The Complete Guide To Becoming A Paid Bubble.io Freelancer

have you ever wanted to earn up to a hundred plus dollars an hour building apps for people in bubble obviously obviously obviously right now there's an unprecedented demand for bubble developers who can quickly build and ship MVPs this means that for bubble developers like yourself there's truly never been a better time to start your own freelancing business but of course building a freelancing business from scratch is no easy feat it requires you to master things like sales marketing project management your craft as a bubble developer as well as understand how to manage and deliver client projects oh that must be exhausting so how can you simplify the whole process and capitalize on the current opportunity look over the past 12 months I've been working hard behind the scenes to create my bubble freelancing masterclass this masterclass includes literally everything you need to know about creating and growing your own profitable freelancing business in a matter of weeks not years well in this YouTube video today I'm going to share the first three hours of of that masterclass with you for free this can't actually be happening but why would I do that look I get it maybe I'm just a nice guy but at the end of the day regardless of whether you're looking to build a freelancing business or not I think there's just tons you can learn from this whole course in this free video it might start a little slow as I take the time to analyze the current state of the freelancer market as well as the required skill set you need but once I break through these topics I dive into some of the more juicier areas like building a portfolio that attracts leads as well as how you can Master the art of cold Outreach emails to close clients of your own beyond all that I don't just tell you what to do I actually show you with real examples this is why today you'll also get access to all of the free templates I mentioned in demo within this video this includes things like a fully built portfolio template and bubble a cold Outreach template and even a sales follow-up message template and look you can access all of these through the link in the description of this video whenever you find yourself ready to become a paid bubble developer though I'd always encourage you to check out the full masterclass through the link I also provide in the description but look regardless of whether you do that or not I'm sure you'll learn more than a thing or two from this free video but by this point I've already rambled on for long enough so let's just grab our bubble editor and we can dive right into it foreign before we dive into the actionable lessons that I have set out for us in our tutorial today I just wanted to take the time to just briefly discuss why bubble freelancing is becoming so popular in this day and age and of course how you can capitalize on this opportunity look over the past four years I've been a bubble developer and I've never seen more opportunity for skilled bubble developers than right now each day I'm not only seeing more companies hiring full-time bubble developers but I'm seeing a flood of inquiries looking for skilled bubble Freelancers to help quickly build and launch nvps for startups businesses or even people's personal projects and even though no code tools like bubble can still kind of seem relatively niche in the grand scheme of things the past year has experienced an unseen amount of demand for skilled bubble developers and that's because more people are starting to see the power of the platform and of course it's no surprise why tools like bubble have such a spotlight on them at the moment moment if you think about it it wasn't that long ago that the only way to create an application was by manually writing the code yourself which if you're anything like me you've probably realized how difficult it is to actually learn how to code so you had all of these people who were looking to build applications but didn't know how to code and then all of a sudden when you can introduce a tool like bubble which allows you to create applications without having to write code it really opens up all of the opportunities that you can bring to life and I mean if we were to look at the impact of no code over the past couple of years the traditional way to build an application from the dawn of time up to when no code tools started having an impact was that a company would work with a developer and they'd have to spend at least fifty thousand dollars if not more building that application now why would it cost so much to build that as you would know as a software developer yourself inside of bubble creating and launching software is no easy feat it's a very technical process and it requires a lot of skill and so that's why developers and Engineers have been able to to charge quite a hefty sum for their work since the dawn of time but the other main factor is how long it used to take traditional coders to actually build an application when you're writing code this can be quite a cumbersome process and it can take quite a long time to build everything from scratch so traditionally if you were looking to build an application whether it be a mobile app or a web application if you're working with a traditional developer this could easily take 12 to 18 months if not longer but the worst thing about the traditional way of building application is that it was not interpretable to any other party but developers and what do I mean by that let's say you're working with a traditional software developer who's building an application in something like JavaScript or react once they've created their application and they hand that back over to you so all of the work is done without any coding experience you don't know what the hell is going on inside that project so there's actually nothing you can do to update and change that app so you're really left at the hands of the developer themselves now if we were to compare that to the new way of building applications so this is the current way in which companies