evisions

Hello Hitesh, While there are many ways of beginning your freelancing career, using freelancing sites such as freelancer.com and others is the best means of receiving work from clients. But with ever growing competition and established providers with a lot of reviews for completed projects, it would be a daunting task for someone like you to face the competition and convince a customer. Let me also be candid in stating that you are 1 of the many thousands of aspiring freelancers that always look for work, but are short of opportunities. Here are some quick tips for you to get hands on work and build your freelancing career: 1 - Use Linkedin and other Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter to meet other web development professionals and make some good contacts.. Once they know enough about yourself and your portfolio, you may well get an opportunity or 2 from them to share their work... 2 - Watch out for jobs/projects section on web design/development forums like this one and try to pitch yourself and see how the responses are... To sum up, life as a freelancer cannot be a walk in the garden and it requires a lot of your efforts, perseverance and time... All the best Evisions

Do you really need to give it such a deep thought and ask people around what excuses to give to a client not to meet him/her? It simply tells that: 1 - you have enough work in hand 2 - you have enough contacts/clients that give you regular work 3 - you don't have the desire to meet a client personally to discuss his/her project Hence, you don't have to really break your head to figure out what excuse to put across to a new prospective customer. If someone reaches you or wishes to meet you, tell them politely that you prefer an email / instant chat or at the most voice communication instead of saying that 'I am busy ' or 'my granny is Ill and needs me by her side 'etc..... As simple as that.. And if you really don't have time to handle new prospects and convert them to sales, appoint someone that can work with you and meet the client, gather information and pass it over to you (provided you are getting a lot of requests from prospective clients to meet ) Cheers

You are 1 of those lucky ones I must say. what do you do?

Are you a customer? if yes, I can help you with something! contact me

Not all indulge in this. You need to develop the art of negotiation

they seem to have gained a lot of popularity because there isn't a better service / site.. its as simple as that

A lot of so called 'popular' freelancing sites claim they are doing a great service to the outsourcing Industry. While part of it is fine, most of it is false... Here are some of the many drawbacks I found in sites such as Scriptlance, Freelancer, Elance etc 1 --- Lack of personalized service for both ends 2 --- 3rd party arbitration? To this date, I fail to understand why a website like Elance that earns huge income from providers and customers says 'it doesn't have the final say' and wants both the sides to pay fees for arbitration? lets say a provider did a logo design project for 50 USD and did 10 concepts and unlimited revisions and customer isn't happy, does the provider need to pay 199 USD to arbitrate? Holy crap!!!!!!! 3 --- there are plenty of customers that ask for free mock up designs and vanish by stealing the concepts and nothing seems to be done... 4 --- A customer that spends hours in identifying the right team and hires them hoping for the best often gets screwed up due to time zone, communication gap and plenty of other reasons? What choice has he got? He has to again post a project and go through the same nonsense? If he already paid some advance payment to initiate the project, he has to spend hours and days to get the payment back? 5 --- A website like Freelancer suddenly changes it policies and closes accounts of some providers with their hard money and later demands photo id's and even if someone submits, they don't revoke the accounts.. where is that money going? No wonder they paid 10,000 USD for their new logo and creating all sorts of fake competitions and offering 20-25,000 USD? 6 --- On freelancer.com, if a customer hires you, they charge their commission instantly and if the customer vanishes or doesn't reply or doesn't want to move forward with the project and if you request Freelancer.com to refund the commission you lost, they come up with a very silly reason that ' both customer and provider exchanged contact information' after the project has been awarded and hence it is not possible for them to refund the commission? Who is the customer? He might as well be from Freelancer.com posting a fake project? Damn you guys!!!! There are 100s of problems with prices, down time, interface and what not? and the so called 'happy customers' that use these websites and luckily get a good provider are like 5-10% of the users..... I decided that I am going to launch a website in the near future that will address all these issues. I cannot guarantee that my website will be robust, flawless or without any issues. But I can atleast feel proud and happy that the website I an gonna launch will make a positive impact on both the customers and providers.. Its gonna be one heck of a website and will require a lot of investment and man power.. If anyone of you is interested, we can work something out I guess?

Few more points that I missed ============================== Customers that wish to clone popular websites for peanut prices and hope they will become rich and famous Customers that post projects on freelancing sites and don't bother replying nor hiring anyone nor informing others about their reason for 'silence' Customers that ask for too many silly changes all the day Customers that keep pestering for updates without knowing or understanding what it takes for the designer/coder to show an update Customers that don't know what they want and keep experimenting on a 'trial and error' model and on the top don't bother paying or respecting the efforts of the programmer, designers (especially) Customers that rush you to complete the project on time and take their own sweet damn time to make the payment and give all kinds of lame excuses Customers that are far beyond racists and call the programmers/designers by names, by country and are abusive Customers that take hours and days to discuss a project, hire you and dump you by either vanishing in the thin air or not setting up the escrow or whatever..... If anyone has more points, most welcome to add

I don't think this has anything to do with 'Indian' thing you are referring to.. If a web designer or a coder, be it from India elsewhere offers an equally competent service that you offer for a lesser price, then the customer has every right to choose who he thinks is the right one.. Having said that, I understood the context in which you wrote that... If a customer is getting a X price, he takes that X price and goes to another vendor and states that he is interested, but the other guy quoted X and is equally competent and hence wants a discounted price.. This is typically known as a 'cheap negotiating' strategy.. Customer should rather be upfront and state his 'budget' and save his time and others time and not keeping looking for the cheapest price!

I totally agree with your views.. cheers

As an example -- if you sell a pen and the one that bought it sub-sells to someone and the pan is found to be damaged, the 3rd guy who bought the pen will catch the neck of 2nd guy and not your's and to protect yourself from such an odd situation, you should rather have an agreement or some form of terms and conditions to whom you sold!

If it stands like that, why are you concerned? It's your customers look-out and in case anything goes wrong, their sub-users will hold them accountable and not your website!

Are the 'terms and conditions' between your company and the customers that use the website? or is it between them and their sub-users? I am kinda confused....

Every businessman is optimistic and we all know this. Everyone thinks or feels good about their respective ideas. We all know this.. But not all the ideas succeed. Although there is no harm in your offer, I see it as a low-risk model for yourself and a high-risk model for the developer in question. Imagine a developer plugging it out for 3-4 months ( may be more ) and imagine your business doesn't get through as per the projections or it fails in the worst scenario, the loss for you would be far lesser than the loss incurred by a developer. Experienced developers these days do 2 things primarily 1 - work on projects which fetch them the money they deserve 2 - form their own ideas and build their own websites The one you are looking for should be someone that's already doing both successfully and has additional time to join hands with you and try out the business without much to loose (as he is already doing 2 primary things) It is therefore my observation that you either 'hire someone for a decent pay' or find a VC or accumulate money required to fund the project and developer. Looking from another perspective, even if someone comes forward and joins hand with you, he always has an escape route when 1 - he gets bored 2 - he gets a paid opportunity 3 - he looses interest or whatever Hence, hiring someone using your model might prove to be more dangerous for your own interest than for the developer

Do you pay by hour or a flat rate fee?