A chat with the Freelance Expert | Kyle Prinsloo

hey what's up everybody so today with us we have kyle prinzloo and uh kyle is a great freelance developer i've been trying to get connected with him for a while actually originally introduced through floor and pop or at least sorry my uh my audio just went on from this stream delay so uh kyle's a great freelance developer we've been trying to connect for a bit and uh he's all over google when it comes to freelancing i've seen him on free code camp a bunch of youtube videos out there so i just want to go ahead pick his brain kyle we have a bunch of questions that were submitted through twitter uh people have also responded in the chat too so i've been writing them down i do have questions prepped but what i want to do here is just go ahead and start off with a little introduction on who you are because i know a lot of people do know that but at the same time there's my viewers may not fully understand or may not fully know i guess not before they connected there so i just want to give you that introduction that moment we'll start there and then i want to go full q a at some point so let's go ahead and start with that and tell us about who you are and maybe how you got started awesome awesome well first of all thank you for for the chat uh dennis it's awesome to be here and and i had a look at your had your intro image you know i had to laugh you dominating freelancing [Laughter] so so yeah thank you and and also to to that guy who likes uh the color purple uh of old florent pop and and uh yeah it's uh it's awesome to be here so yes um i've been i've been freelancing now since about 2015 and about full time now for um i think 2016 2017 so so good probably about five odd years um full time and it's been an amazing journey uh this far it was not an easy journey a lot of it i had to you know figure it out and learn on the job and uh you know all of that but i'm sure we'll get into you know if you if you would like a lot more detail and and that sort of brought me to a place where i'm at now where i'm grateful to you know actually um still be freelancing uh you know freelancing is actually a main part of my income at the moment a lot more than my digital product uh now at the moment so so i'm grateful for that and now i just pretty much share what i know uh with freelancing with my blog studywebdevelopment.com.com and it's been an amazing journey this far so i'm really i really love what i do put it that way awesome yeah i i just finished watching your uh your story i've seen it a couple of times i'm sure you've told it a thousand times already but from it was moving to south africa i believe or your girlfriend moved over or your wife and she couldn't work and how she got you into that from your background in marketing into freelancing and did you say 2015 yeah yeah yeah that's funny 2015 is yeah sorry go ahead oh no so 2015 was a start when you started freelancing right or at least web development yeah yeah yeah it was both it was both yeah gotcha okay cool that's uh that was actually my start it was kind of like 2014 but when i really started freelancing was 2015 and i kind of did it differently with the business i guess actually like starting up like a former like a i guess a full company around it and hiring people too but yeah that's kind of cool so same time frame awesome awesome so yeah you came from that marketing background so same thing here can you go into that story because i really like that where it was just something that you weren't traditionally from the web development background but you went into that because you said your girlfriend was trying to figure stuff out and you were just and she motivated you to go that direction how was that yeah for sure um okay so it started when um let me start from the beginning right so so i dropped out of high school for for various reasons and um it was it was really not easy from there so so it was a lot of struggles and odd jobs random jobs um it's amazing i must just share this story i got 43 in my final end year in accounting and but yet i found myself in an accounting job i don't know how that happened but anyway and um so i found myself in accounting i found myself in uh tech um in rt installations uh like networking and all that um i didn't do any of the of the knowledge side i was just sort of there as like an apprentice sort of like holding the ladders as these guys sort of install everything and everything and that was an interesting journey that led me also i found another job in uh selling insurance products so i was like all over the place right i needed some form of income it didn't really work that well then that sort of led me into really thinking about what i want to do and and i've always enjoyed business related things i've always enjoyed the psychology of online in other words like websites and marketing you know and and i think one of the main stories that that sort of motivated me encouraged me was the case study of the amazon 400 million dollar button if any of you interested definitely do google that and in short what is about is it's about how amazon one employee at amazon made one change to one word on a call to action button and it resulted in a net income of 400 million dollars for amazon so i found that like fascinating and that sort of got me on my quest of like whoa like like what is this what is this like psychology of like conversions on a website so that led me to um study and i studied a short-term course i found a short-term short-term course on digital marketing as well as business management so what i used to do was i used to work at my rt job and walk across the road to the college and study there at night and that and and i did that for you know a few months eventually uh in one of my hr human resources uh professors um he had a friend in in a big business looking for someone in marketing so i was like hey i'm your guy you know so so so he put me in touch went for the interview got the job and my role my responsibility was the marketing manager overseeing this uh it was quite a large company and and they had like 10 different businesses and hours um overseeing it pretty much how to make sure that they were growing right and getting more sales and and all of that so i was at the company for about two years and although my income was sort of fine for for one one person eventually my uh my wife and i got got married she's from india and she came to live with me in south africa and finances were taught right um so so we i was i was forced to like look for another source of income and i knew i could get i could ask for salary increase but that's not pretty much the solution so then eventually my wife told me and she said like hey why don't you study web development and study webdevelopment.com and and and i was like no ways you know like that's like a foreign language i'm not going to learn that stuff you know and it's just weird so um my wife is amazing she persuaded me to like really look into that a lot more and i was like not a bad idea because i've got marketing knowledge on the one hand yeah somewhere here and then and then web development knowledge and it combines very well right so that i could offer clients a once off marketing a one software design service plus an ongoing marketing retainer to help them grow their business so in 2015 um i started learning web development i've got a client and studywavedevelopment.com was born because i wanted to share what i knew what worked for me recommendations on you know courses to learn and all of that and sort of i realized that in my learning to be a freelancer there was a lot of fluff online and i'm not a fluffy guy i just want you know the 80 20 give it to me and let's go you know so i thought let me let me add my two cents and see what people think and before i knew it um after about a year i was earning more on the side as a freelancer than my full-time job and i left that full-time business in my full-time position in marketing after three and a half years and as i say the rest is history so uh i hope that explains it yeah i love that story that's the story that i've heard a few times just from watching those other ones but there's a lot of there's a lot of nuggets i guess in what you said right there and it's funny i didn't realize that we were so similar i guess in that business aspect and the marketing and i think you would actually agree that marketing right there is probably one of the biggest keys to being successful in freelancing is probably what helped you get that big start because i was going to address it later but i would i think you would agree maybe not we'll see but i think marketing if you needed one skill outside of the technical stuff in freelancing it would probably be that without a doubt yeah by far like that's something that like i think a lot of tech people do struggle with in that original entry into freelancing yeah and also the the side business the fact that you started it on the side where a lot of people think i'm gonna jump into this and i'm gonna make a hundred thousand dollars this year and i actually just posted that was one of the questions was uh people were asking it was that thing where i asked people to ask you these questions and somebody said can you share your income i'm not going to ask you to do that unless you want to talk some numbers but i went ahead and did that and my numbers weren't the way people would probably expect them to be and i'll actually pull that up at some point but the whole thing where you replaced your business or your original income and then freelancing kind of took over yeah that's i love what you said there and i just want to highlight those points right there so as far as i guess when you got started it was on the side so you definitely took some pressure off yourself when you got started how was that process of getting that first client because that was probably the most commonly asked question still the question that i get today is what did that look like like i don't want to just go for what it takes to get it but what did that look like for you did you just start telling people did you start posting somewhere and who i guess what type of client was that if you don't mind sharing it doesn't have to be the client itself but the industry maybe yeah sure i i think i do want to touch on um you know on the income side um and and say like um it's i've always sort of felt a bit weird talking about the income start um yeah you know because you know and i'm i mean put it this way like like i'm grateful to say that in all or put it this way freelancing has led to various different incomes and and the main income um up until recently was actually an e-commerce business um i had two e-commerce businesses one of them i was in well both of them i was actually in partnerships in and that was like a um quite a quite a large income so so so if you add all the incomes together you know um it's it's really uh really really a lot of income um if i can say that i don't like giving the you know the exact amounts but it's not yes it's like multiple multiple six figures you know so so it's really um a good amount now in terms of the in terms of the freelancing side because i know you know um obviously you don't want to be like as a fraud right i i really hate that you know like guys sort of teaching you how to make money online by making money by teaching you how to make money online you know if that sort of makes sense and and in short what i will say is that um my freelancing income is is at a point where now where i've sort of um jumped in between a lot of different businesses so it wasn't always my focus over the years but it but it is uh six figures and it's a lot more uh um than my and my digital uh products at the moment so so i just want to you know sort of at least mention that you know um yeah and and then in terms of um in terms of your question about how i got this first client it was that it was that question yeah yeah it was how was that how did you get that first client to what was the industry yeah i guess also going into the tech stack too like i know we're kind of veering off here but we're using wordpress what kind of sites were you building too because i think that's relevant yeah yes yeah yeah i i think that's a great question actually to to maybe begin the foundation in terms of my knowledge right and and it's amazing like i chat to people like all the time and it's like i really have arguments with them you know because a lot of people think that like you need to know like react in all the different like 13 000 javascript languages to be able to you know make a good income and and it's sort of the perception of like you know the more the more advanced programming languages that i know the more i should be earning as a freelancer because i know more than you right but actually it goes it's like completely empty that right it boils down to a simple fact if you can create web sites you can start freelancing right so now let's sort of dissect that a bit more what