How to Start Freelancing as a Data Scientist / Analyst (part-time)

hey guys shashawn kalanithi here and in this video we're going to go over a step-by-step guide to get you up and running with freelancing as a data analyst or a data scientist freelancing is just basically doing any work outside of your regular nine to five usually at an hourly or project-based rate where you're not contracting for the full eight hours of the day so things like upwork things like fiverr these are usually freelancing gigs and the great thing about being a data analyst or a data scientist is that we have a unique set of skills along with other people like software engineers that allow us to easily sell our skills at an hour by hour level so for this video the basic structure we're going to be following is what is freelancing and why you should do it why i personally chose to use upwork for my freelancing kickstarting your upwork profile how to have a killer profile right killer proposal stuff like that and then how to manage clients how much you should charge and then why i quit and things you should look out for if you decide to go into freelancing if you want to get straight into the part where i actually give you the step-by-step guide on getting started on artwork go to this time stamp right over here but for now let's go ahead and talk about why exactly i think you should be doing freelancing and what i liked about it i would say there were three major things i benefited from by doing freelancing the first thing was i was able to just get money right i increased the amount of money i was able to get the second thing was i was able to use it to improve both my technical and non-technical skills i was able to improve things like stakeholder management and improve my technical skills by working on technologies that i would not have been exposed to in the workforce by doing them through work and then third was the income the extra income security that was offered to me by doing this job and that's different from making more money and i'll tell you why in a second so the first thing making extra money now you know i know that people aren't always comfortable talking about money but in my opinion making extra money up until a certain point is definitely a good thing and just generally good for your life um i think that you shouldn't be fueled by greed but you should understand that a large portion of the life that you live will be determined by the amount of money that you earn and that's kind of why i wanted to make a little bit of extra money i would say you know one of the great things about upwork was it by doing working on upwork i was able to actually build up enough capital to go buy a house which hopefully will provide me with some passive income in the future that i can use to give myself more income flexibility as i get older but that's a fairly obvious reason let's go into the second one help me improve my technical and non-technical skills so when you go into the workforce right you're gonna go work for a company and there there will usually be a single tech stack that you'll work for or maybe you'll work for a couple of different tech stacks so for example i work at nordstrom as you could probably tell and over there we use a couple of sql databases but there's one that i work with specifically basically all the time by doing freelancing i was able to work on other sql databases such as google bigquery uh aws redshift and a couple of other technologies that i'm not normally exposed to which is one of the reasons i really liked doing um work through upwork i was able to develop those technical skills additionally there are all the non-technical skills that you'll be able to build up by going into freelancing things like stakeholder management how to properly charge clients and probably the most important one out there which is how to sell yourself to people if you ever want to make extra like a lot of money in your lifetime if you ever want to accomplish a lot in your lifetime you're going to have to figure out how to sell yourself to people and what that means is put your skills in the absolute best light possible that way you can convince people that you are the solution to many of their problems and hopefully your technical skills are at such a level that you actually are the solution to many of those people but i find that technical people oftentimes are not taught these skills of selling yourself to other people to um brag in a very gracious way to show people hey i know all this stuff and i can get all the stuff done for you and maybe exaggerate a little bit and uh rise up to the challenge of actually doing what you were asked to do even if you aren't able to do it at that exact moment so outside of making extra money and improving your technical non-technical skills i would say the third major thing i liked about upwork was it gave me a lot of income security so as many of you will know i work a nine-to-five job at nordstrom and i love my job it's a great job but i like the idea of having the income security that upwork provides me that way if for whatever reason i get fired or i get let go or something right um or i really just don't like my job i make enough money off of up work in order to have the income security to not have to dip into my savings in order to cover my basic living expenses except for i think maybe rent i might have to dip into it a little bit but that extra income security makes me a much stronger negotiator whenever i'm looking for jobs because i don't need the money right now so i would say income security is um although you have to work for it having the option of being able to make money doing something outside of your primary job provides you a lot of freedom in life and it's something that i value quite a bit personally all right so now that we've talked about freelancing in general let's talk about why i personally used upwork this video is not sponsored by upwork although if oprah wants to sponsor me feel free to let me know i've been using the service for over a year right now and absolutely loved it um i used upwork for three major reasons one it seemed more professional