are looking to work with bubble Freelancers instead of spending fifty thousand dollars or more I personally find that most NOCO projects can start at around five thousand dollars of course these can go upwards based on the scope of the project I've seen plenty of bubble projects cost 15 25 and sometimes fifty thousand dollars but they're much bigger projects in general but what you'll find is that straight off the bat the price difference here is that working with no code tools is roughly about 10 times cheaper now why is that the case well one of the most important factors in this scenario is the time in which you can build an application so instead of having to build an app over 12 to 18 months you can build it over one to six months so you'll see the timeline is completely streamlined which just means that if the application is being built faster it's going to cost less in the long run but one of the other Main benefits to working with a bubble developer is that the whole Handover process is much more simplified so because bubble is a visual programming tool it's a bit more interpretable for anyone who receives an application so let's say you're working with a client you create a web application for them and it's time to hand that project over instead of sending them a whole repository of just code which kind of looks like spaghetti to someone they're going to end up with an application that they can visually look through and they'll easily be able to interpret how it's built so not only is a tool like bubble more cost and time effective but it also just creates a much better experience for any clients that you're working with as a freelancer now to my point about the price difference of working with a traditional coder versus a bubble visual developer although there is quite a large gap between both of these prices here what you'll find is that both Freelancers are probably actually still charging the same rate and so what do I mean by this if we were to look at the cost equation here of building an application whether that be with a traditional software developer or a bubble visual programmer let's say both developers are charging a hundred dollars an hour and if they're a freelancer that's working with multiple clients they might only work with one client for 10 hours a week that is a pretty realistic time frame but the key difference here between both parties is that the traditional Coda would take 12 months to build an application and so if you were to multiply 100 by 10 and get your average weekly rate and then of course extrapolate that out to a year what you'll find is that the total price someone will pay for that project is forty eight thousand dollars whereas if you were to work with a bubble developer they are still going to charge you a hundred dollars an hour and of course they'll still work 10 hours a week but because they're able to build and launch the project over three months not 12. it's Gonna Save You thirty six thousand dollars in the grand scheme of things and that's just because the developer is going to get the application done in a fraction of the time that the traditional Coda would so as you can see it's a bit of a no-brainer as to why companies are starting to make the change to working with no code bubble developers now of course another reason why bubble is so popular when it comes to Noco tools and a big factor as to why companies and brands are looking to work with bubble Freelancers specifically a key value proposition bubble has is that you can use it to build almost everything and as a bubble developer myself I truly do mean everything when you're working with bubble you can build things like marketplaces on-demand apps booking platforms matchmaking apps internal tools and dashboards directories social media apps project management tools and so much more so you can really see that bubble isn't just a niche tool for one specific use case it's Broad and it can cover a whole Myriad of use cases for any client within any particular industry and so who are these clients that want to work with bubble Freelancers and of course who want to work with you today I just wanted to take the time to highlight a few specific use cases of clients who tend to work with bubble Freelancers more than others because I really think these are going to be the key clients you're going to work with as a bubble freelancer yourself and so what I want to do is just break down a few key personas so that way we can identify first of all why they're looking to work with a bubble developer what their goals are and of course how you can source and start working with these clients so if we were to take a look through my list here one of the most common use cases I see of clients looking for Freelancers is often startup Founders looking to build their initial MVP and now I'm not just talking about self-proclaimed entrepreneurs trying to build a little passion project on the weekend I'm actually talking about real startup Founders who have raised money and are looking to gain traction within their target market so in my example here today we have Evan who is a startup founder he's looking to build an initial MVP and because he wants to get his product to Market as quickly as possible he knows that bubble is the best tool for the job so clients like Evan have traditionally taken the time to do their research which means that they know that traditional coding will be either too expensive or time intensive which is why they're looking for a no code solution like bubble because they're looking to validate their idea as quickly as possible speed is the number one attribute they're looking for now when it comes to working with clients startup Founders like Evan are typically my favorite people to work with particularly if they've just raised money price isn't really something they're sensitive to and because they have such a sense of urgency to bring their product to Market they're sometimes even happy to pay a premium for your services and because most startup Founders can respect technical skills I also find that they're