does it take to build a website you know you don't need node.js and sql and you know whatever let's go to the basics html css maybe a bit of javascript but there's you know all of those tailwind and bootstrap that sort of make things a bit easier and you know functional um and and also wordpress you've got wordpress you've got webflow you've got all of those things and it's amazing when i tell people that you don't even need to know a coding language there are plenty there are plenty of freelancers who earn six figures a year just on webflow just on wordpress but they do not know how to code you know a div in html you know and and and i think that's important to to mention so so in in that case just to sort of wrap up that point my knowledge is extremely basic i've tried to learn a lot of javascript even though i love brad traverse's courses but it didn't it didn't stick with me right i sort of stuck to html and css and the basics you know wordpress and and currently now i'm in the process of learning a lot of web flow and and that's pretty much it if that answers that question yeah that's awesome because that's been my experience i i ran my freelancing business for the first three years i think with not knowing any code outside of html and css and even then i started before doing that i think the first year and a half i didn't know any html and css it was just wordpress the first website was actually wix so that's that's a good uh i guess depending on the type of freelancer you're getting into um yeah it's a good thing to know because people do have that that understanding that i have to learn all this have to be all prep no if you can build that's it's not the only skill you're going to need but as far as a tech right there it's enough to get started it might not be the best it might not be ideal but but it's you know it's you can go from there absolutely exactly exactly and i see um i think it's shyder muhammad there's quite an apt uh quote because because i say that like all the time you know if you can stop if you can create a website you can start freelancing so yeah i love it definitely good yeah so okay so the i guess that client then um we so we haven't addressed that one yet the client was what kind of industry and how did you find them sorry you broke up there a little bit but uh so the first plane but i did hear you okay i got you yeah so so it's my first client how did i find him which industry was in and and i'm gonna say it i'm gonna say it i found my first client on fiverr that's the story i wanted to so so i i don't know if anyone is still with us now but but um but uh um okay so so let me start at the beginning right before you you know before you sort of think a bit weird about it about this um i want to say something right from the start freelancing platforms are not my number one recommendation are recommended as an option and not the option in my personal experience number one recommendation to actually get clients is your portfolio website i believe that that helps quite a lot okay now with that um disclaimer i want to explain to you how i got my first client on fiverr so what i did was um i looked on i looked at the web development you know category and i saw that it was extremely saturated i mean you've got like thousands of people competing and saying hey i will do web development for you i'll create a website for you five dollars you know for website or something and it's like listen i'm desperate but i'm not that desperate you know so so um i thought i'm like well what can i do to really think about this a bit differently from like a strategic point of view and i thought let me sort of flip it on and flip it around a bit and let me offer a website analysis report so that way i would offer a um a service like a three page pdf or four page pdf on uh you know someone letting me know their website i'll go through it and i'll critique it i'll give some feedback this is what i found good this is what i think you can improve on and my suggestions right so what i did was right from the beginning i knew that no one's going to place an order with someone who doesn't have any reviews so i'm i did do some work uh from an ethical standpoint i did do some work for my mom and my brother when i was like 15 16 17 like random stuff and i said you know hey will you you know leave a review for me okay so i've got two five star reviews i'm glad they didn't give a two star review so that helps um and and they and and and and that was that was very much a foundational aspect of the portfolio right then i saw i'm like well what else can help me differentiate myself from all these other hundreds of other profiles also offering the same service and i thought let me get a video explainer animation so it's like a video intro instead of like a static image that you'll see on fiverr and i remember clearly it cost me 84 there was a lot of money for me at the time and i got this cool looking like um you know animation right to to some uh to sell my service now the foundation my profile everything i was at work and about a few weeks later i got the first email to be like i got my first order and i was like i got so excited and uh i looked at the email and in my lunch break uh you know my heart was beating so i was waiting waiting to get back home that night and sort of reply so i i really aim to over deliver i did the website report this was a client in hvac industry he was selling air coolers and his website sucked so i love that because that means that i see a lot of potential and i knew that his marketing was not good at all so i gave some feedback in that and i'm like hey that's my suggestions all of that and i said now very important i think this is very important so i charge five dollars my cut was four dollars i spent a lot of time on this report i did i pretty much didn't make money if you want to think of it that way but when i delivered the website proposal to to this guy i said look here's the website proposal if you would like me to design a wire frame for you which in other words is a visual representation of the website you know on like an improved look i'll charge you a hundred dollars so it's an upsell right he went ahead with it which i was very great grateful for and i celebrated like crazy on that and that was my first hundred dollars online that was amazing so then what i did was i designed the wireframe in powerpoint i was efficient in powerpoint at the time no such thing as photoshop i couldn't afford that and i didn't you know know know how to do it so um i created the wireframe and now again i over delivered i really went the extra mile and i said look here's your here's your wireframe yes your design if you would like me to implement this wireframe and design i'll charge you a thousand dollars okay he went ahead with it and let me tell you that was a big celebration like like my wife and i like i took my wife out to like a nice meal you know like there was there was a party that was a party okay so now um so so now very important that five dollars turn into hundred dollars turned into a thousand dollars and to wrap up this point uh this client ordered eight more websites he ordered a marketing retainer of a thousand dollars a month and he also referred me to other clients so if you do the calculat oh and also one other thing this client is still with me today okay so so my very first client is still with me and you can do the calculations of like what five dollars turned into right and and and that's pretty much the um the story i know it sort of doesn't happen for a lot of people which i'm grateful for but i just wanted to show you and highlight um you know the principle of that in these job platforms about how to think of it a bit differently and approach it a bit differently and also not to underestimate you know small services because it could turn into you know a decent amount yeah and that's what i love from that story is the principle i've i've told so many people that story right there from fiverr and it's funny because you always get that first initial reaction people like cringe the second you say fiverr or any other i guess online platform or they will have had experience using it and they can't get anywhere but if you go in with that approach i always say i mean people that know how to make money or know how to apply certain skills can make money in any environment in your case you made thousands just out of that one client and that that client probably gave you a review they probably gave you recommendations there's no real way of telling you what that client did and um i don't think that's a unicorn story either because i've had that too i built out my first couple websites for free but the level of reviews that i've had from that like you have to break in the industry somehow right and that was your first client this is where i get that kickback but i just can't explain the principle enough from that and i love the retainers too you're able to upsell people miss out on that and that's where marketing experience comes in not just marketing but even like a business background or at least educating yourself in those skills and negotiating with the client too right so you you got the sale let's say you marketed yourself but how do you i guess become a salesman which is kind of scary to people but you're just selling an additional service you're showing them more value and people don't finish mining the gold mine they'll just pull out a nugget out of it and that's it they'll take that check and say okay i made my 500 dollars and that's it when that client could have paid way more especially through referrals exactly exactly and i think that's a great point um if i can just highlight that because um this is pretty much like like a lot of what i try and get through to a lot of uh you know developers it's pretty much just a mindshift change right in the sense that if you learn a skill such as digital marketing you know and and that's simple stuff i mean that's like uh adwords seo social media um you know things like that advertising online you know you can offer that as a service that's a valuable service to offer clients and the thing is most developers are very quick to say whoa i charge ten thousand dollars for this website like like a massive amount right and it's like wow great but you do know that you could have charged let's say five thousand dollars for the website and two thousand dollars a month for the marketing you know and it's like and and that's sort of that's pretty much always been my approach and that's and that's like why i sort of um explain that to others as well yeah golden so the pricing structure then i want to get into that because i love your value-based pricing system too i've talked about that uh not in exactly the terms that you have but when you're coming up with that thousand dollars how do you find out what that's worth and then also i guess i'll open it up after this answer but i want to go down into a regular pricing structure of how you decide how long a project will take how much you should charge for it and uh yeah i guess going down that road so how did you decide on that thousand dollars and then those upsells and did you charge lower i guess great question yeah great question great question so um i would say over the years my process has really fine-tuned a lot right i learned a lot through the processes i learned a lot of how to handle client objections as well like for example if they say oh wow you're way too expensive you know and like oh but it should take you you know like a week to do it and you know all of that type of stuff but um at the beginning in in the case of this fiber client i sort of just winged it to be honest with you like like like like i just thought of like okay he's willing to pay a hundred dollars for wireframe surely he is willing to pay a thousand dollars for the website you know and and i thought to myself i'm like look it might take me you know let's say two weeks or three weeks at the time to to actually create this website and i thought that's a decent amount considering i'm like a complete newbie and so i'll just sort of give the price right so so essentially um what i did there was maybe to ask you on to your overall question in terms of pricing let me start with that so in pricing i would say there's generally i mean there's many different ways like even profit sharing and you know all of that i won't get into that but generally speaking there's about three ways that you can charge for website and that is fixed pricing that is uh hourly billing and that is um value based pricing so number one ask in this five o'clock that i gave to him was i am i essentially gave a fixed price right so i said look i'm going to charge you a thousand dollars and i will do everything you know take it or leave it tough thing so so the way that you want to approach fixed pricing is you want to sort of work out like your costs you know maybe you need to buy a theme or buy a plug-in or outsource certain tasks to someone else uh or you want