Hey, what’s up, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com.
I got a question about—for freelancers if you’re doing any kind of client work about
should you have a written contract for clients or do I need a written contract for clients.
This question, I don’t have a name here, but he says, “Hey John, I’m thinking to
start a web developing business, but I run into a few problems.
After searching online for answers I found out about your channel.
I was watching your commentaries and I learned a good amount of information about web developing
business and stuff like that but some of my answers are still unanswered, so I was curious
if you can make a video about my questions.
The first is about customers.
What are ways to find new customers?
Another question is do I need somewhat of a written contract for my customers?
If yes, then what should the contract say and how should it look?
Thank you so much for reading my email.
Love you your videos.”
We’re going to talk mostly about the contracts, but I could quickly address the issue for
finding customers.
If you haven’t checked it already, I have a course on this called How To Market Yourself
as a Software Developer and that is the best way to find customers as a freelancer, to
be honest is not necessarily the course itself but the material in it.
It’s building a brand, building a reputation online, building a blog, getting out there,
getting customers to come to you.
If you pick a niche, if you pick a topic and you build a blog around it and you build a
reputation and you go to conferences and speak or you write books people are going to come
to you and you are going to be able to bill a lot more per hour than you would if you’re
going out and going after clients and it’s going to take you a lot of time and effort.
Honestly, I don’t give people advice on how to go out and find clients.
I give them advice on how to get clients to come to them.
That’s inbound marketing.
Again, the course is How To Market Yourself as a Software Developer.
You can check it out there.
Now, let’s talk about do you need a contract.
Starting out in business you want to try to start as light as possible.
Now it doesn’t mean that you don’t necessarily have a contract, but what you don’t want
to do is go and immediately get a trademark and create your corporate entity and create
a tax sheltering plan and patent all your ideas and all this stuff.
That’s just going to be ridiculous or get a bookkeeper, an accountant.
Forget all that.
See if you could make some money first.
Most people, what they do is they never actually make it past step one for 2 reasons.
One, because doing all this other paperwork and legal stuff burns them out and they don’t
actually get to create their business.
Two because they just don’t have what it takes anyway.
Let’s see if you have what it takes.
See if you can make some money first.
See if you can get someone to pay you for some work first before you go through all
that effort including getting a complex legal contract set up.
Just have a basic, you know, when I do contracts with people for the most part, I try to do
it on trust.
I don’t work with anyone I don’t trust anymore and I tend to demand that they pay
upfront otherwise I’m not working with them.
Some people don’t like that.
That’s fine.
They’re not the people I do business with.
If people come to you they’re going to be more favorable to that idea.
That’s one thing especially if you think that they might not pay you.
If you’re paid upfront the contract doesn’t matter that much, right?
Because if you’re already paid then you just have to do the work whereas if you do
the work and then you’re trying to get someone to pay afterwards it’s so hard.
I did a video on this on how to get people to pay, what happens if your client doesn’t
pay you or customers don’t pay you.
It’s a pain, it’s definitely a pain.
There’s no easy way to deal with that.
That’s one thing.
If you’re going to put together a contract, like I said, just put together something light.
You could go on legalzoom.com and get a basic contract for cheap.
You could talk to a lawyer and just say, “Could you write up a very basic statement of work
type of generic contract where I can fill in the blanks?”
and pay for that.
It might cost you a few hundred bucks to do that.
It might be worth it.
Or you could just look one up and write one yourself if you’re, you know.
The thing is like—I always recommend too that you give a money back guarantee on whatever
you do because a contract isn’t going to protect you.
You shouldn’t get into these relationships or these situations where you’re going to
need the contract.
Again, this isn’t legal advice, I’m not a lawyer so I’m not giving you legal advice.
I’m just giving you my opinion here.
My opinion is that at the point where you have to go to litigation over a contract over
some work you’re doing you’re in trouble.
You messed up well beyond that.
You picked the wrong client.
Spend more of your time focusing on picking the right client.
Don’t worry so much about the contract.
You can only protect yourself so much.
I would rather just have good will and say, look, every person that I work with, every
product that I sell I do this, I say, “Full money back guarantee.
If you don’t like it, refund.”
You should do that even on client work.
When I do client work now I say, “It comes with a money back guarantee.”
If you don’t like it you’ll get a full refund.
People aren’t going to take you up on that unless you actually failed to delivery horribly
bad, in which case you don’t deserve to get paid.
You deserve to—and if someone takes advantage of that, every once in a while it’s going
to happen, but for the most part you’re going to get more business by doing that and
you’re going to have less headaches and less worries.
The less legal stuff I can have the better.
As you get bigger and stuff and you become a bigger company, it’s more than just you
and you have employees and a bunch of clients and you’re dealing with multimillion deals
now you need rock solid contracts, but now you’ve got a lawyer that you could pay to
do that.
That’s what I recommend.
Try to be as lean as possible starting up and that’s going to prevent you from having
huge legal bills and getting burnt out on the business doing all the legal stuff.
At the point where it’s easy to afford then do it, but early on don’t worry about the
stuff.
Just have a basic contract, a handshake is good enough honestly, and offer a money back
guarantee and that’s going to be the best thing that you could do especially if they’re
inbound clients.
Like I said, if you get my course on how to market yourself and you learn how to attract
customers they’re going to love you to start with.
You’re not going to have to negotiate with them and try and have to have contracts that
have weasel clause and all this stuff in there.
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Take care.