a bit more lenient with the project and they really just understand you as a freelancer more so if I was to only have one key type of client that I work with I personally would choose startup Founders like Evan and now although startup Founders are great to work with there is another type of customer who I'd also recommend servicing and that is small to medium-sized business owners like Christina in this case Christina is an owner of a small to medium size business and I find that these types of customers are typically looking to build a product that can complement their existing business service or even their existing business product so in this case you'd be building a client-facing product that's going to help Christina get more out of her business so in short you're just going to be building a product that her customers will interact with and the reason why someone like Christina would Source a bubble freelancer like yourself is that although she is quite educated and knowledgeable about her own particular business and skill set she just lacks the domain expertise to learn a tool like bubble and more importantly she just lacks time small to medium-sized business owners have a lot on their plate so having to learn how to build a whole product from scratch even though it might be a little easier than traditional coding is still going to be a massive feat for someone like Christina now one thing I've found with these types of clients is that although they're looking to Outsource the initial product build with a freelancer after the project has been complete they'll often won't complete control over how they can manage and make changes to the product itself just because as a business owner in the long term they don't want to be so dependent on a third party and so when you're working with clients like this it's always important to create thorough documentation throughout the process of building the product itself just so that way at the end of the project you can not only hand over the product itself but you can also give them an actionable guide to how they can actually manage and make changes to it and of course this is also a service that you could even charge for within the actual project itself now another key client type that I see looking to Outsource work to Bubble Freelancers is kind of along the same lines as Christina so if you remember I'd mentioned that Christina here is a small to medium-sized business owner who's looking to build a product that will service her customers or her clients but another really core use case I see for people looking to Outsource work to Bubble Freelancers is small to medium-sized business owners who are looking to build internal tools so in this example here we have another Christina and once again she runs an established business only in this use case she's looking to build an internal tool that will help us save time and streamline existing processes so perhaps there's a manual task that she does or she's previously used an existing software solution that doesn't meet her specific needs for her business and so that's why she might be looking to Outsource work to a bubble freelancer to build a bespoke custom solution and of course similar to our previous small business owner this type of small business owner would also like to have complete control over the product once it's been complete so that just means that they'd like to know how they can make changes to it as the needs of their business also grow and evolve now these are just three use cases of potential clients I see looking to Source bubble developers of course there's a whole Suite of additional use cases and clients from different Industries and different verticals who all need the work of bubble Freelancers but these are just the three main types of clients I've seen from my own experience in this field so these are the main types of clients that I wanted to cover and to be honest these are three of the better types of clients to work with now regardless of if you only ever want to work for these three types of clients or if you're happy working with any other client from any other industry it's super important to understand the value proposition you can give to each individual client because of course each client is going to have different needs and wants because if you remember in our first example of the startup founder his main need was speed and time so because he wanted to launch a product to Market as quickly as possible that was his main need and want so of course if you're serving that client that would be the value proposition you would deliver to them whereas if you were working with a small to medium-sized business owner they might be looking to either drive more revenue or save time through an internal tool so depending on their needs and wants you're also going to tailor your messaging and value proposition to that specific use case and so that's why it's so important to understand what types of clients you want to work for and what kind of value proposition you can offer them and so that's why I like to take the time to construct those personas in advance because if I can really understand what particular client I would like to serve it just allows me to hone in on that message and of course that will eventually help me attract the clients that I want and the biggest thing to remember about value propositions across different clients is that each individual client is going to perceive value in different ways so to my example before a client might value the speed in which you can work out another client might actually just value your ability to build an application so they want a best-in-class application that's going to be super fast super responsive and it's going to really show your skills as a bubble developer whereas other clients might actually just want a basic MVP but the thing that they would value the most is the communication that you provide them throughout that whole process so are you walking them through all of the features you're adding are you sharing all of the roadblocks in