to when you want to work out you know let's say your salary um i'm just giving a random number but let's just say your salary is five thousand dollars a month and and you would like then to say like look i need to make a profit and cover my salary at least so i'm going to charge it's going to take me a month i'm going to charge let's say you know 7 000 or something so that's pretty much like a fixed pricing model you know you add you work out your costs you add in some profit you give the price and you have to deliver okay now in terms of uh i would say let me start with that with the hourly billing approach right so i actually recently wrote like i mean literally uh probably about 22 hours ago i it went live on free code cam and and and i made the argument like um so i think it's titled something like um should you charge by the hour or is there a better approach and and and let me start it by saying this holy billing is it works for a lot of people but that's not i wouldn't recommend it i think there's a better alternative to hourly building so very important i'm not saying it does not work okay now with that disclaimer it's very important to have disclaimers these days so um so so our labeling right let's just look at this from from like a practical standpoint instead of trying to look at it like from a number standpoint hey what is the going rate for someone with my experience and so on let me ask you a question you charge hourly billing what happens if you are sick for two weeks if you are ill for two weeks or four four weeks are you gonna get paid for the for those two weeks or four weeks no your income is zero right now let me ask you dennis can you create e-commerce websites yeah okay are you would you say you're actually very good at creating e-commerce websites yep i can do it by hand i can use wordpress a lot of platforms with it yes perfect perfect now and i've got a great scenario for you now okay so now i've given you i've given you the the images the product information let's say it's like 20 products i've given you all of that stuff i'm sure with confidence you could get that website from start to finish in probably four hours maximum one day right would that be right to assume yeah if i'm using something like wordpress i'm sure i can get that down today pretty much yep great so now let's say hypothetically you charge hundred dollars two hundred dollars an hour so now would you think it's fair right to charge your hundred dollars times eight hours eight hundred dollars for the website would you think that's fair definitely not no yeah exactly because you would have to create like 22 websites a day to pretty much get your your full-time salary and and and and that's so so what i'm trying to get to is um hourly billing actually discourages um uh your knowledge right let's use another example let's say you're a senior developer and you charge i don't know like 250 250 an hour like a high amount because you justified like well i'm just going to charge higher for my hourly rate you know so now you charge your 250 and now you've got another guy who's like a junior or intermediate guy and he charges you know 100 an hour but now you know to solve this problem it can it will take you one hour but this other junior guy takes him three hours he makes three hundred dollars you know so so in that sense he's earning more than you yes he's working longer hours but if you look at it from a from a financial side he's earning more than you purely because he can delay the other one is sorry if i'm rambling but but there's quite a few no i love the point i love that you're saying this because i just made a video on this and you're hitting every point that i made right yeah i love it oh great and and and also and sorry if i can add another one is that you know um it discourages efficiency right i mean i mean let's say let's say there's a quicker way to to solve this problem let's say you're building like a like a cms you know or you know web flow incredibly well or like um or you can code the solve this problem very quickly or you might have like a for example tailwind you are it makes websites so quick you know i mean you can whip something up in like i mean a few hours really and now you've got all of these tools at your disposal let's say you need to buy a plug-in for 100 or website template from from themeforest for example to help you code this whole website even quicker would you do that because essentially what you're doing now is is you you're coding it a lot quicker and and and now it's essentially costing you money because you know and the other side i want to me want to mention is hourly billing is actually probably the biggest cause for a lot of um arguments or disagreements with clients in other words a lot of admin right if you think of it from from the approach of like let's say in your mind you know you you build for 180 hours you know but now the client in in his mind thought listen it shouldn't should not have taken you this long it should have taken you 80 hours you know you know you're not being fair and then it's disagreements like whoa but it only took you that long because your knowledge sucks you know and you don't know the topic very well so why must i pay for learning on the job you know and and and it's just a lot of hassle so so i don't know if that sort of makes sense but you know is that's a convincing side about why i don't like yeah no that that's perfect i need to take that little bit right here after this stream snip that and i want to post that on its own probably because you you said it perfectly right there you're discouraging your own time right there somebody who's less knowledgeable now you almost don't want a client knowing what's behind the scenes right like you have your skill set so somebody that's been coding let's say or been developing for 25 years i can get something done in three hours is now like you said completely discouraged clients are very afraid because if they don't know how long something's going to take you they're going to be calling you all the time trust me i'm sure you know what that's like to have clients calling you every day and having to update them because they want to know if they're over a certain limit because they don't know how much this project is going to cost them but when you set that fixed rate you are in full control of what you make and at the same time you can end up making i've had clients where i think i've made over 800 an hour based on what i built it took me three hours but yeah it's it's just my speed or just because i happen to have a template that was already like that like i just finished up with another client that had the same exact project all i had to do was modify something and i charge them the same price there you go you know it's just like that exactly but yeah exactly exactly perfectly i love it awesome awesome and uh yeah in in terms of uh value-based pricing so i think the best way to think about value-based pricing is in a way it's pretty much the opposite of hourly ballet because in hourly billing you you're essentially selling your time value-based pricing you're essentially selling the potential value or return of the of the website or changes or problem that you're solving right and then basing your amount or your fee off of that potential return so i think um let me start by saying this like i've sort of gotten much better at value-based pricing over the years and and and to get it right right from the beginning might be a bit challenging right because i think there's there's some guidelines to it but it also requires simple things like i mean requires confidence to actually like really believe that you can you know uh um charge that amount and also from a practical standpoint i mean you really need to know what you're talking about you know i mean you can't be a fraud and like sort of fake your way to you know earning a good amount doesn't work you know so so i think let me start with that disclaimer again so value-based pricing let me use an example i i think i always use this example that's that it's like you need to know two things let's say you dennis you've got a 3d printing business right and and you sell 3d printers great niche by the way uh as a side note um okay so so so you sell 3d uh printers and and you've got um an existing website and you approach me and you're like hey carl you know can you create a website for me i'll say sure very important i don't say hmm tell me about your website tell me exactly what you want you know how many pages is it going to be you know um and and all of that i'm like okay it's going to cost you you know x right the approach i will take is i ask two very important questions i i say this i say how much is your average product and you tell me let's say how much is your average 3d printing you tell me 10 000 right let's see these big 3d printers and i'll tell you okay and i'll ask you okay how many printers on average do you sell each month and you tell me 10. so i know that your small little business you make twenty thousand dollars a month so then the next step what i would do right is i would i would look at your website and i would analyze it and i'll be like hmm if they are making twenty thousand a month based on this current look is there anything that i can do to improve it do i see any conversion improvements that i know for fact work now side note where am i getting this from number two experience and number well number one experience and number two um sorry and and yeah and and the other one is um by learning right there are plenty of valuable resources on conversion rate optimization so really just type that in on google you'll find incredible tips on conversion rate optimization is going to blow your mind okay so now based on that i would then look through their website look through their their current advertising see how much they're spending each month on advertising see the marketing channels that they are using only if i see any improvements that can be made i would give them a proposal right if i can't i'll say i think you're doing great i can't help you maybe someone else can very important now if i see potential based on the website and advertising that i can make improvements to increase their sales i would then work on based on experience and knowledge like if this guy's if you if you dinners or selling 10 3d printers a month i know for a fact based on previous experience with other e-commerce clients that i can definitely increase your monthly sales by let's say three extra units a month so even even just a thirty percent uh increase in terms of your um sales right so that's six thousand dollars a month right now very important when i in my proposal in my website proposal to the client uh as a side note you must always give three three pricing options maybe we can get into that a bit more but but um as a general rule so six thousand dollars i would i would bench it off right so i would say the increase in sales that i predict for you is six three sales a month six thousand dollars uh a month and i would times that by 12 and i would say look i'm quite confident and you never use the word with certainty so you say i'm confident that that with these changes um you will receive at least an increase of 72 000 for the year right now now what you do is you you you you've already price anchored that 72 thousand dollars in this guy's mine in your mind right so now what i would do is i would base my price off of that potential return of 72 000 that i think is extremely realistic for you to make after my changes now here's the question how much should you charge based on that 72 000. should you charge 50 000 no good luck if only right so so as a as a general blueprint um i mean if you google it as well like yes it depends on the type of industry and business that you're in let's say you're in a software company versus you know like like a brick and mortar sort of business or service industry your profit margins are a lot higher right um compared to like someone selling flowers or something like that you know so so now a general rule is 10 10 of your annual income you should be earning on marketing um each uh each year right um so let's say for example your increase as i predicted is 72 000 i could quite comfortably and confidently charge seven thousand two hundred dollars for the website but i usually i usually actually charge a bit less so in this case i might charge six and a half thousand okay just to make it sound you know a little bit better instead of like seven thousand two hundred so so so as you can see it's sort of like um there are some technical principles and guidelines to follow but in a way it's sort of like a gray sort of art where you just sort of have to sort of use common sense and just sort of figure that out so a lot was said um in that one so let me know if you have any follow-up questions no i love it so i wanted to add to it so first of all you're going to sound very confident to your client and i can pull up an example or i'll mention an