Absolutely. Just make a point of never competing with the $10/hr crowd.
Take a minute and read a few of those cheap bids. Do they inspire confidence? If you were an employer, would you honestly believe that the person who wrote that bid is capable of building the thing you're trying to build? Of course not. They all sound like a bunch of desperate children trying to get away with something. If you want to take work from them, all you need to do is not sound like a desperate child trying to get away with something.
Take 10 minutes and write a good proposal, with a summary of the project, your basic approach to solving it, and what you think it would realistically take to do the job. Quote your full rate, and don't worry even for a second that your bid is ten times higher than the next highest one. You're sending a message that "I can actually pull this off", and the best way to do that is to distance yourself as far as possible from the herd.
If you succeed, the project owner will end up looking at two stacks of bids. One stack will have 150 flaky looking quotes to do the whole project for $300, none of which stand out as inspiring much confidence. The other stack will have a single well written proposal, quoting a bit more than he'd expected to pay, but clearly from a guy who has done this before and can do it again.
His choice is now: Sift through that rubbish pile and hope I get lucky, or go with the expensive guy.
I have to agree. When it ultimately comes down to it, you shouldn't be competing with the $10/hr crowd.
Clients that understand the importance of good design and solid code knows that it costs money and they're willing to pay for it. Clients that think $10/hr is a normal rate are probably bad clients with an unrealistic expectation of how much work it takes to produce a good website. They'll be late to pay and double the scope of the project.
When I freelance, I usually go through a talent agency. This guarantees payment, the clients are usually much bigger and the projects much more exciting than mom and pop stuff I'd find myself or on those freelancing sites. With them, I'm getting at least $35/hr full time for the period of the project. Sure, not as high as my personal rate when I deal with clients directly, but I enjoy the peace of mind that buffer provides. Plus working through an agency, I never run out of work because it's their job to find work for me. I usually go back and froth between agency and direct work.
I agree. However, you will be passed over by most project posters for one of two reasons:
1) They aren't serious, and are posting the project to get a sense of how much it may cost them to develop an idea.
or 2) They don't care or are ignorant of quality issues when choosing a $10/hr bid.
As developers, we scoff at badly written code - it offends us. But as a business person, especially the cheap ones, as long as it works and accomplishes the goal, you're happy.
You should ask yourself if that's who you want to work for. You won't capture every dollar posted using the method above, but it will filter out the non-serious and non-quality minded project owners.
This is so true. Taking the second point first ... I keep thinking that -eventually- the market will find it's equilibrium with regards to price/quality for serious projects. Budding entrepreneurs get on these sites, post something, and get screwed by one of these $5/hr people (often and likely, not every time I admit). You would think that they learn by their mistake and come back the second time with different expectations in price and quality. However, there must be an endless supply of budding "entrepreneurs" as I have not seen any leveling off yet.
I use oDesk and Elance. I have looked at, yes many, other sites but the signal to noise ration is just so low and there are only so many hours in the day. I have had much more success finding serious projects on oDesk more so than Elance. I'm curious what others have experienced. And jwwest, you are absolutely right. There are many projects posted that clearly are not intended to proceed. You can't always tell from the post alone. But after some experience, you can certainly tell from the pattern of how a post ages (in conjunction with how it is written).
The project proposals are often incomplete, so my strategy is to make a bid, and in the comments ask intelligent questions about the project and design to show I'm serious and experienced. So far no takers on that.
It could be that the project posters aren't serious, or that they're not impressed by my credentials/portfolio, or maybe my higher price.
Does anyone in the HN community regularly bid on freelance projects and get them?
That sounds like a good strategy. I'm not sure which site you're looking at, but elance and several other sites offer tests that you can take to prove your skills. I'd say a day or two spent on those is time well spent, and generally inspires confidence in the buyers.
There are a number of other free or inexpensive things you can do to make yourself look better: use a sharp looking picture of yourself, have a halfways decent website (a one page site is OK - leaps and bounds better than nothing), email @yourdomain.com, toll free numbers are fairly inexpensive, sign up for a BBB membership, etc.
Also, I can't stress enough that you need to have good clear writing that touts whatever skills you have. (On your profile and your personal site.) Don't lie, but do brag a little. If you're not the best at copy-writing, have a friend look over it.
Also, make sure to mention which city you're in / near, as many buyers prefer to work with someone local.
It's OK to specify on your personal site that you only accept work through [XYZ freelance site].
A blog on your site is a bit more work, but can pay off in the long run. You won't get a lot of business directly through the blog, but it will help boost your google rankings which _will_ bring in business. Keep it strictly limited to informative articles on topics you're interested in working on, and try to post regularly - at least once a week to get started.
I often go one step further, and highlight a very broad range in a bid, stating that my proposal is hourly at rate x. Then explain the reasons for needing an hourly assessment: lacking functional specification, requirements, etc. - making it impossible for me to determine an accurate project timeline.
I include a few points that can help them clear up ambiguity in their project requirements, and generally offer an hour of project review as a complimentary service.
On this call (or meeting if they are close), you can quickly determine if they are just trying to get a free hour, or if they are genuinely interested in a more experienced consultant who can really help them with their project.
My experience is about 25% of posters will respond to such a bid/proposal. Of those 25%, about 33% are actually looking for assistance and open to paying for experience.
Notes: I moonlight, and usually bid on projects for which I estimate 40-120 hrs of work, and they are generally in the realm of system administration, database optimization, and php (often on shared hosting). Not the greatest client group with which to work, but you encounter some interesting challenges.
Exactly. Last year I had to choose between a 600 lawyer and a 6k lawyer, guess whom I went with?
The 6k lawyer, because even though I am not a lawyer, I could tell the $600 dude was just rambling and did not even understand the seriousness of my case (or maybe he just didn't care)
Are you assuming that all $10 code is bad? What if its done in India by an awesome engineer and his $10 equates to $45 here? So he is actually a high end developer there competing with someone here.
I personally took on a project and didn't like it a bit, so I passed it on to India. That was the furthest my $200 ever went on a $5k project. It was not poetry, but no better or worse than the average. My advice, don't swim upstream and complain about the currents, this is your cue to scale, an opportunity for you to shift away from one man gigs to bigger projects where you outsource and code review, and program parts that interest you yourself, all the while making a lot more money.
Take a minute and read a few of those cheap bids. Do they inspire confidence? If you were an employer, would you honestly believe that the person who wrote that bid is capable of building the thing you're trying to build? Of course not. They all sound like a bunch of desperate children trying to get away with something. If you want to take work from them, all you need to do is not sound like a desperate child trying to get away with something.
Take 10 minutes and write a good proposal, with a summary of the project, your basic approach to solving it, and what you think it would realistically take to do the job. Quote your full rate, and don't worry even for a second that your bid is ten times higher than the next highest one. You're sending a message that "I can actually pull this off", and the best way to do that is to distance yourself as far as possible from the herd.
If you succeed, the project owner will end up looking at two stacks of bids. One stack will have 150 flaky looking quotes to do the whole project for $300, none of which stand out as inspiring much confidence. The other stack will have a single well written proposal, quoting a bit more than he'd expected to pay, but clearly from a guy who has done this before and can do it again.
His choice is now: Sift through that rubbish pile and hope I get lucky, or go with the expensive guy.
That's a pretty good place to be.