I tried to be a freelance, it is well paid but with my full-time job it's too time consuming and I'm not so ambitious.
I'm not here to make advertisement but to hear your experience. I'm considering security audit, consulting and things like that be it's the same as to be freelance: you need to search for prospects, etc.
Do you have some clue or experience?
Moonlight is still in its early stages but we are doing thousands of dollars per week in business. Our average hourly rate based on paid contracts so far has been $146.79. We're focusing on more specialized work rather than generic web development from scratch. Early projects have ranged from a custom algorithm for a hedge fund to some infrastructure work to support Tensorflow. The benefit to companies is that they have access to specialized engineers for focused projects, and they can get a match within 48 hours.
If you're interested in short-term projects, you can join at https://MoonlightWork.com/apply - we're working on increasing the number of projects, so sorry if it takes a couple weeks to get a first project match.
We're going though YC's Startup School MOOC, and we did live office hours with Sam Altman a few weeks ago. You can see the video here: https://youtu.be/abtHadERzXU
We're in a similar space and more companies like yours need to exist.
I'm one of the cofounders at https://turtle.ai/
Our average paid out hourly rates have been lower than yours, but we make it REALLY easy for both sides to work together. We've built our own task manager and chat app that makes customer and freelancer lives easier.
We have a lot of PhD students and full time developers doing 5-15 hours per week on Turtle.
Good luck and we'll be looking out for you! More "alternative work" options need to exist. The 40-hour, butt-in-seat life needs to go (or other options have to at least exist).
Our mission is to help engineers earn what they want, and for some people - that means working more time for more money, but for others that means working just a few hours per week.
I see that Turtle focuses more on web development. I think this is a good way to go about it - but for Moonlight specifically, I knew there was a problem when a friend of mine making $400K/year as a security researcher couldn't find a way to apply his skills in contract work. He wanted to travel and contract for a bit, and was having to look at webdev contracts at $50/hour. So, instead of focusing on building products for non-technical clients, we're focusing on more specialized tasks like dev-ops and algorithms for technical clients.
Edit: I thought it was the double-scrollbar, but I now see that Log In is cut-off. We'll fix the responsiveness - thanks!
Hope to hear back!
We don't do much screening on our end except for fraudulent applications - the clients choose from among several contractors and proposals.
We know that we need to engage our community more - so keep an eye out this week for an email update from our team and a Slack community channel (with a stream of incoming jobs).
Rephrased:
Isn't Gigster a seemingly more efficient way to build software? Why aren't there more companies like Gigster? Competitors to Gigster?
There should be. It is a more efficient way to build software. The market will reward Gigster, MoonlightWork, and Turtle.
We're focusing more on microtasks for technical clients. Think - helping the CTO and in-house team gain momentum, rather than outsourcing.
I tried to be a freelance, it is well paid but with my full-time job it's too time consuming and I'm not so ambitious.
- I've build a number of websites businesses on the side. Most the jobs come through word of mouth and recommendations.
- A few of them have agreed to keep me on a retainer, they pay me $XXX a month and I'll host their sites and give them a couple hours of maintenance each month if needed.
- I started a little API about 5 years ago and dropped an advertisement on the homepage. 3 years went by with next to no revenue from it, as time went on though it started to pick up. It runs on a $10/m VPS and at it's peak it made $1600/m in ad revenue. These days it hovers around $600-700/m and runs on a $20/m VPS. This takes about 0.5 hours a month of my time to keep up.
- Another company wanted a web application but didn't have the budget to pay for it up front. Built out a proof of concept on my own time and presented it. They liked it, so instead of selling it outright I host/maintain it and sell them seats. They pay $X/m per employee. They're trailing it right now in a few stores but they're in talks to launch it nationally.
- About to launch a small SaaS; one of those 'scratch your own itch' things. Whether there's a market for it or not remains to be seen.
All of those things have been accomplished over the last 5 years. I have a wife, 10 year old daughter, a full time job, and coach a soccer team. I know there are many people much busier than I am out there, but if I can find time to work on side projects, so can most people. You have to want it though, and your lack of ambition is most likely the prime culprit.
After seeing that, I created a quick demo in about 3 weeks as a proof of concept and asked my friend to bring it to her boss. She gladly accepted because it made her look good by going beyond her duties to help the company be more efficient. The boss loved it and set up a meeting with me where we ironed out their ideal use cases as well as settled on a price and release date. After drafting a contract, viola, I had my first side gig.