example too so when a client knows that you know their industry you set yourself apart from any other developer that might be quoting them right because i've had people say i can't even sell a website for a hundred dollars how can i do it for a thousand that's because they're they're taking this arbitrary number or they're just going as low as they can something they found online your client doesn't care what you need to make they're trying to run their business and as a business owner they understand how to create you know how to invest and actually make money out of putting that money somewhere i guess investing something so the example i use with your story is a coffee shop that when i was a when i was trying to do this whole value based pricing because that's the exact model that i use too i'm doing keyword research i'm looking at what can i improve for this client how much of the traffic are they missing by now let's say having uh better search results with seo how can i improve that and if i improve that how much of their traffic can i increase with that too so you can see a lot of competitors stuff other coffee shops in my example and based off of that i'm taking a percentage off that the client loves that i can tell them what their market's like i i sat down with a coffee shop owner and i said hey you're missing that about you're missing out on about 3 000 searches a month if we can pull in you know i feel like we can take in let's say about five percent of that traffic this is what an average customer spends now so the customer is now seeing themselves working with me they see that i know what i'm talking about and now when it comes to that number i can charge them a hundred thousand dollars they wouldn't care if i can tell them i can make two thousand dollars i think it was a um kyle webb dev simplified i forgot his last name he was saying if you give me if i give you ten dollars and you can give me or promise me 20 back or not promise but almost guarantee that he says there's nobody in the world that wouldn't just hand out 10 bills left and right because they know they can get that back so that's what i love about that value value-based pricing approach too it's you're actually showing your worth rather than just giving a number and you know opening or burning a hole i guess in your client's pocket i like that and i like that approach in a way i think i i think it actually might be better to um to to maybe combine the two as well in in well i mean essentially what you're doing is is you basing it off okay so this is a good example right you're doing it from a different perspective which i find fascinating i think it's a great um a great way to approach it so really good because you're saying like this is the potential of what you are missing out on essentially right whereas in in in this case i might approach it i don't know for example technically of a coffee shop but let's just use it right so so in my case i would like to say like look um what's the busiest time of of the day of the month for you you know and and what is the average price um you know of like a product that you that you offer you know is it is it like a cup of is it like a cappuccino and like a breakfast okay how much is that worth to an average customer right and like and like how much can you get how many customers can you get in one seating and how much at capacity are you because if you're at 50 there's 50 more room to grow and if your time's at 50 percent you know that you could make each day times by 30 days in a month that's potentially what you could be making and i could help you with that you know and sort of base the price sort of technically off of that which i which which is quite interesting i i find that i find that approach um i think both can work quite well because um from a sense of like uh working on like um opportunities like what you're missing out on versus okay here's your current business let's sort of work on what you're currently doing and what you sort of you know what you can do to improve it and you know as well i think maybe a mix of both might even work quite solid i like that yeah yeah and you'll find like i said they will open up that checkbook without hesitating because they they can see the potential return so before before we get into that um i see a question actually from cody from web dev junkie but i wanna address that uh the keyword research if for anybody that is doing the seo stuff i just wanna reference that go to google keyword planner or just google up keyword research tools type in any keyword find out what's popular in that area or if you're working on a global product there's also moz that's moz.com i believe that was their website so there's a lot of tools like this where you can come to your client and sound very smart because you can just pump in the keywords and know exactly what you're targeting and and sorry and uber suggests uber suggests that's what i use it's a lot cheaper than it's a lot cheaper than ah refs and all those mods and all of that and it works just as good so i just want to add that i'm definitely going to write that one down so uber suggests awesome so uh somebody donated wow stefan thank you so much i'll get to that question in a second i want to answer cody's here so let's pull this up because this is a really good question and this is actually it was on my list of things to ask you so we talked about uh the value-based pricing system right well a lot of people could end up taking on a contract and overestimating or underestimating for example i hired somebody one time that told me they were gonna charge me five thousand dollars to build out the system that my company needed so i was in charge of doing the hiring i ended up having to or our company ended up having to pay him 7 500 and we over way overpaid what the bid was and we actually ended up taking a loss on the product that he never delivered at the end of the day so how do you insure for a product let's say somebody says um build me out uh this database system for our company that can also send reports to clients that's a lot to do there's a lot of research in that how do you price that and i have a few solutions myself so i do want to jump in on this one but i would love to hear what you think great great okay so um on those instances i've turned clients down right um you know if i feel that if i feel that the website project is just going to be way too complicated you know i mean i mean i've had client proposals where it's like it could be a massive amount but i'm just not willing to take the risk and it's going to take so much time and you know to deal with this contract and you know all of that but um let's say you did want the project right let's say you needed the project and you needed the cash so so i always use this example like um first of all i i never do software development you know i'm not interested in that right now right but let's say for example i i use this example that let's say a client asked me carl you've got this website and and you've done great you you're hanging on marketing well but we want at an app we want an iphone and android app right you know what i would say i would say sure no problem ever do i know anything about apps not at all you know and i i i wouldn't even know where to start right um so but my very first step is this i would ask the client okay tell me exactly what you want this app to do what do you have in mind do you have any design you know ideas of how you would like it to look like practical questions right i would then take this brief from the client and i would look for someone on upwork i found upwork credit quite a good place or maybe someone on twitter i had a few people from twitter um or hubstaff talent or whatever bottom line is i'll find a contractor you know for this project who knows it well who i can trust ideally so then what i would do is i would send them this brief and then let's say this guy tells me like look it might cost you know five thousand dollars i don't know he gives me that price right now this is where i think a lot of people sort of go wrong um maybe if i can start off by saying i wouldn't feel comfortable doing value-based pricing in this method sorry i should maybe start off with that so i would rather provide a fixed pricing for this first project and then maybe the second app i would do and third i would you know charge more value-based side so i should have started with that disclaimer okay now with and now with that said right let's say this contract that charges me five thousand dollars i will not tell the client six thousand or seven thousand no because i know for a fact this contract is not going to charge five thousand dollars there's gonna be changes that need to be made so i'm gonna budget that in i'm gonna say listen this guy's gonna charge me six and a half seven thousand dollars so i'm gonna work out my cost being seven thousand dollars right then i'm gonna work out look i need to make some profit off of this because i know there's gonna be some back and forth the project management with this with this uh contractor so i'm gonna add another buff of a thousand dollars so that's eight thousand but you know what i know there's going to be some random things in between calls with a client and all this other stuff i'm going to charge another 500 extra so i would say i would be more comfortable charging let's say eight and a half thousand dollars um where i think there's some wiggle room to make some profit um you know to sort of take some risk and you know and make some changes and i think that'll be a decent um learning curve um so i'd be willing to take a risk on something like that you know if that makes sense yeah i like that approach so i've actually dealt with this and this is one of the harder things to kind of work with because most when you're talking about software development projects let's say you talked about the app or anything like that uh you're not really just delivering a product you're working on something that you are going to have a service contract with too so working that into it so i'll just pull up an example i have a client that wants a system built out and the first approach is to be blatantly honest with them and let them know that it's really hard to project this and give them almost like your your highest your worst case scenario i guess for the client at least and what a better situation may be so in this case and i don't know if i'm gonna take this bit but this is what i'm working on because i haven't freelanced since like 2019 i'm off i'm telling the client this product on the high end is probably gonna cost about seventy thousand dollars to get this thing in the first working model but it also could go to forty thousand so i give myself a huge buffer and they need to understand that there's no way of actually knowing there's always changes i'm going back and forth to the company i'm having to figure out their their system and what's going on there so i give myself a big buffer then what i do is i say okay but before we start there we're not just going to go ahead and you know have you write us a 40 000 check i want to go back in and i want to figure out what it's going to take to build out that minimal viable product so i make the client explain to me what is the first working version of this product let's draw up everything let's draw up all the features and then let's take away 90 of that what can this product just function on without all these bells and whistles let's start there and let's say let's go for the mvp and let's sign a 15 000 check and let's go ahead and start there and then we will continue to reapproach this so constant communication the communication in this case like you said you can't do value based it has to be more of a set price but that price still has to be adjustable so not value-based but something that we mutually understand because my client needs to understand that there's people that build these high-rises they're that the cost of a high-rise is never set in stone they may quote you at 3 billion let's say to build a skyscraper but that ends up being four and a half so they already work that in and people understand that so i would say constant communication and then section the project off try to find different uh goals for that and then continue to adjust from that so if i can get you that mvp let's do this and then we'll resign the next one we'll go in increment so i'll say do that but it's a skill that you're going to have to develop if you don't have the skill to be able to to project that then you may not be not not that you're not ready to freelance then you may need to lower your price and lower your own expectation because that is a skill that a client is going to want from you it's not just your good development skills they want you to be able to price them right and fairly and be able to manage a product a project that's where as a freelancer you're more than just a developer i like it i like that i agree and and just to quickly also add on that