Hey, what's up, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com.
I have a question about jumping into consulting without experience.
This question comes from Travis and he says, “Hi John, my name is Travis.
I’ve been reading your book Soft Skills.
Great book, by the way.”
Here it is if you want to check it out.
“I want to know if an independent software consultant is right for me at this time.
I’m 23, finishing my degree at college.
I have been a little over a year of programming in C#.
I’ve been specializing in WPF CRUD applications and I’ve created many open source projects
on GitHub.
I’ve watched many online courses from PluralSight teaching practices and patterns such as MVVM,
repository pattern, dependency injection and much more.
I have had no formal software developer job and I feel like it might be hard for me without
any job experience to convince customers that they should hire me even though I have self-taught
myself far beyond my college degree.
Furthermore, I feel like I have more knowledge than the average programmer that has 1 year
of programming.
Should I get a software developer job or should I jump straight into becoming an independent
software consultant?
Thanks, Travis.”
Travis, this is going to be hard.
I’ll be honest with you.
Trying to jump into just being an independent software consultant, a freelance essentially
without any kind of experience it’s going to be difficult because you’re going to
have to get people to trust you and you’ve got nothing to show for it.
But I really don’t see any reason why you couldn’t do this if you do it the right
way.
Number one, have a portfolio.
Have demonstrations of work that you’ve done.
Obviously you’ve got a good GitHub profile so you can show work you’ve done.
That’s going to help.
I did this interview with—about becoming an entrepreneur or becoming a freelancer.
I’ll have to pull up the video here.
I can’t remember.
It was with Martin, I believe, I think that’s the video.
Anyway, we’ll see if we can find the video, if so it will appear right here, if not then
a chicken will appear right here.
Okay.
A chicken will appear right here anyway.
What do you think about that?
Anyway, what I’m saying is that—now I’ve totally lost my train of thought.
I just keep on thinking of chickens appearing right here.
Here’s the thing.
You may have to work for free or for extremely cheap.
In the interview that I’m thinking about Martin basically he had started off as a freelancer
and what he did was he worked for something like $5 an hour it ended up being.
He bid on these projects and he knew it was going to take him 30 hours and he bid at like
$500 or something like that.
He bid something very small in order to gain the experience, in order to gain the trust,
in order to put his skills to the test and to see what—he was doing stuff that didn’t
scale.
What I would say is that if you really want to be a freelancer, if you want to go straight
into being an independent consultant, what you want to do is you want to find clients
and offer them really good value, because you can’t offer them experience, you can’t
offer them stability but someone might take a shot on you if it’s going to be cheap.
I’ve done this before.
I’ve found people that—maybe the going rate for someone is $50 an hour, but I’ll
hire someone for $5 an hour, sure, and give them a crack out it because they’re 1/10th
of the price and let them see what they can do.
If they do a good job, then great, then wow, I just got a super value.
If they don’t do a good job then I’ll just chalk it up as an expense and maybe they’ve
given me something I can use.
There’s a lot of people that will have that mindset, a lot of business people and you
have to tap into that mindset at first.
I think that’s a good way to go and then that’s going to give you experience and
then you’re going to be able to use that experience and you can be able to increase
your rate.
Just start at an extremely ridiculous low rate.
For example, if you’re a software developer and you’re billing in the US here, let’s
say that you’re billing $15 or $20 an hour, let’s say $15 an hour doing software development.
If you actually have the skills and you’ve got a portfolio and you just say, “Look,
honestly I don’t have any experience that’s why I’m billing this rate.
It’s a hell of a deal.
I’d tell you that it’s a hell of a deal because I can do just as a good of a job of
someone who has 5 years experience but I’m going to give you this rate.”
You’re going to have customers, I guarantee you.
If you advertise that right you’re going to have customers.
Then once you do good work for them you’re going to have referrals and you can start
upping your rate because then you’ll start to have experience.
You’re just going to have to work your way up honestly if you want to do that.
I will tell you that you do want to do inbound marketing though.
You don’t want to be going out and trying to get clients.
Check out my course on how to market yourself as a software developer.
It’s kind of designed for the problem that you’re facing here which is you’ve got
to get people to come to you.
If you build a blog, if you know how to market yourself and brand yourself and build a good
personal brand especially if you’re starting out as an independent consultant you should
definitely invest some in that, in building the brand, in building the inbound marketing
because it’s so much better to have clients and customers coming to you than you going
out and finding them.
I don’t want to go too much into this because we’ve already gone on long enough, but essentially
figure out what is a specialty that you’re going to provide, what you’re going to be
the expert in, brand yourself as that expert in that area and that’s going to help you
more than anything else.
Thanks for the question.
If you have a question for me email me at john@simpleprogrammer.com.
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