I guess the main takeaway is to keep an eye out for professional friends and acquaintances outside of the tech world who could benefit from automation or digitization in their daily jobs but are simply unaware it's possible.
So how do you get word of mouth going when nobody I know, not even 2nd degree connections, know anyone that is hiring? It really sucks to be in this position.
1. A shopify app that makes about 150/mo. I answer about 2 emails about it per month and otherwise don't work on it. It took about 150 hours to build so I haven't been paid well for it, but I enjoyed building it.
2. A WordPress plugin I acquired for about 10k that makes 800/mo. I get a lot more emails about this but I think if I get it into a less buggy state then I can get that down to something more reasonable.
Edit: spelling
I found the plugin on flippa.com. Flippa has a lot of crap. Maybe almost all crap. But there are some good things there if you just watch for it. There was a really high quality magento plugin and there I wanted to buy and I chatted with the dev a bunch but it didn't work out.
I was looking for something that was programming centric rather than sales/marketing centric, which is fairly limiting. And something that was <10k which means you have to filter through a lot of cruft. If I had more to spend then I would look on FEI which seems to have things that would be more interesting to programmers, but is a higher price point. Empire Flippers is another place I'd look. https://www.sideprojectors.com/ didn't seem to have anything interesting to me, but I checked there a bunch too.
> Was it doing well before or did you grow it to this point.
It's been a bit volatile so it's hard to say how it's trending, but I don't think I've helped or hurt it much. If anything it's making a bit less. Haven't prioritized working on it so I can't expect much.
What I'm hearing though is you want the benefits of freelancing without having to do the work of a freelancer? That's a huge fallacy. Freelancing requires some degrees of ambition and most importantly work.
Unless you've built a reputation for providing these services its going to be difficult obtaining customers.
What should you do? At the very least
- build your profile and build your brand
- "become" an "expert" in your field by blogging, tweeting, etc to drive engagement
- get connected to other "experts" and start conversations
- build a simple landing page (site) for each area you want to provide services for. A/B test the landing page using Google Ad Words, etc
- sign up as an organization on freelancing sites and start doing jobs which can be done asynchronously
- become a maintainer or contributor to security auditing software
Again, all this requires ambition and work.
If you don't have time or interest in finding the time it's probably not for you.
There are solutions popping up that make freelancing much easier. UpWork is hit or miss, but an option. I co-founded https://turtle.ai/ -- we have a bunch of PhD students, developers with full time jobs. There are even a few people doing just a few hours per month.
We need to unlock ourselves from the mentality that "40 hours per week, butt in seat" is the only way to do work. The future of work is remote, flexible, results-driven.
I'd agree that Upwork is hit or miss and as a freelancer and a business owner would prefer something like turtle.ai. Will look into it :)
Seems like quite putting yourself out there for getting some pocketmoney, or extra as the OP requests.
To an extent. The op doesn't have to do one or any of these. They are suggestions which can be leveraged.
As I mentioned in a previous comment I probably didn't quite understand quite what the op was asking.
I work as a mentor for a few of their courses. You're connected to X number of students (you set x yourself). Then as they progress through the course they have the option to send you a message to ask a question or whatever. You also do a weekly check-in with them to see where they're at, if they have any blockers, what their goals are for the next week.
You then get paid (via PayPal) based on how your student interactions went on a per week basis. 0$ for every student who didn't message you, 5$ for 1-9 messages, 15$ for 10+ messages. You get bonuses for them completing major sections as well.
You interact via a mentor dashboard on web or via a mobile app. If you use mobile, you're basically being paid to text some students a few times a week. Pay will obviously vary depending on how many students you have and how good you are at interacting with them. (The better your mentor rating the more students you're allowed to take on). I had 40 students and made 1.4K a month. The work didn't feel stressful or anything. It's pretty easy to land (no formal interviews or anything), you just have to get involved in their slack and PM one of the Udacity staffers. Was pretty easy, plus I enjoy teaching/mentoring.
You can also be a project reviewer rather than a mentor, but not sure how that works.
Not really, mainly because there's very clearly two kinds of students. The ones who don't talk to their mentors at all outside of the weekly check-in (a single message) and the ones who utilize the mentor to the fullest. So if someone is asking you a question you generally don't have to worry about getting to 10 messages with them because it'll just happen.
For example, if I say that in the following two weeks, I want to do X hours of programming work, and they know my skill level, they should be able to match me up. Like a job agency, but for short-term freelance work.
Still... the overall experience of bidding on jobs and possibly getting 1/20 tries not a very pleasant experience. Also I'm not an expert so... sore loser I guess.