like um this reminds me of i think it was like last year february um we had like a prospective client that that they gave us a big brief and it was a big project and it was going to cost you know tens of thousands right and and we suggested an mvp dream that probably i think it costs we quoted like 10 000 or 8 000 and and and yeah i mean i i mean i think i think that's some great advice um you know in like sort of like looking at like what can you do as an mvp and let's start there you know yeah yeah exactly so i i was going to go more into some technical stuff too like invoicing and all that but i think i want to leave this out because i like where we're at we're going into some nitty-gritty stuff here so things like invoicing software and all that i think that's more stuff you can google up but that's stuff that you will need how to invoice a client how to actually present that i do like your three approach or your three prices approach too and it's funny because i listened to your stream with uh with kyle from web dev simplified and i can't remember if you just said it or it fails from that stream but you talked about offering your client three options and why you do that did we just cover that i can't completely completely throw it off between the two yeah yeah so so we didn't talk about it uh it was mentioned you know like i said okay like look you know do charge you know um three um yeah do you want to talk about that now yeah absolutely i love that because that's something that i would use in order to get a client to go into a direction that i wanted but if i uh maybe overestimated their budget let's say i thought they could spend let's say 5 000 but they really only can spend two if you give them those three options which i want to get into right now you're able to still work with a client to negotiate better yeah let's go ahead and do that right now yeah yeah sure so so i think um let me start off by saying this right point one when you meet with a client i've i did this plenty of times at the beginning and i just i don't have the patience to do this anymore right so so i learned a lot from it you have a long meeting with a client back and forth phone calls it's like oh cool i'll do i'll i'll give you a proposal you know presenter i'll send it through to you next week and you spent hours on this thing now all of a sudden you send the proposal and they're like what you know like this is far out of my budget you know like you know where where do you come up with this i don't care about your value-based pricing you know i can only afford like a tens of them right and that happened to me a few times and i was like screw this i'm not going to make the same mistake again and waste my time right so i asked a qualifying question to the client they should not be interviewing me i should be interviewing them you know so so i asked him this question and i think it's very important so you can paraphrase it and use it as you want but but i asked this qualifying question i say do you have a budget set aside yeah do you have a budget set aside for this project and is it at least over x okay i love that sorry i just wanted to interrupt there that's the qualifying questions you're gonna save yourself so much time and headache i just stamped that yeah yeah yeah agreed and and and look if they say um uh you know like let's say for example in your mind you're thinking like look this is a this is quite a big project i don't have time to sort of figure it out let me just throw a random number and be like look i'm not willing to accept this project for you know let's say three thousand dollars or five thousand dollars you know whatever amount you feel comfortable with you know at least because you said at least you're not saying it's going to be that price and if they say look you know like well we are so far out you know like uh i was expecting 500 and you say look you know um maybe maybe when you grow to a bigger size i'm more than happy to help otherwise i can refer someone else to you or just google you know in your area boom boom done meeting done don't waste your time right um so that's important now after you've done a qualifying question i think it's important to mention that so many developers and so many freelancers leave money on the table they only provide in their proposal one price take it or leave it right and they even negotiate on that price sometimes you know the amount is irrelevant but you only offer one price and i learned this lesson um in in jewelry right because i was there selling when i was like 17 and i used to work there on weekends and all of this and i learned so much from that and and and i read this example that reminded me of it which is so great it talks about this simple question how do you make a ten thousand dollar rolex look cheap and affordable and the answer is you put it next to a fifty thousand dollar rolex you know or like another brand right if that makes sense yeah so yeah yeah so so what that is and that principle that psychology is um called price anchoring okay so what that means is you're pricing your or you're providing a price based off of another price right so now let me use an example i always use three price um three pricing options option one which is like the standard price and that is my from price so let's say i've already worked out you know that 72 000 example on the um 3d printers and i'm like okay look uh six and a half thousand i would price it from six and a half thousand okay so that will be option one and i will list you know um the services very important i'm not listing like how many pages it's going to be you know like you know like um atomized building like logos and like you know content and you know all of that type of stuff i'm not doing that i'm giving sort of brief overviews of that so i'm saying option one standard you know website with some marketing sort of services done uh you know to set up or some some changes option two i might charge oh sorry maybe put your hand to the camera there we go there we go okay cool okay sorry i got a bit too excited there okay so then option two i would charge a bit more in this case if it's six and a half thousand i would charge maybe seven and a half or eight thousand okay then option three i would charge much higher than option two so in this case let's say i charge six and a half eight thousand option 3 i might charge 12 000 or even 14 or 15 000 right and the point of this is very very important is most clients will not choose option one and i can testify to this i can really test about this in most proposals that are sent to clients they often choose i don't even think i've had a client no sorry i have a client only one client choose option one but for for the 99 of other clients that always chose option two and some chose option three which is great right so now the point of it is you are trying to make option two look like the ideal solution right and you can do that by adding you know some more services and all that and remember because you're using value-based pricing it's definitely worth your time as well so if that makes sense yeah i love it i love the rolex example too but from my experience it was the same thing if i sent a client one price let's say five thousand dollars i've had rejections from that but then when i would start adjusting that because i wanted to do this approach i would find that i can get virtually the same client or the same type of client to choose a higher option when they see all of those things broken up and what i would do sometimes is i would take away from a product instead of adding to it let's say we had all these features like you get the site you get all these pages you get seo and a logo and all this what i would do is i would take some features away and lower the price for one of the options so you can have everything but in the lower option you don't get seo well a client will say well i do want seo though i do want my site optimized for search engines so they start it's almost like an all car option so they start choosing it and before they know it they loaded up their car with more than they planned to come to buy but they do have the budget they just didn't like having that one option and it just seemed high for them but once they saw that broken up you don't lose a client and they would end up choosing more so i can definitely attest to that or verify that i guess like 70 of the time it's crazy yeah yeah yeah that's amazing it's amazing and if you think about it like that simple strategy right accounts for like so much more income in your bank account and and like how many freelancers and developers are not using their strategy you know so that alone can just increase your income as well yeah absolutely so i do want to get to uh to this question here just because somebody donated so i want to do that and i will get more into the q a everybody who's watching here but uh i'll answer this one because it is more in my field i guess yeah so it's a flask it's just a framework within python here uh to charge for a website like this i mean this is gonna be gotta be your minimal product here you said it's just login and a couple of pages what i would do is i would start with the minimum amount that i'm willing to work for and for me even though i don't take clients right now i wouldn't take a project for under 500 like that's the lowest and if this project doesn't exceed like the minimal amount of effort then i'll just charge 500 but it still depends on what the client is but i would just set that so stefan whatever your minimum is like if you wouldn't work for less than a certain amount kind of make that your base but it's hard to just judge what this application is actually worth you could try different approaches but you know this doesn't seem like it's more than a couple thousand at max unless there's something i'm missing so i just wanted to jump into that great great so uh sharir this is the one we already answered when how does somebody know when they're ready to start kyle what was your answer it was you wanna you can you can build a website yeah exactly if you can build a website you are good enough to start don't procrastinate stop trying to be perfect because if you try and wait until you're perfect and know all the different javascript languages and frameworks and all this other stuff you're never going to start perfection leads to procrastination just start and then one and learn on the job i think that's such an important skill set in mindset to have yeah perfection is the enemy of progress that's the the term that i've heard and i like to use it means if you're trying to master everything you'll never be ready you'll never move forward so um i do still have a i want to start opening up those questions kyle we are just over an hour are you still available or do you have more time to go to your q a yeah sure okay just give me 13 seconds i need to charge my laptop my laptop just one second okay so while kyle's gone i'm gonna open something up actually here uh somebody asked i guess they asked kyle originally but i will share the income right now and i to go over some expectations of what your first year or couple years may go to and some people saw these numbers as very high and a lot of people thought they were very low too so that's kind of funny to hear that but it depends on what your expectation is so let me share my screen here give me a second so kyle i'm about to share my uh my screen here and i put this out in a tweet so if you want to find my twitter i guess i didn't link it up kyle is linked up though i'll have to link it up after this but um i wanted to share my what is that five or six years i think since 2015 so five years of freelancing okay so i pull this up and this right here is about half of the income maybe a little bit less even of what i did at least in revenue so these are my personal profits and what i had to put into it but if you look at 2015 uh 2015 i pretty much didn't pay myself all expenses were just put into it it was going back into i guess into the business and getting some contractors to come and help me out but the first year was 26 000 in revenue seven thousand eight hundred dollars in pure profit so that could be high for some people that could be low i know some people start off with way more than that but that was my experience kyle i don't know if yours uh was he was you know in the same ballpark or not but that shows a pretty slow start i think in most areas even though i guess depends on who you talk to this is coming from a marketing background from knowing that very well and it was a little bit easier because i think i was more well networked in my city i know a lot of people live in underdeveloped countries so they can't just go door-to-door but i was hustling trying to build that base up so year number two 2016. 