to me than the other networks out there two rates seemed to be higher to me than the other networks out there and three there was a specific button on upwork that let me limit the competition for jobs to people looking for us-based contractors uh and so basically this is a switch that you could talk on the upper right corner of the screen that would say only um allow us-based persons to apply for this job and this was very important to me because i didn't want to be competing with someone halfway around the world who's gonna charge a quarter or a six or an eighth of my rate um for comparable or the same work so that switch was super great because as much as i you know am a fan of working hard and i tell people work hard um you know i think that competing with uh competing on rates can be a very dangerous downward spiral for you as far as what you can actually make for the amount of work you put in now that's not to say that other freelancing platforms don't have these services as well and don't have these features as well upwork is just the one that i chose and it had all of the stuff and i was personally happy with it um that's not me saying that other services aren't good just that upwork is good all right so now that we've gone over uh why you should do freelancing in my opinion what i liked about it and why i use upwork specifically let's talk about actually getting you some jobs on upwork aka kickstarting your upwork profile in my opinion there are two major steps to doing this correctly one have a killer profile and two write killer proposals now in upwork the basic premise or the basic process you follow in order to actually get a job on upwork is you go onto the website um and there's two ways you can do this right but you go to the website people will post a job that they need to get done and they'll usually post some kind of budget there as well although that budget make sure that you understand that that budget number is negotiable just because the number is low doesn't mean that you can't ask for more a lot of the times the clients don't necessarily know how much a job should cost but there's a job board and there are proposals on that job board or sorry there are jobs on that job board you submit a proposal and the proposal that you submit can be accepted or denied and then after it's accepted or denied you take on the job you agree to a rate you finish the job you get paid you get reviewed and you review your client so let's start off with getting a killer upwork profile there are four major aspects i think that will actually drastically help you get more jobs and get proposals accepted by clients so the four things are verify your id and your phone number i've noticed that not all people do this and i'm not too sure why because it's a fairly simple thing to do to give your clients a little bit of extra trust that they may need to know okay this is like a real person and it's not just some random person from you know the middle of nowhere and then two if you have any certifications now is the time to use them now is the time to put them upwork has a certification section at the bottom of their profiles so go ahead and put your certifications down there and then three really crank up the marketing speak to 11. you may you may be a little bit uncomfortable using marketing speak uh words like um derives top um top tier insights for clients or i will squeeze every ounce of insight from the data that you have that's actually what i used on my profile which we'll look at in a second but and i've noticed that technical people especially have a lot of discomfort with using language like that but that's the kind of language that in my opinion you have to use on upwork in order to make yourself stick out from the crowd and the good thing is if technical people are uncomfortable using that kind of language this is an easy way for you to stick out the thing is a lot of people on upwork are not other software engineers or other data analysts looking for data analysts to do work for them a lot of the people are just you know people running businesses that need someone to do the work for them and because of that they don't know exactly how the stuff the stuff in our industry works which is why you can you have to use this language in order to you know really stick out and show them hey i have a um i really know what i'm doing check out my profile you can see my profile right over here where you can see the description that i used i especially cranked up that uh information to 11 and try and find a way to stick out for me it was this little donation clause i had on mine as well that was another thing i did a little bit later that allowed me to actually stick out on my proposals and it's the first thing on my profile and you see before basically anything else also notice how my title has my certifications in it as well your title can only can only be so long um but i have it in there as well just to make sure that people see that there as well also if you're a data analyst go ahead and just write down data scientists on your profile in my opinion because the the word data scientist is more common uh in like just the general lexicon out there and so people know what data scientists are and they're deemed to be more experts but you can just take on data analyst contracts and not take data data scientists ones on if you don't want to but i i by using that word you will be able to stick out a lot more to people in my anecdotal experience and number four make sure you ask clients for reviews i know that uh this can be a little bit uncomfortable as well but if you did a good job for a client in my opinion you deserve a good review and you the client will ask you to review them as well usually but i found that clients that i have good relationships with which were basically all of my clients uh i think save one i was able to get a great review from that client so i highly highly recommend that because you're getting more reviews on your profile is the secret sauce to actually making upwork be a profitable and uh time efficient enterprise for you you want to spend as little time as possible looking for