the way and are you clearly communicating how the project is progressing overall and similar to a point that I mentioned before I think the best way to understand what type of value a client is going to perceive the most is just by understanding what their biggest pain point is now as I mentioned the two best examples for this are either cost and time is the client looking to work with a bubble freelancer because they're more cost effective in the long run or is it because they can build the application in a quarter of the time and of course another big factor when it comes to the value proposition that you can offer to clients is understanding if they're building an external tool or something internally and a great example of the difference between the two is with our two examples of this small to medium-sized business owners I just gave so our first small to medium-sized business owner was looking to build a client-facing tool so this is a product that's going to help her drive more revenue from her existing clients or customers whereas in the second example I'd explained how you could build an internal tool for another small to medium-sized business owner and of course the main value proposition for foreign tunnel tools is not to drive more Revenue but instead is to save more time and so if you're ever trying to clearly communicate a value proposition It's always important to understand how much additional Revenue your products going to drive for that business or how much time it's going to save them because of course time is money and in both examples you can actually kind of calculate the overall value you're going to deliver so let's say for our first small to medium-sized business owner where we're building that client-facing tool if we were to charge the customer ten thousand dollars to build that application it's important for us to understand what the chances are of that product driving an additional ten thousand dollars of revenue for that business and if the chances are quite High the Project's eventually just going to pay for itself so it's a bit of a no-brainer for that business owner to work with you as a freelancer and of course in our second example where we're saving the business owner time can we put a dollar value on the actual amount of time that we're going to save them so we could perhaps speak to that business owner and ask them what their hourly rate is and then multiply that by how many hours in the day or week week think our new internal tool is going to save them and then of course that will give us a total amount of time in a dollar value and if that value is higher than the cost of the project itself once again it's going to be a complete no-brainer because the amount of value that we're going to deliver to them as a freelancer is going to be higher than the value that they pay us for that project and so that's why it's really important to take the time to understand what your value propositions are whenever you work and Source clients and I really don't think enough Freelancers take the time to actually think through this thoughtfully but this is what's going to help separate you in the overall freelancing market now I know I touched base on this before but I really just want to hone on in on why there's currently so much demand for bubble Freelancers in the no code space and why if you're an experienced bubble developer you'd almost be silly not to create a freelancing business at this point in time so unlike most no code tools bubble is actually a product that's been around for 10 plus years now I know that it's only really become mainstream over the past three three to two years but bubble itself started 10 years ago so it's a tool that's much more mature than other NOCO tools that have just emerged and so that's why bubble has a huge Advantage when it comes to the overall adoption of the tool it's just because it's been around for so long and people can really trust it so bubble's not this new startup who's shooting for the moon and could potentially fail within a year it's a trusted product that's slowly being created bit by bit over a 10-year process so bubble truly is in it for the long haul and that's a massive Advantage when you're freelancing as a no code developer just because businesses want solutions that are going to be around for the long term they don't want to work with Freelancers who are going to use some tool that disappears in a year because that means that they'd obviously have to rebuild another solution with another freelancer and so they want something that's tried and trusted and is mature in the overall space and so that's why bubble is the top pick for businesses looking to work with Freelancers the other big benefit to Bubble is that it already has a mature ecosystem of plugins and provide is so you can think of these almost like all of the plugins inside a bubble as well as the templates that you can get access to and of course with all of these third-party extensions what you'll find is that the possibilities with bubble truly are endless and I mean I don't even have to explain that because I'm sure you've experienced that firsthand but when it comes to Bubble you really can build pretty much anything and even though bubble might not support that in its core product of course you can use an integration with a plug-in or even a third-party API which opens up another world of opportunity for Freelancers and most importantly when it comes to Bubble it truly is one of the closest comparisons to actual coding so when you think about it bubble actually is a visual programming language as a bubble developer you still need to think about the complex logic or conditions that power an application but thankfully you just don't have to write the physical code that of course is bubble superpower it does that on the back end without you seeing it and because it is a visual programming language it opens itself up to a whole lot of possibilities that you can't achieve in other the no code tools and look I could honestly sit here and ramble on all day about how great bubble