starting to fix my freelance career

While my nomadic lifestyle is finally taking off, i might start a series of posts about a very concrete topic and a problem i have been subjected to for a while: my career as a freelancer is not really taking off.

This Stack Overflow question and answer was very inspiring for me when i started leveling up my ambitions as a beginner freelancer, but after more than one year trying to pursue the goal, little of that inspiration turned into concrete results. How can i fix this?

The problem

My goal was to work professionally for multiple clients concurrently. I mention professionally, because the idea was that working for multiple clients would help me also in doing a more professional kind of work.

I have to admit that i failed to achieved this goal. On one side, i keep having a single main client, and from the point of view of professionality i hardly notice an improvement, in the work i do for clients. Of course the more time i could spend in study, training, experiments and professional conversations did help a lot my professional development.

The model

Rough premises

In the job world, some people do not care much about how to achieve their goals, while other people are passionate about some techniques, and interested in deepening their skills in their craft.

These two groups of people could also be described as people with problems and people with solutions. The groups need each other, and they find each other and collaborate via the job market.

I belong to the group of those passionate about a craft, thus in order to find work i need to look for people with a problem that my skills can help fixing.

People’s problems change over time, and so does the value of the solution i am offering. In order to keep the value of my solution high, i need to continuously find those who needs it the most.

My situation

Given this model, i am in a situation where i can’t find more problems for my solutions.

Enter value

Something important to consider is value, my hourly rate. I found clients on Upwork, but the rate they would accept is lower than the one i would accept

Location, location, location

I moved from a tech hub like Berlin to nomading, and that makes it harder to reason about the value, as i met my client in Berlin, but i look for new clients on the Internet

Ideas

Be less extremist about decentralisation

As i am nomading, i still have the chance to get in touch with clients in person when i happen to be in an hub. That also means that my expenses are higher when in an hub. Originally i wanted to avoid getting contracts in person because i wanted to pursue the ideal of a global Job market on the Internet, but society changes slowly and my life is short. As a nomad i am in an intermediate situation, and extremism is not helping me in showing nomadism as a successful option

Be less extremist about wages

Not always lower wages are a sign of lack of respect or appreciacion. Companies doing the same professional work might have very different flows of money depending on their location. If i want to save professionalism at least, i can weight an offer depending on the client’s location. In a perfect virtual job market, such differences would not exist, but obviously the current job market is still not perfect just yet

This is it, for now

This is how much i can write for now. Hopefully my analysis will move forward and help me to find better directions