jobs and get your profile to a point where actually jobs are coming to you or you have one or two very large clients uh that way you don't have to worry about you know going and finding clients because that is not time that you are actively working and actively like earning money the time that you are looking for proposals so i definitely think that that is something you want to strive for get a bunch of great reviews on your profile next we're going to be talking about writing killer proposals to clients so remember in the process of getting a job at upwork the job gets posted on the website and then you um will apply for the job you send a proposal there are five parts in my opinion that are required in order to write a killer upwork um proposal number two is actually really interesting so the first part is skillfully under bid and do this with your first couple of contracts you want to get two to three five star reviews with text so make sure that the person actually writes down text on uh the review and usually someone's willing to give you a five-star review they'll write down text as well but get two to three five-star reviews with text on your profile this gives you way more credibility than basically anything else in upwork can give you so make sure you do that so this will the reason that this is particularly important and this it should be pretty obvious is that this will help you ask for your own rate in the future under bidding right now so that you win the contract and get that five-star review is a work you're putting in today to reap the rewards of tomorrow it's delayed gratification because you will be uh you will eventually get to the holy grail of upwork where you get emails from clients prior to them posting the job on the public asking for you to apply for the job so that's what happens in my profile right now where i don't i wouldn't have to apply for a job ever again if i didn't want to because the jobs just come to me now because of my uh profile rating and because i had that top rated badge in upwork also um one more thing i should also note is i've done jobs at a loss before like i did like one or two jobs at a loss to myself in order to get those five star reviews but because of that i don't have to work anymore in order to look for jobs and i keep upward gives you proposal points basically that you use in order to um actually like propose to like send a proposal to clients and the reason they do this is to make sure that people aren't just like spamming the entire network with a bunch of like junk proposals um and the reason i completely forgot to mention them is because i haven't used those points basically in forever because uh i don't have to at the end of the day clients come to me asking for uh proposals not the other way around now number two number two this is the secret tip that a lot of people don't know about try and figure out the client's name so oftentimes the client's name will not be like visible on the actual job posting and so what you do in that case is go to the reviews of the client oftentimes a prior contractor will write down the client's name saying john was a great person to work with and have that written out over there and by doing that what you've done is um you've made your proposal instantly way more noticeable to people because people when they see their names they instantly notice them i know whenever i see my name even if it's not referring to myself i instantly notice that there's a couple of commenters on my youtube channel who have who are named shank as well i instantly notice their comments because they have the same name as me so it is a very easy trick that you can do to try and make sure your proposal sticks out at the end of the day that's what you want to do the best jobs have like 10 to 50 proposals in them you want to make sure that yours sticks out another tip also is to make sure that you don't apply for jobs with more than 10 proposals to them because on the actual screen where the job posters looking to see who i should actually inc or who i should actually interview i believe it only shows the top the first 10 proposals so if a job has more than 10 people looking uh looking for a don't even propose in my opinion you'll waste your time by doing that and then number three this one's a really interesting one do the job ahead of time this is especially easy for web scraping jobs so i found that for web scraping jobs oftentimes people will say i need this website scraped and i need this data scraped if i see that there aren't that many proposals for that job what i do is i will go and scrape the data like instantly i will stop everything i'm doing i'll go scrape the data instantly and you can see it on this proposal right here this is exactly what i did and then i actually give a sample to the client and say i have your data ready give me this contract right now and i will email you the data instantly and this is a very easy way to win contracts like instantly like i was able to make like 200 in an hour basically by doing this someone was offering 200 for a web scripting job that's a bit unusual just to be clear that's not at all a common rate for a web scraping job but this one just happened to have that and i basically got 200 for working for one hour because i made sure to scrape the data instantly and go ahead and just send it to the client as quickly as possible and then number four i believe write down as much of the process you'll be following in order to deliver results it shows that you know what you're doing so you'll see in this proposal over here someone was asking me to do i believe a uh web scraping job but it was a bit more of a complicated one where they wanted some stuff automated so i actually wrote down the process one two three four five of exactly what i would do in order to show them and give them confidence that i'm not just telling them hey i will do this job for you but i will do this job and i know what i'm talking about look at this these steps over here so this is another kind of like magic bullet you can use to increase the chances of you getting your proposal accepted something i should make