is when it comes to building applications but as I mentioned I'm sure you've already experienced that firsthand so I'm not going to waste your time repeating anything that you already know what I do just want to talk about is how you as an experienced bubble developer can maximize the opportunity in the current freelancing market and to be completely transparent with you that is the overall objective of this course you're taking today so my goal is to help you not only set up your own freelancing business but I want to make sure that you can continually grow that as a profitable business that serves your life because I've experienced first hand how empowering that can actually be now throughout this course today I'm going to cover a whole Suite of things you need to know in order to create and run your own profitable freelancing business but a few key points I just want to touch base on here when it comes to maximizing your opportunity as a freelancer is just around how important it is to become an experienced practitioner in the space so although I'm sure you're familiar with using bubble at this point in time you're going to need to be able to communicate that with the outside world I've seen some bubble developers out there with years of experience who don't actually share any of that knowledge publicly and so although they're exceptional Bible developers the world actually just doesn't know it and so they really struggle to find clients and so throughout our course today I'm going to give you some actionable examples of how you can be perceived as an experienced bubble practitioner and that's going to give you a huge Advantage when it comes to maximizing opportunity just because people are not only going to be able to see your bubble skill set but they're going to build a relationship with you before they've even communicated with you so that just means it's going to increase the opportunity for inbound freelancing leads when it comes to freelancing another critical component of maximizing opportunity is just going to be setting clear boundaries and so when you're getting started more often than not you're just going to want to take on any freelancing project that comes your way and as tempting as that can be it's so important to set clear boundaries about the projects you work on and the projects you turn away because you're a freelancer you only have a finite amount of hours you can spend in each day and so in order to maximize opportunity you need to only work on the projects that are going to serve you best now of course I know that's easier said than done but I'm going to show you some actionable tips today that can help you master this and now this is going to be a huge game changer because if you spend a few hours that you have in your day working on client projects that are going to serve you well it just ensures that you're not wasting your time on projects that aren't really going to benefit you in the long run and that is going to be a big win as a freelancer and finally the last two points here kind of go hand in hand but being able to position yourself ahead of the curve as a freelancer is going to be a massive Advantage so if people can perceive that you as a bubble developer know your essentially and you're always on the Forefront of what's possible using the tool people are going to be confident in your ability to work with them as a freelancer which is going to help you build trust and social proof which of course is going to help you close more projects now I'm going to be sure to dive into all of these Topics in more detail throughout our separate modules but at this point I just want to wrap up this module because I think I've rambled on long enough about this particular topic my main goal with this first module was just to summarize why now is the best opportunity to become a bubble freelancer how you can understand the value the bubble Freelancers offer and how of course you can maximize your opportunity as a bubble freelancer and at this point we're only scratching the surface of what's possible foreign the purpose of this section in our master class is to discuss the required skills you'll need before you can actually kick start your business as a freelancer now within this I want to discuss both the hard skills you'll need as well as the soft skills so we're not only going to talk about what kind of skill set you need inside a bubble which is probably what you're more familiar with at this point in time but in my opinion more importantly I'd also like to discuss the soft skills you'll need so things like understanding how to properly communicate with a client as well as how you can actually manage that relationship throughout a project and of course I'm going to make sure I leave no stone unturned here I want to not only lay out all of these skills you'll need but I also want to give you an actionable guide that explains where you can learn these skills so that way if you don't have any experience in a particular area you can quickly get up to speed in our tutorial today before we dive in and run through the actionable modules where I explain how you can set up your freelancing business and also manage client projects I first just wanted to take the time to talk about the essential skill set you're going to need as a freelance bubble developer and contrary to what you might think this isn't just going to focus on the skills of using bubble as a tool instead I also want to touch base on the soft skills you need in order to run a successful freelancing business and a big mistake I see a lot of bubble developers make when they want to start their freelancing business is putting a large emphasis on the hard bubble skills so that's their ability to actually use bubble but they take no time to train their soft skills so things like their client communication and although you could be the best bubble developer out there if you have no soft skills you'll make a terrible freelancer and this is actually something I see quite frequently what you'll find is that those who actually Thrive as a