71 000 in revenue and we're going to see something interesting occur here basically we see the revenue go down but the profits go up so it was 28 000 and at this point actually in 2000 2015 i had just gotten married and i took a job too so i was working full time so this is a side income for me i didn't just go all in i was just trying to reinvest everything so 2017 it was 64 000 at this point what i did is i actually ended up firing a lot of my clients if that's the right term but i ended up just giving away a bunch of the contracts and i stuck to four four to five clients that made me the most amount of money one client i think earned me about twenty two thousand dollars a year and that was running adwords for an account so i basically got rid of the bottom half i had over 100 clients in this time frame and i stuck to those so i just completely did a purge i got rid of a bunch of clients gave a bunch away and yeah that was 38 000 right there in that so this is why we're seeing that profit margin go up from 71 and 28 to about we're making less but we're also seeing more of a profit there then in 2018 we're seeing the numbers be pretty much the same because the same four to five clients were with me the whole time so we go to 64 000 rev or income goes up right here profits go up and 64 000 and 40 000. so that's my breakdown i know some people wanted to see that what would you say as far as what people should expect when they're starting in the first years and how they can scale that and if this is reasonable from what you've seen from other people because you are teaching people you've probably heard a lot of stories success stories stories of not making it yeah for sure and and i think this is great it inspires a lot of people and uh i think also um i think you gave a good disclaimer like this is your journey right and and this is how and this is what worked for you and and for and for others you know i mean it can be completely different i mean especially also depends like on you know which country you're from as well yeah i think that also has a lot of uh to do with it and also the other thing is you know like the resources you have about available the time the money you know and that you had so so so i think those are that that's very important to um to sort of look at because if you look at someone who's full-time who doesn't have to rely on like paying you know a car rent you know maybe they've got they've got a spouse and things are tight financially and whatever you know that's a lot different to someone who's like a student who who's like living with their parents and doesn't have any expenses and you know has can dedicate like eight hours a day to freelancing you know so so maybe let me start with that the other thing i want to mention is i sort of hate this question to be honest you know a lot of people ask me like hey you know like you know i would like to earn you know 3 000 or five thousand or ten thousand dollars a month how long is it going to take me it's like you know how do i answer that you know because yeah i mean if you think about it you know it's like it's like number one i don't know your your finances your background your skill set how you communicate how your problem solved you know and you know all of that type of stuff right and and that's important now maybe to wrap up and sort of give my 80 20 answer the bottom line is i've seen people within one month make really good incomes and land clients like thousands of dollars a month and that sets them up you know great well done that that didn't happen for me you know um you know so but i'm glad it worked for you straight off the bat that's great now the reverse is also true i've seen people after six months still not get their first client and they've tried a lot of different things but they just can't make it work for various different reasons right and i think there's always solutions to whatever the problem is you know maybe maybe they were justified in their mind like yes but i tried to reach out to clients okay but how many clients did you reach out to oh 10 well there's your problem right so so so i think like um you know it's a it's a it's a it's a weird a weird answer and uh you know it's a weird answer it makes sense you know yeah yeah i know your points dead on that's kind of where it was like okay people want to see it it does help to just show you know what it is so people can they're trying to gauge a ballpark and you're right that's not correct but yeah it's so varies on so many different things like in my case i was working day and night you know trying to try to put this together so there's a lot into it and literally walking door to door but yeah there's just no way of gauging that because i've seen people that have done it for a year and the the biggest here's one answer that i don't like where they'll say i've done it for six months to a year and i've reached out to clients and let's say you reached out to a thousand clients and couldn't get one the fact that if somebody says it doesn't work it's still not true even though you've went through that just because you're reaching out to clients doesn't mean that you're you're doing the right thing how you talk to them like you said i don't know what your networking skills are like are you just what they call vomiting on clients where you just load up information i can build you a website i can do this and start going into too many technical things are you sending good proposals are you pricing right so the answer is to always adjust i do think anybody can make something happen but yeah there's just absolutely no way i thought i felt it was funny because i pulled up my uh my not my tax returns but my p l statements and again this is for just one part of it because i've in pure revenue it was probably two times if not three times that uh because i was outsourcing a lot of work to like photographers logo designers you know just people that did work that i didn't want to do or wasn't able to do but yeah uh yeah i just thought it'd be my it might be fun to do that but it definitely felt like yeah you answered it perfectly yeah cool so uh in that case let's uh let's go ahead and i want to start with the twitter questions now and i actually had one for you before i pulled these up if you were to start your journey again and i want to try to i guess put into an example somebody that may be from a more underdeveloped country let's say they can't go door-to-door there's just no businesses that want websites if you were put on an island and you had all your living expenses or i guess you can survive there but you had internet and you wanted to start freelancing how would you start that today if you just had your internet you couldn't go anywhere what would be your first approach tomorrow okay um yeah yeah sorry i just want to confirm uh um can you hear me uh um because you you broke up there i don't know if that was my signal or yours oh um no i can hear you well i know there's a delay between us so i'm trying to account for that there's like a second or two delay but i can hear you okay no worries no worries sorry about that okay so um i think i mean i mean just to sort of rephrase the question back to you so so it's like um let's say i'm in the third world country which i am i mean south africa and what would i do differently you know to start freelancing is that is that the correct question i guess not differently but what would you do today if you couldn't physically see a client that's probably the better way to say like if you wanted to start freelancing what would you do right now to let's say you were your name was completely erased nobody knew you had to change your name for some reason and you were to start a square one how would you approach that business what would your first month two months in a year would look like oh yeah sure okay okay great question okay so um number one i don't like meeting clients in person you know um i always try and you know sort of stick to um phone calls or you know zoom meetings or things like that so so that suits me perfectly now let's say i just started from the beginning and uh you know i didn't have an existing you know website no referrals and you know from scratch i would i would start like this i would want to find a niche to target i'm not interested in being a generalist you know to work with any type of client you know across the world you know in various different industries with various different budgets and so on i'm interested in finding a niche and um presenting myself as an expert within that niche by a portfolio a website or an agency website um you know and then i'll write about that about like any tips that i would recommend that this niche can improve to get sales and very important you mentioned earlier right at the beginning and i wanted to actually ask you when you discussed about working for free and and i think that's a key point here because i've done it before and i would do it again to in deciding on a niche which maybe we can even talk about if you want to if this if there's time to talk about how you decide on english and all that but but but maybe i can just sort of go into that briefly so number one it could be based on anything you potential anything you see potential you know or anything you see passionate about or something but basically what you want to do is you want to decide on a niche that um that can pay you well and that justifies your time so what i do is i go to payscale.com let's say i'm interested in dentists i just randomly think of hard paying jobs right in the medical niche for example i'm in the medical niche and and what i did was i looked at the different titles in the medical niche so let's say for example the dentist right i'll look at how much they earn on payscale.com as a salary and then i'll sort of work out like oh they earn you know 100 000 or 200 000 or 300 thousand dollars a a year as a salary outside hmm let's say they had to spend 10 percent of their salary it's not like that but let's just let's just work a thumb sakia uh you know they they'll they're able to spend you know 20 000 a year uh which means like plus minus you know two thousand dollars a month um that's a that's a good enough niche for me to target so that explains uh niching down uh 80 20 very quickly okay so i'll decide on that build an agency portfolio website content around the dentist you know how they can get clients how they can grow tips on how to improve their website um you know use examples then i would also get free work so so for number one i would try and get paying clients but that's quite difficult because the most importantly they want to see what you've done they don't want to see what you can do i think that's an important differentiator to to establish now in order to show what you've done you need to show examples of that so how can you show examples there's two approaches you can either create um you know like like fake websites in buy your own domain you know um dentistry um or dentist practice you know um los angeles dot com whatever create a website you know and and and and um the point of this is you're not like being completely fake about it and pretending it's a legit website the point is you want uh this prospective client wants to see like what you can do and this this showcases like look this is what i can do for you if i were to do your website for you the other option is you need to get testimonials from clients and the way to do that i recommend is offering free work for clients yes you can try the paid route but sometimes that doesn't go as well at first so so literally you need to do phone calls you need to do emails you need to do everything you can to reach out to hundreds of different dentists around the world in america in australia in the uk wherever and offer them a website for free in exchange for testimonial you know uh 80 90 are going to say no 99 but you just need to find that one or two and once you've got two websites for free to get the testimonial boom done you're ready to start charging a client and then what i would do is that that sort of goes into how to get clients and there's very different various different ways i'm i just want to 80 20 sort of the sort of approaches right so so how to get clients email uh outreach which is uh very it still works today but there's a strategy on on how to do that um number one number two you've got instagram outreach via dm you've got facebook groups that still work very well in your niche you've got adwords you've got seo ranking uh relevant articles and pages on google and then letting clients find you you've got linkedin you've got various different other ways so bottom line is i've rambled a lot yet but that's pretty much you know what i would do if i had if i had to start from scratch so i'm assuming you would probably also mine that client too right because not only do you want that testimonial you also want to see if they have referrals for you wouldn't you go the approach of seeing if they know other let's say this was doctors yeah so i i just wanted to touch on that because i'm assuming that's awesome you're right you're right you're right yeah you're out there and i should have mentioned that yeah you're right you're right it's