clear is that my proposals get used to get a rejected um a decent amount as well so none of these are maybe magic bolts not the right term but none of these are silver bullets but if you combine all of these tips together you're drastically increasing the chances that your proposal will be accepted and then number five go ahead and attach any prior experience check out this proposal right over here that you might have in relation to the job so you'll see that actually i had a lot of prior experience or i had some prior experience in real estate and real estate analysis for this client over here who was looking for something similar done and i actually attached a project that i've done in order to show them hey i've already done this kind of work um like you know check it out and see how i can help you out i actually won this contract and this was one of my best clients she was so easy to work with um which is we'll go over uh what you should do to make sure that you actually get good clients in the future all right so as you guys saw in that last project that last client what i'd done was i'd actually done a real estate analysis project prior to going for that client and that was just a happy circumstance where i needed to do some data analysis real estate because i was planning on buying a house and i just you know flipped that into my proposal for that client now you may or may not have such product projects in your repertoire so far and if you don't then today's sponsor project pro is exactly the website for you they reached out to me and i checked out their website absolutely loved it this is a i don't know why no one started this concept before but basically they have solved end and data science big data and machine learning projects just uh right for the taking created by the top industry experts at companies from all over the world everything from facebook to walmart uh companies you've definitely heard of so you can go to their website check it out over here you'll see they have a bunch of big data projects for you to practice big data skills data science projects or practice data science skills and remember these aren't just skills to practice these are actual projects that have been done at companies and the whole point of them is that you could take it back to your company or you could take it back to a client that you might be working with and actually work through these projects um that have already been worked through for you so you'll even see they have this really cool customized project path um a little tool over here where you can select what your role is right so i can say i'm like a data scientist and i can select i want to know more about ada boost progressors and then work on let's say a uh i don't know let's go with or you know let's go ahead and do adaboost uh or a decision tree classifier yeah so let's deselect everything we're going to decision tree classifier and then do a clustering problem and i can go whoops sorry classification problem and i can go ahead and get my path over here and i'll get a list of projects that i can use for whatever i might need in the future so it's a curated library of verified solved end-to-end project solutions and data science machine learning and big data all the projects are created by top industry experts from top global tech companies and you'll find end-to-end project solutions reusable code guided videos 24 7 tech support and access to over 2 000 code recipes for free with 120 plus solved projects after you uh join the service so visit projectpro.io to know more about this service subscribe to project pro's youtube right now link in the description below now this is the part of the video where i just go over some miscellaneous tips that i have that i think will be useful for you as well if you want to get onto upwork and actually succeed on the platform one learn a programming language the reason i say this is because not all data analysts know how to program um and even in my videos i tell people you don't have to know how to program to be a data analyst you basically should know sql and a bi tool those are the two well and excel those three things if you know how to do those three things you can get a job as a data analyst now the thing is when you learn a programming language like python or r you're able to do things and a large number of things that other people cannot do and you can take on tasks that are not just data analyst tasks on upwork and don't be afraid to take on tasks that are a little bit outside your wheelhouse it can be a great opportunity to expand your horizons and maybe see uh if a career in something else like maybe software engineering is what you want to be doing or maybe web development there was a web development job that i actually took up and i designed the entire website in python because it's what i knew but knowing python was made it to where i could actually take on a large number of jobs i would not have been able to take on otherwise all right so one important thing that people don't talk about enough about upwork in my opinion is how to manage clients in order to get those five-star reviews you can't just finish the job on time or you can't just finish the job info you need to also finish it on time and in my opinion um or not even in my opinion in my experience sometimes jobs have scope creep and sometimes the job the number of things in the job will expand and more stuff will have to get done and if that's the case then you might have to you might find yourself doing more work than you promised doing which is why i believe managing client expectations is one of the most important things that any consultant needs to know in order to have a successful career on something like upwork and i do that by using this client dashboard which i built out it's the same one i've used whenever i go around and go ahead and do my upwork consulting and you can go check it out on this gumroad link below um it's fairly simple i'll have a screenshot of it over here as well that way you can see exactly what it is you'll see it's not particularly complicated but there's a couple of things that you need to consider you