bubble freelancer are those with more business experience so these are the people who know how to Source clients how to manage clients and how to actually deliver projects and of course it is important that they have Bubble skills but their ability to manage their own freelancing business is what makes them Thrive now this module is going to focus on all of the different skills both hard and soft you need throughout each stage of your bubble Journey as a freelancer so this is going to start from the skills you need right at the beginning so when you're trying to Source your first initial clients through to when you're a seasoned freelancer who can pick and choose between the clients that they have and so the first thing I did want to focus on is actually the hard skills you should have as a bubble freelancer now thankfully you can be a freelancer across multiple different levels you don't need to be the world's best bubble developer in order to start taking on freelance clients in fact I think you'd be quite surprised at how low the barrier to entry can be for a bubble freelancer and so when it comes to actually becoming a bubble freelancer I like to break the hard skills into three different stages so these are almost like the freelancing tears and these three stages are beginner intermediate and advanced and these are all pretty self-explanatory but as a new bubble freelancer you should always start at the bottom and then gradually work your way down to the top and the main reason for this is because your sole objective as a freelancer is to never over promise and then under deliver in fact you want to do the complete opposite you want to under promise and then over deliver to your clients and the biggest mistake I see for bubble Freelancers is that if they're a new freelancer they'll take on an advanced project straight away and immediately it's just out of the scope of their hard bubble skills meaning they don't know how to do something and so then inevitably what happens is that the project is a complete failure and they burn that client as well as any potential future clients they have and it really just doesn't create a good experience because that freelancer might think that they're just bad at using bubble when in fact they could have actually just taken on a beginner project and actually thrived at that but they just bit off more than they could chew and to my point that I mentioned before you don't need to be the best bubble developer in order to start freelancing you just need to understand which of these tiers you currently sit within and what I also find is that if you're to start at the beginner tier and then slowly work your way up it also helps you build confidence as a freelancer and of course I have a dedicated module that's going to touch base on that today but confidence is one of your number one assets as a freelancer if you don't have confidence it significantly impacts your ability to deliver on a project and just imagine if you were to take on an advanced project straight away and have it blow up that's really going to affect your confidence as a freelancer and make you even start to question if this is something that's right for you and so again that's why I like to break this down into three tiers and I always recommend you start at the beginning now each tier is also going to determine how much you can charge as a freelancer so obviously if you're working on more simple beginner projects you're only going to be able to charge less and as you work your way up and start working on more complex projects that's when you can really start to charge the big dollars as a bubble freelancer because at that point you're probably connecting with third-party apis and services and so the work you're doing is actually quite close to traditional coding itself but of course to my point before there's nothing wrong with just starting at the beginner tier and so what I want to do right now is break down all of the different types of projects you can work on within each tier and what you'll gradually see is how how we can actually work our way through these different tiers and end up at the top within our beginner tier here what I wanted to do is just list out the different types of projects you could take on as well as what bubble skills you should know in order to fit within this particular tier and I might just move my head out of the way so you can see this entire list but when it comes to taking on beginner tier projects you can think of these as basic applications so things like job boards and directories I find that there's not a whole lot involved in those particular applications although they're definitely more than just a static website and so I think these are great projects to take on board if you're just starting your journey as a Bible freelancer and so if we were to think about the skills you need to build something like a job board or a directory you're obviously going to need to understand how you can create a basic database and within that you'll also need to understand how you can create new data entries as well as change existing data so when something's like a job board you would allow companies to post new jobs and make changes to those jobs and it's the same with the directory you need need to allow someone to create an account and of course create a new listing on that you're also more than likely going to need to be able to process one-way payments and what do I mean by one-way payments this essentially just means that one party is going to pay another and that is it so we're not processing Marketplace payments we're not paying out any third party and taking a commission fee on that instead we're just processing one transaction so in the example of a job board let's say a company purchases a job ad on a website that company would just be paying a one-time fee to the owner of that website so that is a one-way payment now of course when you're using one-way payments you can easily just take advantage of the free stripe plugin with bubble that's going to handle everything you need for these