it's funny that you said it's uh you can reach out to 10 people and you can only give away two websites right like it's actually hard to give away a free product sometimes because people might be thrown off hey what's going on here what are you trying to do but when you do find it because that's that's how it worked for me was once i found there was a client in in a different field it was more like forensics laboratories that's what it was in so there wasn't that much there but i remember i landed a dentist as a client and we ended up getting like four dentists right after that because he was so thankful wrote the review and then said hey you can reach out to these people so now when i reach out to the other dentist it's not a cold call anymore or a cold email they i can now reference hey dr you know so and so i just did some work for them they said that you might need this too and referred me to so now you're starting on a different field but we've got into we've got our foot in the door by doing that i like that approach so niching down doing a bunch of research and then maybe even starting that free approach route too i think that's one that's very viable yeah yeah that's great i i love that and uh and and nothing much more to say um instead of i stamp that as well so let me go into a into some questions and on twitter i'll just read them off instead of showing them on screen so uh somebody is asking let's see so they said ask him if he had a family i mean wife and kids and or if not so or if he were not so young would he still be freelancing and if yes would would be additional considerations or precautions life to live a decent life with family while doing so uh it sounds like they're basically asking if you were more established would you still take this route let's say starting from square one or would you have not been i guess so risky i'm assuming that's kind of the question it goes kind of all over the place yeah yeah good question and and and and it's always an interesting uh um one to answer that because um it's it's quite funny you know it's it's almost like it's like someone's saying okay what would you do in a bank robbery right and it's like you think you would do that but would you really do that you know so so so obviously my answer is going to be you know it's going to be based on like assumption on what i think i would have done or what i would do um so i think i i've always been a naturally um inquisitive or curious person um i i ask a lot of questions to to a lot of people and and and one of the questions that that that i ask myself is i'm like do i want to be working for the rest of my life you know eight to five or nine to five and the answer is no you know i don't want to be working up until the age of 60 or whatever up until retirement so so i would and i would insist on trying you know other income streams would that have been freelancing i don't know i can assume so because based on my on my skill set assuming i would have the marketing skill set and web design skill set then yes without a doubt i would definitely offer you know do freelancing if i had family if i had financial problems if i was in a different thing while i was in financial problems but but let's say um you know it looked a bit differently i'm sure i would have adapted i would have found some solutions somehow you know um yeah i don't know how to to sort of answer that question yeah that's good you answer that um okay so source code then somebody's asking about that who keeps it so let's say you develop an application or let's say just a website uh what do you do do you just hand off that code let's say you use godaddy in wordpress do you just hand them the source code the godaddy account how does that look in your case i guess good question um for the most part um pretty much pretty much they they own it in a way or you know what um in contracts i've got it i've got a professional contract that i got written up by by a friend a lawyer in amsterdam so he's a commercial lawyer and that's sort of like a legit contract right and within one of the clauses it does talk about you know ownership of um you know certain assets let's say and and and obviously that's for like large clients and stuff obviously you need to make sure that they own their assets it's fair you know in other words in this case being the source code and all that but i would say generally speaking for for for most smaller clients i'm talking about websites that you charge you know even small small websites like you know from like a one page or something from like 500 to let's say two three thousand dollars um i've always used like a proposal template and and i do have a proposal template for free and you know if some you know maybe someone wants to download it but but basically i use that and and i sort of treat that as my contract and i don't mention anything um you know about ownerships of assets so what that would so i sort of leave it open-ended and there's some ambiguity to it and some sort of license there in a way that if for example i like i've done this before like in my medical niche i would create a website for a client and i would literally just copy that wordpress theme and then with the information duplicate it you know migrate it to the the relevant client domain change the contact content and the stuff boom done so technically i reuse it technically i reuse the existing template uh asset that i created but that wasn't explicitly mentioned in the contract so i think it doesn't for my 80 20 odds would be for big clients um i don't think you should take that risk but for smaller everyday average clients i don't see a problem with that okay how do you handle difficult clients let's say a client has i mean i think i'm pretty sure you've dealt with it because i've dealt with it multiple times like how do you how do you deal with a client requesting something unreasonable or accusing you of something great question great it's amazing i was driving with my wife today we went to um you know you know we we went to work and have some breakfast uh somewhere and i was just telling about this client like listen i don't know if i should just say like i'm done with this client because she asked for like a lot of revisions you know and it's like i'm fine with that in terms of uh content writing and stuff like i'm fine i understand but man this is taking a lot of my time and i'm not happy you know so so it's quite fresh you know so so that client i might say like look you know sort of i'm not interested anymore but there have been cases especially at the beginning up until recently i would like it's quite rare to be honest with you but very much at the beginning i had this one client and he was paying me i remember a thousand dollars a month uh for to handle some marketing uh stuff this was like uh probably like two right probably about three four years ago maybe and um he would all the time phone me you know chat to me like even on a weekend and because i needed the money i was like i sort of sucked it up right and then at one time after a few months and i was like screw this like i've really had enough you know so so i told so i got off the phone with him and i just like had this like big um anxiety and i was like i'm so i'm just too stressed i just can't handle this so i sent him a whatsapp and a message in a respectful way and i told him i'm like look you know like like if it's going to carry on like this like like we i'm going to have to leave i i you know i can't work like this you know all this like micro managing and you know all of this type of stuff and it's amazing after that he completely left me he you know and he respected my viewpoints a lot more and all of that so so it was quite interesting i um by standing up for myself in a respectful way and addressing the issue you know he actually stepped back a bit and actually saw like listen like i'm also an expert you know i know that you are an expert in your field but i'm an expert in my field you know you don't have to talk to me like that and like macro manage me all the time you know you do your thing let me do my thing and we can work well together you know so so in that case that's what i did i haven't had a lot of fussy clients besides that um you know and i'm curious to know like from your side how do you handle that yeah so that's um the approach would be the exact same thing so if you need the money sometimes you're gonna have to deal with it my biggest client uh even though he paid a crap ton was uh was hell to deal with like he said constant phone calls on the weekend same thing micromanaging and for me i got to a point where i had to take a risk because i still needed the money but i was able to get to a point to where it's like okay if i lose a client it's not the end of the world i can continue so once i got to that point that's where i stood my ground i mean ideally everybody would stand their ground early but the same exact thing happened they they end up respecting you for it everything was fixed up at least on that that end of things and it got a lot better but if a client doesn't do that i fired clients one time i had a client that i've mentioned the story in a stream before but they they signed a contract to deal with a new web or basically a whole new website to do seo and i warned them in advance that hey if you want a full rebuild like completely different system i forgot i think it was website was like hand coded it was just a static site i said you're gonna lose your seo ranking it wasn't good anyways he was like on page two or three but i told him he might lose it the second the seo ranking went away because we took down the site and we had to put up the new one he called me demanding that we we call google and put you know get the ranking back which he obviously had no idea how this works i can't call google you know it was just ridiculous and i basically wrote him a formal letter and actually sent it to his office instead of writing him or emailed him i just sent it in almost like a legal letter and i said that hey you pull this crap on us again we're done but we're going to be done after we finish this project for you once all the deliverables are there you just you're done with us and we just fired them that was it wow and uh they were actually supposed to be on a retainer too so i basically said we are ending our part of that contract too because that you're in contract with us not us with you in that sense so we can we can we can end this so we said here's a list of people you can call if you want there's some i just googled up some other developers in in the city and other companies but yeah i just fired them if you if you're into that yeah sorry yeah um not a cool name and aj there's your answer oh somebody asking that in here right how to deal with difficult clients oh not not a cool name yeah so kyle i mentioned this in the beginning when we started the stream kyle prinslow is all over google just look up freelancing he's on free code camp he has his own website and blog and twitter it's all linked up in the video description so if you don't know kyle shame on you but now you do yeah thanks um not a cool name basically i'm a freelancer so so that's that okay let's see so what kind of projects have you worked on this year so freelance wise uh none i've completely went into youtube and i've actually just been passing off my clients so there's some that i helped maintain but yeah i just complete that's why in my list is 2020 was listed as completely blank okay so i'm gonna go for the more recent ones i'll try to find some older questions but i do address them so if you guys asked a question earlier we won't get into everything let's make sure it's relevant to this but let's see so if someone started freelancing let's say from today what would you recommend he or she look for in freelancing projects kyle i think you kind of went into this already you talked about itching down finding out what your skill set is like for me like uh i think how i would start like when i started originally i knew wordpress and wix so what kind of clients can you get with wordpress and wix and i wasn't even that advanced with that either so okay that means your local business bloggers anybody that needs basically a static website and simplified websites and then as you expand your skills that's what i would say is advance the skills as or advance the client reach as your skills advance if you can now build out ecommerce websites with wordpress that's just a new potential client for you agreed so somebody said there's a question on mumble so that's the open source project i'm working on so let's see that i think they commented cool so let's see so praveen is asking he says it's really hard and he actually does freelance too but he's saying it's really hard to get started on a freelance project plot on a freelance platform because there are already freelancers with good reviewers and better experiences and deliverable projects how can we face it standing out client or kyle you already mentioned