need to always have your clients contact information the preferred method of contact uh the proposal you sent the rate you agreed to sometimes you do stuff at a project level sometimes you'll do stuff at an hourly level um legal documents so ndas sows statements of work basically uh invoices some clients will ask for invoices some don't the scope of the work this is very very important because scope creep or the basic uh incremental increasing of the scope as people add more requirements like oh could you do this thing could you do this and could you do this thing uh is a major danger to uh projects like this now if you're charging by the hour then it doesn't really matter but a lot of the projects that you'll do initially you'll charge a flat rate that way you give your clients uh a lot of confidence that hey i'm not going to pay any more than this to get the work done another tip for you guys as you get more experience you can charge hourly um and then you don't have to put in so much work into figuring out okay exactly how much this is going to cost me and then make sure you have your due dates in there that you're very very clear about when things are due and specifically what is due when the first contract that i did were basically all project based on upwork you can have two types of contracts either hourly or or project based project base basically means that you do some work you get paid a flat fee no matter how long that work took and hourly means you work for a certain number of hours you get paid an hourly rate you want hourly rate uh projects in the future in my opinion event or you usually want that right but what i did is i used to do uh like flat fee like total project um proposals and the reason i did that is it gave my clients a lot of confidence that they uh would only have to pay a certain amount for me and there wouldn't be any creep on my end as far as the rate was concerned and then i have a kanban board down here which is just basically a methodology for uh listing out all the tasks that need to get done whether they're not started in progress or completed this is a great way to help the client know exactly where you are what you're doing and when you're doing it and i find that this level of communication with clients is fairly easy to put together i've already put together the dashboard for you guys it's easy to keep updated and it's a tremendous way to make sure your clients know exactly what's going on and gives them a lot of confidence that way even if things go wrong you can say hey you know i'm very very sorry but like you know this didn't go as expected um can we have a little bit longer to do so i found that as long as you're very clear with clients and you've communicated consistently with them and clearly and accurately with them they're generally more than okay giving you extra time to get stuff done so that's why i recommend having a dashboard like this in order to help your clients out or help communicate with your clients i'd say now i want to talk about what i call the three golden rules of consulting in my opinion uh rule number one provide the client with value multiple times the price they're paying for you in this world in the system that we have currently uh in the market economy that we have currently you do work that work presumably is worth uh a hundred dollars to someone and they'll pay you 50 for it um everyone wins in the exchange you get money that you wouldn't have had earlier they get something of a value greater than the amount of uh for the work that you put in and the economy goes round and round and round makes the reason i say this right is because it is very easy as you get more skill to make more money in this industry to lose sight of what's actually important which is driving value for clients driving value for customers people often ask how do you do this stuff without getting greedy that's how you do it always keep in mind the value the client is receiving for your work and i think by doing this you may not make as much money as someone who it just takes the ultimate greed approach and like always charge their clients as much as they possibly can but you will definitely have a clearer conscience a more cleanly run business and probably a longer running business as well if you want longevity you have to worry about value number two is communicate thoroughly consistently and accurately with clients and that's what that dashboard up there is supposed to help you out with um i find that if you do these three things even if stuff goes wrong clients are rarely angry and then number three this is very important as well the customer's not king i've never believed that the customer is king and the client definitely is not king quickly offload troublesome clients there are always better opportunities out there the customer is not always right that's why they hired you i have been very lucky to only deal with two clients that were quite difficult to deal with in my time one of them i could not offload um and actually that's the one client that gave me a um not a five-star review on my profile if you look at my profile i have one review that's not five stars and it's from that one client um unfortunately the job was short enough to where i couldn't offload the client um i probably shouldn't have taken taken the job to begin with uh and the other one the requirements kept changing and the timelines were very very short uh and poorly planned and the client um one thing i don't really appreciate with clients as clients that freak out consistently um they will come to me and say like hey i need this thing done immediately immediately immediately and like their emails are just a frantic like uh rush of thought and the reason i don't appreciate that is because it is difficult to logically speak and reason out with someone who just has that kind of attitude in general and you never know when they're going to like jump more information on you also don't i would be very careful about clients that are very um persnickety about your rates i'm not at all saying that a client has no right to question your rates they totally do but if you find yourself discussing