beginner projects as I alluded to before being able to create a generalized data structure is going to be important so being able to create a relational database which just means that some of your data fields link out to separate data types and just understanding that it's important to structure these correctly so you don't want to have too many lists of items and you don't want to have data types with hundreds of data fields just because that's really going to start to slow these applications down so just understanding how you can actually build and optimize a basic database is going to be important I also think being able to use custom States and URL parameters is going to be essential for almost any project that you create as a freelancer and look to be honest these are pretty easy features to get your head around and I'm sure if you've been building in bubble for quite a while you'll know exactly how to take advantage of these and a big no-brainer for any application you create for any client is being able to make it fully responsive so both across desktop and mobile devices now personally I find that the new flexbox responsive engine is a godsend it simplifies the entire process of creating fully responsive applications and so before you take on any beginner project I think it is essential for you to understand how you can make a project fully responsive and now if you have all of these hard skills in bubble bow all means you can start taking on beginner tier projects but if you're at the point in your journey where you need to refine one of these skills I also just wanted to display a list of resources I'd recommend checking out so I actually have a whole library of existing courses that explain how you can build these beginner projects and I personally find that the best way to learn anything is by building a clone product of an existing tool that you use just because that way it allows you to replicate the real world features of any application and what you'll find when you're working with freelance clients is that they'll often come to you and say I'm looking to build a job board like indeed or a CRM like Salesforce and so understanding how you can recreate these applications is going to be a huge Advantage just because when a client asks you to kind of replicate a real world product you're already going to have a clear idea on how you can bring that to life now moving on from our beginner tier in our intermediate tier this is where you can start building applications like Market at places social networks and on-demand services and by on-demand Services I just mean things like ride hailing services or even delivery apps and in my opinion the intermediate tier isn't that much of a fast stretch from the beginner tier building on top of the existing skills you would have within the beginner tier I think it's important at this tier to really understand how you can build and optimize a successful database structure so this is a database that can handle thousands of users and thousands of Records so that just includes splitting out your data types making sure that you're not storing data that you don't need to immediately display under one of your main data types and then of course also making sure that when you're performing a search for things inside of your bubble editor that that particular search is fast and responsive as well the last thing you want is slow page load times another big factor here is the ability to process Marketplace payments so this would be through using a tool like stripe connect which just allows you to process a transaction on behind half of a merchant then as the application owner take a commission fee on that before you then pay out the remaining amount to that Merchant and of course there are plugins that allow you to easily do this but being able to process Marketplace payments is going to be absolutely essential within this tier and then on top of that being able to use Advanced Integrations through plugins so these could be custom plugins like extensions on maps being able to connect with third-party email service providers so things like sangrid or mailerlite and sometimes these Integrations will require you to Source API keys so this is when things can get slightly more complex as a freelancer and if you don't yet have these hard skills as a bubble developer here is a list of the courses within my own course Library I'd recommend you looking at so you'll see here once again my courses explain how you can rebuild a clone of an application and a lot of these will explain how you can build marketplaces so things like a freelancer Marketplace like Fiverr or a property Marketplace like Airbnb there's an on-demand service like uber social networking apps like Instagram and Linkedin and of course a matchmaking app like Tinder and I think that all of these tutorials are going to give you a great building block as to how you can start learning these skills required of the intermediate tier but then let's say you've taken on a couple of intermediate projects and you've nailed them all it's time that you can finally start taking on more advanced projects as a freelancer and within the advanced tier this is where you can start building Advanced applications like appointment scheduling or even applications with video based features when it comes to integrating things like videos or live chats these can be a lot more complex in bubble just because you not only have to use a third-party tools and integration but things like video files can take up a lot of storage in your database so more often than not you might actually need to integrate with a third-party database and so if you were taking on projects within the advanced tier I recommend you have a good knowledge base on using API Integrations and that's not just sourcing an API key for a plugin in what I mean here is actually setting up a custom API and either creating or reading data from a third-party service you should also be comfortable with back-end and scheduled workflows so these are going to allow you to create powerful features