friend wants a website and I found myself building those sites. Then I started branching off into the community. I posted on local boards and got a couple more clients there. After this point, I started getting word of mouth referrals.

In a gist, you start with customers who will pay you little to nothing. Do a good job and advertise that work, you will attract higher paying customers. Having a few personal projects will also help, just make sure that they look good (remember "To the user, the interface is the product".

Good luck!