this but if you can maybe elaborate on that how do you stand out from other developers yeah i think um it actually boils down to which platform you are using right and and maybe let me start off by saying like i'm not a big fan of the platforms yes it works for some but for most people it does not work um i would actually recommend your starting over from a portfolio website or an agency website or to rather even look via twitter maybe i can use the example quickly because because this really worked for me so so i think about two or three years ago and what i did was um i don't want to say it because i know it's going to happen um to me i i know a lot of guys that have tried it with me and well actually some of them i've worked with so so maybe maybe it would work so anyway i was looking for for large accounts right and i was looking for accounts that that um guys who sold digital products right and who was selling like um good amounts like like uh i'm not talking about five thousand dollars a month i'm talking about like 10 20 30 000 50 000 plus you know a month on digital products so guys already do well and and basically what i did was i just dm them on twitter and i went through the website or the landing page and i sort of saw if i could give some advice to improve it and okay i've already designed a a wireframe for you for free completely free of charge you know please check it out you know you can use it not but this is just my two sims you know i thought i thought you might find it helpful and bottom line is um one of them actually came on board and uh he actually wanted to pay me 500 to say thank you i said no no problem you can keep it and eventually like two months later or something uh i dm'd him again i'm like hey you know if you need someone to help you with your marketing i can help you and i chosen two and a half thousand dollars a month and he came on board and um yeah so so that was like two or three years ago and and i haven't used a strategy since but for example i know that that's one approach that can work and again i mean there's so many ways of getting clients as well which i don't think we've got too much time to talk about all the details but i think that's a good approach you know that that works as well yeah yeah i just love your opening state your opening story so much about how you stood out just to go back to that question i guess um it's going to require a lot but it also doesn't take it's funny that's contradicting it requires a lot but it doesn't require a lot like you a lot of people just do the bare minimum they'll just hey they'll send you an email and that's it but you're going to have to do more than that it's still not that much but it's you're it's going to take that that perseverance like what you just said you reached out to this person and there's a chance that that person probably plenty of them didn't go with you so you're putting in all this effort the answer would be just to put in that effort find ways to to do something different to catch somebody's attention so this one what do you do if a client is not paying so let's say you they sign a contract there's a few approaches to this i'm just curious what you would do yeah yeah yeah for sure and uh i think um sort of my general answer to to questions like this is um number one it depends on how you are charging for for the for the project you know um if you're charging hourly good luck getting your money because there's gonna be a lot of issues in admin and hassle and all that stuff now very important if it's fixed based or value based pricing i've got a i've got a company policy and i tell the client this so i say in the inner terms in the in the proposal template or within the contract i say 100 full payment upfront so there's my company policy payment upfront that solves the problem right now obviously you've got a follow-up question but what happens if a client does not want to pay the full hundred percent upfront then what i say to them is i say look i don't do this all the time which i don't i'm being honest but i will make an exception i will charge 50 percent up front uh you know 50 percent uh of the amount but here's where a lot of developers go wrong and here's a solution to it you don't say fifty percent up front and fifty percent on completion because com the word completion is very relative is it complete based on what you've done or the client's understanding so if you expecting to get the other fifty percent at the end of the month the client is not happy with it good luck trying to get paid it's going to take you another month to get that 50 so this is where it's important i say look it's uh it's not company policy but i will make an exception 50 upfront however i do require the other 50 the remaining 50 on x date whether the project is complete or not because remember this is just helping them from a budgeting perspective and helping them so that they can trust you and they've got doubts and all that stuff so let's say i know it's going to be three months project i would make sure without a doubt that i'm going to take 50 up front before i commence and then 50 percent the remaining on the second month i'm not going to wait until the third month you know and you have to agree to that and make sure that the client understands it so that's pretty much my solution and answer to that problem yeah that was pretty much what i was going to do too is to get that money beforehand so to break it up i would i would rarely do 100 i would usually do it do it in chunks but i always made sure that there was no deliverable product until that money was paid so the client so that way i never put in work and never got paid for because there are clients where you put in some work and they'll just say well i changed my mind so you still put in work now that you don't get paid for so by setting those deadlines you know exactly how much you need to produce so if you're way ahead of schedule you can even slow down or come to your client and say hey we feel like we can deliver this next part quicker let's rearrange that payment but make sure it comes in first i guess agreed agreed yeah so in that case uh kyle if you see any questions i i don't want to hold you too long we're at an hour and 37 minutes this is pretty typical for my stream but i want to respect your time i realized i didn't tell you ahead of time but how long does it take no worries cool no no worries i mean i mean we can do another 10 15 minutes if you can or if others are keen um maybe if someone wants to ask some more questions as well um let's just see which technology do i suggest to put it into to work for long term long term um my i mean dennis would know better but i mean you really can't go wrong with javascript is the foundation of pretty much uh every cool framework and everything there is and that's pretty much my 80 20 answer to that what what do you have to say to that dentist so somebody was asking what tech stack to start with is that correct or what technology to learn yeah which technology would you use yeah yeah yeah so i mean i guess this depends on what you're trying to do if you're just trying to go the freelance route and you want to go with the smaller clients um i would consider learning a language like javascript and going into html and css but i would stick to wordpress just to start and see if i if that's something that i want to do so i'll go there see if i can get some clients and then if i really was into development because you shouldn't do it if you're not into it it's really difficult and guess to learn not difficult but it's really time consuming it's gonna require a lot of energy so my i kind of have this approach where i'm i'm a very hard-working person but i also have this approach of what's the least amount of work i can do to get the most amount of results so by using that approach i'm able to always test the waters too so that way i don't spend six months learning php and decide i can't get clients with and you know just waste all this time so i'm always trying to see a little bit because now if i get clients with wordpress like i did it piqued my interest to learning more okay i want to pick apart these websites so let's go ahead and add in html and css so i can customize these templates or customize a part of a website nice great answer again then brand text youtube how do i get freelancing clients when you just started freelancing and don't have reviews because people mostly prefer other people with higher ratings and reviews how do you how do you get your land one so i assume you're referring to something of a job platform uh it seems like it um you know with uh you know like fiverr or upwork or something and the bottom line is that's the hard truth you know um but as i said at the beginning uh you know there are certain ways of trying to strategically approach that situation about trying to get some reviews and trying to word it a bit differently so let's say instead of being a web developer you could be a web developer for the real estate agent or web developer for you know i don't know like like sass you know um so so so you can niche down and sort of differentiate yourself within that bra broad um ocean right um and uh yeah in terms of just getting reviews um and and uh also from a general sense of testimonials um that's important because clients want to see what you've done to help other clients you know and we did touch on like working for free you know and that's an option so so definitely definitely consider that so this one's going to vary depending on where you're at i'm every contributor has it differently but no you don't need an llc you do you can start something in the us called the sole proprietorship and i'm pretty sure that's somewhat uniform for a lot of places in the world they probably follow the same structure even though the name might not be the same there but a sole proprietorship basically means that you are yourself you're not you know you're not hiring a you know a bunch of employees or anything like that so your sole proprietorship could just be in my case it would just be dennis ivanov like i'm operating as a business as myself and usually you'll just get either you can use your social security number or they'll give you a tax id so now when you're reporting your taxes you're putting it under that business name so now you don't need an llc but you do usually need to start a former company now or a formal company now small projects might work a little bit better or you could probably start a few projects and just take that income in as yourself pretty quick and that's not usually going to be fine in the early stages but once you start pushing over a certain amount is when you might want to establish your business and make it more official so let's see i like that i haven't had a chance to read this one i'm just going to read it up here so i have a product in mind and no it takes time to build and it may take time to build it how long do you tell yourself to be patient and take time to learn i mean as long as it takes i guess um yeah for me yeah like for me i had a product that i wanted to build and i poured in three months and that was enough to get me like started and get that minimal viable product but it was probably another nine months of continuous development to really master that so yeah it depends how bad you want it so in that case i'll probably just uh end the stream on that one then so i don't want to be digging through chat messages right now and trying to find the relevant questions but kyle thank you so much for joining this the insight was amazing i i stalked you for a little bit read a bunch of your articles and you just came out with the uh charging by the hour one funny because i just put out a video on that one too not just but maybe like a month ago so a lot of similarities and it's really cool talking to somebody who's also done this i've noticed we click very well when it comes to our style in pricing and our marketing and business background so thank you thank you so much for coming and giving your insights and taking your time wow well first of all and thank you so much and i've really been a big fan of your channel for for a long time now actually like since last year and it's been an honor and a privilege to chat with you i really really appreciate it and i'm sure we'll be in touch after this as well and also to everyone else in the comments if you're still with us um thank you so much and yeah i hope you found at least some value from it if you have any questions uh more than happy to help and uh yeah i really appreciate uh appreciate it so thank you awesome yeah and uh kyle is linked up to his book his website and uh his twitter account too so if there's anything else you need me to link up let me know and we'll put it there so that's it for now i'm gonna end the broadcast so

Channel: Dennis Ivy

Views: 4,401

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Id: l1sL1hN_dJk

Length: 103min 38sec (6218 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021