"Yes, you can work in your underwear, wake up at 11:00pm and drink beer all day if you want to.
But you shouldn’t."
YES YOU SHOULD. But not every day and only at the right moments. It depends on what you think of what is important. What is worth more to you. Your undies, or a pay check.
Trust your gut feeling and do networking. And if your gut feeling sucks and you think you are bad at networking... know how to deal with it or stop freelancing. You cannot apply a 'guide' like this to yourself. There are many many examples of successful (=happy?) people who do not apply this guide to their selves. Like me. I'm quite successful and happy! And do work in my underwear sometimes. And like to go kitesurfing in the middle of the week (and work my ass off in the weekend if necessary). I can make more money if I want to, but I dont. I prefer having fun, broaden my mind and sure do enjoy the freedom of being a freelancer!
You are absolutely right in that your freelance experience might differ from mine - and I did try to say at the end of the piece that money is just one factor. If you can operate well on a job and work in your underwear (and not feel like a sub-human after 3 days), power to you - DO IT!
There's room for disagreement and I'm not trying to run anyone else's freelance life - just share what's worked for me.
These are MY lessons. They're not meant to be absolutes for anybody. I couldn't have dreamed this would wind up on Hacker News - I wrote it for my (small) community and I'm thrilled to see it get traction, but I didn't try to game any system and get on here.
Interesting how you said money was the goal but then when you get the success there's always someone doing better...even though you might have a fat bank account.
Judging by some of your comments, I may have walked right by you on the strand with my wife a couple weeks ago. That was only made possible by understanding my priorities, even when giving myself permission to follow them can be scary.
But I still treat it like a job. A job I can take vacations from, or a hiatus from, or whatever - but still something that takes some discipline to succeed at.
I never intended it to sound like freelancing should be un-fun slave labor. That would entirely miss the point.
Irresponsible person and/or unhappy worker will be less productive no matter where he works but I do think that remote work is the future if we want to have a sustainable life and don't have a new age slavery that is dominating in today's capitalism.
1. I did something.
2. I want to share my experience with you.
3. This is about what I DID, not what I THINK.
4. Take from this what you want.
5. Hope it helps.
If one good idea from a 5 minute read is gold, then this post is platinum. Excellent advice, even more valuable because it comes from hard earned experience.
Thanks Joel for the bulletin board material. Keep it coming.
Thank you for reading, and for being open to the idea that this is just my experience!
Overall I definitely cannot see where the "bashing by HN community" is.
The big figure was intended to do what it did: publicity. Congratulations to Joel on that! It worked out pretty well:)
The way you have read it is more like it was an advice. But to me it was not written like that.
I know you say publicity like it's a dirty or cheap word - but, what writer doesn't want people to read their work? What person doesn't want their story to get traction?
Yes, it feels a bit cheap to throw numbers for attention. But my honest goal was not to wave a financial number like I've "made it", but use that as a means of opening the floor for discussion and sharing.
I appreciate that to many people, that's going to seem really insincere, but I hope that the rest of the piece made it worth your time.
I think there are valuable things in that article, and I worry that you may have missed them because you didn't like the tone - which is a shame for the author, but possibly also a shame for you.
EXPECT CAPITAL LETTERS!
I think it makes some good points, especially about marketing. (See also EL James, who is now a multi-millionaire because of a very clever marketing campaign, and certainly not because of her literary ability.)
I also think the fact that it's all about marketing and not ability is kind of sad. And the fact that it's hard hard hard to make $$$$ doing cool artistic work that isn't about selling stupid shit for someone else is even sadder.
But still. There we are.
No, absolutely not. You won't make more money.
You'll only make more money if you bring other people into the picture, but at that point, you're not a freelancer ... you're an agency.
You have the freedom to work how you want, on what you want, when you want, with who you want, and how much you want. You'll never have that at a job.
What really does interest me though is - talk about subcontractors. This is one aspect I have been struggling on a bit. how does one find good subcontractors or outsource work properly.
If you do that, you're not a freelancer ... you're an agency. Different conversation.
Also: someone did get a home run from a bunt, in MLB no less.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/WAS/WAS201506170.sht...
http://www.developingandrails.com/2015/06/freelancing-with-f...
But at the risk of running a cliche, if I'm not failing, I'm not learning. And that's all this post is - sharing what I've learned.
Appreciate your kind response :)
If you really want to wake up every day at 11pm and drink beer all day you have to separate income from hours worked. A really successful freelancer might be able to increase project/hourly rates to the point where they don't need to work that often but residual/passive income is a better long term strategy. Create technology and license it, create copyrighted materials and publish, write a song and collect royalties, purchase income generating real estate and find someone to manage it.
https://medium.com/@RecurVoice/how-i-made-100k-freelancing-a...