Consider a consumer item you are passionate about. Walk through the typical shopping process, either as a newb or as an enthusiast. Identify all the pain points, every bit of friction. Consider everything you've listed as an embarrassment that you will personally make right. Build the smoothest, fastest, most respectful experience possible. Compile lots of information too - your goal is to become the best resource on the internet. Put the user first at all times. And when appropriate add affiliate links. (In my case only 27% of URLs are affiliated.)
Why is respecting the user the #1 priority? Because you do not want to look like an affiliate content mill! Go read the blogs that teach you how to affiliate^W build dark patterns and do the opposite of what they suggest.
Of course even if you are unquestionably the best resource on the internet, some communities will still tar and feather you for having affiliate links. I was very lucky to find a great and supportive community.
We do see some bad affiliate behavior there, though most of it gets automatically filtered. When it doesn't, the community usually ruthlessly mocks people who post low-quality content that's obviously just intended to make money.
Almost every time somebody shows up asking for purchase advice, somebody links parametrek.com because it's so useful. You want a flashlight under 120mm long with integrated charging that has a removable, non-proprietary battery? Here are 34 of them.
Make something people want.
I also did some presales engineering work for another agency. Agencies are great for this kind of biz/senior dev roles: they dont always have enough skilled personel that could do this kind of work and might be open hiring somebody to do it. If this is something you might want to do, then try to look around for it.
I don't know how you can get those kind of jobs, but I don't think they will outsource it to some person over internet without history of working together. Those gigs really affects the income of those agencies so they are probably very careful to hire for those roles.
I think you should ask around the people you are working with, companies you worked with and so on. I think most rapidly growing agency is in desperate need of people like this, especially if you work for them just for hours per week so you are not destroying their cash flow.
So perhaps that could be a first step, getting word out more in your closer circle.
I personally have too much work with this ever expanding social circle freelancing stuff, as sidebusiness, that I think of outsourcing it or am wondering when the point is of quitting my day job (which is well paid). That said, I'm using "social circles" for lack of better wording.
What I really would like to do is creating my own sideprojects like goldenbeet here addresses, that seem like fun or just interesting myself. I have a bunch of good project ideas, but the sideproject freelance work keeps on flowing steadily and I never get to it. If this sounds like a brag: it's not. I actually consider anything of (semi-)passive income much of a success then regular freelancer gigs.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2016/05/31/how-these-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/04/25/how-to-mak...
It's funny, that little amount felt more like "real money" than my steady paycheck does.
I find fiverr super interesting for coming up with creative ideas. Stumbled on this one randomly, which made me smile (even though I have no use for it) - https://www.fiverr.com/irishguy1/create-a-silent-movie-of-yo...
You only need some python (and pandas) knowledge, a Linux server and some historical stock market data - please check my older posts for a source (I would love to post the source here, but there is a forum bully stalking all my posts – a failed day trader who will crap all over your post).
The barrier for entry is very low, you can program your trading strategies in your spare time and run the tests while sleeping without loosing a single cent and once you find what works for you can automate it and it’ll run on autopilot...
Just my 2 cents, hope whatever you do works for you in the end, I was in a situation like yours and this is what is working for me...
Check out http://turtle.ai/
We've focused on building software that makes it really easy for "plug and play" software development work. We think 40 hours isn't perfect for every kind of engineering job. We even have some software developers delivering customers value in just a few hours per month.
You do need to be able to clearly say "here's what I'm doing, and here's when to expect results", but we also recruit customers that buy into our vision. Also, our software makes it really easy for both sides to keep smiling :)
I saw some folks mentioning Gigster so thought I'd add some notes. For reference I'm Christian Thurston and I've been working at Gigster from early on.
The benefits of our model is that we do fixed price, not hourly, so if you're able to work better and faster then your effective hourly goes up. Also, with us you don't have to interface with the client - you work with a PM who speaks tech and write code - that's it.
Our clients are both technical and non-technical but it's a lot less relevant because you'll always be working with that PM layer as a dev, not directly with the client.
Here's what the higher end of pay looks like as well: https://www.forbes.com/sites/reneemorad/2016/10/24/the-skill...
Good luck on your search and hope you find a good situation that fits your needs :).
If you're a skilled developer, you're much better of demanding a raise, switching jobs, or switching up your skillset to a higher paying job if your motivations are strictly cash.
All of these other ideas are good, but are not easy and require time commitments.
oppsdaily.com is another great resource, it sends out a daily email with problems people are willing to pay to be solved.