Well, it's safe to say that I walked out of the office after landing this deal feeling a little bit like Diddy did in this classic: %[youtube.com/watch?v=XIeUtaqKrg0].
Yup, I just landed my second freelance job and I've only been coding full time for like 6 months. Sadly, I undersold myself a bit as far as the price for the overall project goes but I did land a nice $150 monthly maintenance contract (that equals to about 5-15 minutes of work) that will get me going on building up my MRR. Once I get enough of these contracts, I will be able to comfortably pay the bills just based on the monthly recurring income alone. That will give me more time to work on my personal projects as I want pivot into building Saas products and larger companies with the potential to bring in serious profits.
I am currently just see freelancing as a means make a living while also becoming a really good software engineer and learning how to build my own company. Knowing that I want to be an entrepreneur, I knew the social aspect is probably more important than anything. There's probably a ridiculous amount of good software engineers out there that could never make a living as a freelancer purely because they can't convey the right messages to the people they're selling to. In my pitch, never once did I mention React, Javascript or any other programming language because you mine as well be speaking Japanese to them at that point. It's just like mechanic going on and on about your type of vehicle and why it's like this and how the engineers screwed up here and there. I don't care. Just fix my damn car and do it in the most fast and efficient way possible so I can go back to my house and code.
I used to think that I hated sales because of my first experience with it selling jewelry in the mall as a 16 year old. Unsurprisingly, people weren't very receptive to a teenager trying to sell them something that costs thousands of dollars. That said, I am really enjoying the sales/networking side of working for myself a lot more than I would have thought considering I'm more of an introvert that chooses to only socialize when it's unavoidable. In the last couple of years my socializing skills in general have really expanded, not that I ever was the type of person that had a hard time making friends, but I take awhile to open up to people and I never enjoyed being the center of attention. Over the last couple of years I've done a lot of work on trying to understand myself, building up my self-esteem, and ultimately find a purpose in my life which have all lead me to where I am now and where I will more than likely be going.
With this last job, I walked into this office. Gave them my schtick, by the end of the meeting they had all completely sold themselves on the project, even the monthly recurring maintenance fee which was very nice knowing that I had the correct pivots from my last business model with didn't have a good way of creating MRR.
In my opinion, your best bet is to sell your website as more of a service. You have to give them their own little 24/7 Marketing/Salesman baby that you soothe monthly with the sweet sound of your new Nuphy Air75 Brown Switch Slim Mechanical Keyboard that you just got for your birthday(thanks Dad btw).
Jokes aside, what good is a website for a business if it just sits there online and never changes. It mine as well not even exist. Facebook page? That's just dumb. You have to convince them to let you put their facebook status updates onto your website so that their customers understand where to go when they want to know what's up with their company. That's also where you'll get them to make sales, so just remember how to constantly convey to them how every aspect of YOUR websites is to help promote and grow THEIR business.
If you can sell a $5,000 dollar 3-5 page website (that would be like $10,000+ in California if I had to guess) to a person that doesn't even really get the internet (Boomers and the like), then I really believe you can probably sell anything, which is very encouraging. I mean that Elizabeth Holmes chick was obviously faking her voice the entire time, seems so obvious that she was a fraud, but if you can sell a good story than someone is going to buy it. That said, don't be Elizabeth Holmes. Do learn to sell but even more importantly learn how to deliver so that the buyers will come running to you.
Anyways, that's just my theory on this whole thing. We'll see how many jobs I've done by the end of the year. I'm hoping for at least a couple more but hey, maybe I'm an idiot. Only way to find is to put your work out there into the universe and see what it gives back to you.
Until next week, Cheers