your rates consistently with clients uh and like having to justify your rate consistently then there are two things to look at one are you driving the value you need to for the client and then two does this client have enough money to be hiring a consultant to do this kind of work you don't want to compete fully on rates in my opinion you want to compete on quality competing on rates is a very easy way to overwork yourself and spend way too much time working and not earning enough money which leads to burnout very very quickly it's bad for you it's bad for your mental health so um managing clients is very very important in my opinion all right so this is the part that everyone always asks me about what should i charge so this is a difficult question to answer i'm sure that there are some people who are much more experienced in the industry that'll be able to give a better answer than i did i've only done i only get off work for about a year or so i normally looked at my uh salary and charged 30 above that that's what i've heard is a kind of good um what do you call it like quick and dirty math you can use to see okay what should i be charging people take your salary and charge 30 above that and then charge a little bit extra as well so for example um and this wouldn't apply to my current salary this would actually apply to my previous salary i charge 66 an hour on upwork um the reason i showed 66 is because upwork takes a certain fee and after they take their fee i'm basically left with 60 an hour which is uh that would be 120 000 a year which is you know more than enough money for what i was doing in upwork i was thinking about quitting by the time i got my nordstrom job anyways and uh i am definitely i'm going to be leaving upwork right now and let me say let me give you a couple reasons to why why why i'm leaving why am i leaving up work the reason i want to go over this with you uh you guys is in order for you to understand the kind of toll that this work takes on you know your mental health your physical health and see is it worth it to you um i definitely think everyone should try it but do you want to go all the way into it and let's go into a couple of reasons i think there are three major reasons number one lack of ownership of the work so um i spend you know my my day job is you know me going to work i build something and that thing is owned by the company i'm totally okay with that for the you know my day job but then what happens is with up work i will um you know log off my main job at five o'clock and then i'll go do up work where i continue to build products for other people now i'm building technical skills i'm getting money it's a completely fair exchange but i guess i just couldn't get over the fact that like all the stuff i was building was not really building my wealth all that much um because i was working hourly right like i would like earn a certain amount of money and then you know i could put in the stock market i could like spend it you know but like i wasn't really building much wealth and i wasn't more than that i wasn't building something that i owned um which is one of the things i was very i feel very blessed about having this youtube channel for it's something that i own and i can build or you know i own i own it as much as you can own it honestly at the end of the day obviously youtube owns it but you know you know what i mean uh number two something to consider and this is really really important uh if you work a tech job which a lot of us do right like we work as uh analytics professionals from a monetary perspective it is often time it often times makes more sense to just chase promotions at your day job instead of doing consulting on the side um understand the opportunity cost of your time of the time you're putting into consulting i think early in your career it can be a great way to increase your skills at a faster rate than other people can increase their skills and you might even be able to charge a lot more for what you do that you get paid for at work but once you get like a good paying job at a major company um for me you know uh at nordstrom it becomes difficult to or more than that it is more time efficient to just chase promotions than it is to go and do this work on the side unless you're able to charge a lot of money for your uh consulting usually you'll have to do some kind of strategy consulting at that point in time so um i will definitely say i feel like the i um made a lesson efficient trade with some of my consulting where i continued to do it instead of putting extra time into my job like the amount of time i put into up work i could have put into my day job and potentially gotten a promotion which would have paid a lot more than upwork uh could have reasonably paid so something to consider and then the third and final reason is uh because of y'all i'm quitting outbreak because of you guys the support that you guys have shown this channel is uh has made it to where i make more than enough money on this channel in order to uh i think actually outstrip what i make on upwork within any reasonable amount of time and it's something i get to own it's something i get to build and it's the reason i want to keep teaching you guys i enjoy teaching you guys these things if you guys have any comments or questions feel free to leave them in the description below it is a lot of fun for me to make these videos um support the channel by supporting our sponsors project pro dot io um amazing website i've used it for a couple of things i really like it um just link in the description below link in the comment section below um but thank you guys so much for checking out my video make sure to like comment and subscribe and if you know anyone else that wants to get into the world of upwork or to get into the world of freelancing make sure you share this video with them please uh sharing my videos is probably the best way you can support this channel thank you guys so much and hope you have a great day you

Channel: Shashank Kalanithi

Views: 43,180

Keywords:

Id: YQ-RXMtQYYM

Length: 29min 48sec (1788 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2022