within your app that don't just rely on your user's input another important thing is recursive workflows so if you're ever creating or deleting a list of data recursive workflows will be your best friend and these can definitely be a little bit more complex if you are relatively new to bubble but that is why these features are within the advanced tier there's also the ability to connect with external databases as I mentioned so you could use things like backend lists or AWS or even Google Firebase but in order to connect these external databases you'll definitely need to know how to use an API so again that's why this sits within our Advanced tier and finally you could also choose to use custom CSS so if you find there's some bubble elements that don't give you the flexibility you need you can always add your own custom CSS to expand its capabilities now if you're a bubble developer who does not yet have the hard skills required within our Advanced tier I do have a list of resources here that you could use so if we were looking at some of my clone build projects I've created a clone of something like Clubhouse which has a real-time audio feature baked into it and that required me to use a slightly more advanced Plugin or I also have a tutorial about how you can build an appointment scheduling application like zopdoc on my YouTube channel I even have a tutorial about how you can create recurring subscriptions so that way if you're ever building a paywall within your application that charges a weekly monthly or yearly subscription this tutorial will cover everything you need and within this guide it actually covers how you can use web hooks from stripe which is definitely more of an advanced feature and I also have things like how you can create a social login with Facebook through an API because I do find that when you're working on more advanced projects building user authentication through a third-party solution is a pretty common feature that some clients will last for so that's why I think it's important to understand how you can do that now I do apologize but most of the resources that I've created to date are more catered towards bubble developers at the beginning of their Journey so bubble developers going from zero to one I'm definitely in the process of creating more resources for advanced bubble developers however at this point in time unfortunately I don't have a list of existing tutorials that I've created myself and so what I recommend doing is by all means checking out the tutorials created from the bubble community and don't worry my feelings won't be hurt if you go elsewhere for this content I really think platforms like YouTube and the bubble Forum are the best place to learn anything about Advanced bubble resources and in fact I'll even include some links to some recommended tutorials I'd suggest you check out if you want to learn how to build your Advanced tier skills so that's things like back-end workflows working with apis recursive workflows creating things like custom events and even integrating with third-party databases so I'll be sure to include a list within the this particular module to save you the time of having to go and search for those yourself but at this point in time what I now want to focus on is the soft skills you'll require as a bubble developer and as I mentioned at the beginning of our tutorial soft skills are arguably in my opinion one of the more important things you need to build as a freelancer in order to succeed soft skills are what's going to separate a good bubble freelancer from an exceptional bubble freelancer and by the end of our overall masterclass I want to make sure you sit within the exceptional category the reason why I think soft skills are so important as a freelancer is because it's a key point of difference that you can offer over anyone else because if you can prove that you're not only a good bubble developer but you possess great communication skills and you know how to lead a client project at that point in time you're no longer just competing on price with any other bubble developer instead you're in your own category where you can offer more value than anyone else so soft skills are going to be your main value differentiator so if I was to break down a list of things that bubble Freelancers think clients actually care about it's more often than not things like how well the freelancer knows how to use bubble I know a lot of Freelancers stress about clients only focusing on price so how much the project will cost to build or something like how fast the application is going to be most Freelancers think that clients also prioritize how quickly the app can be built or even the amount of features that they can actually bake into the app now by all means these are completely valid points that clients do in fact care about but this isn't the only thing that clients are focused on when they start looking for a freelancer to build their product instead what clients actually also care about is the relationship they're going to have with the freelancer they don't want to work with someone they hate they're going to want to work with someone that they actually trust and so that's why it's so important as a freelancer to build trust it's going to be one of your greatest assets clients will also care about how well the freelancer can clearly understand their goal so I don't know if you remember but in our previous module at talked about the different use cases of clients who look for Freelancers so there was our startup founder and our two small business owners now each of those three clients had a different goal that they were trying to achieve one was trying to build a product as quickly as possible another was trying to drive more revenue for their business and the last person was trying to save more time for themselves now if I was working for the small business owner who wanted to drive more Revenue within their business but I kept prioritizing features that are going to save them time I clearly haven't understood that their goal is to in fact drive more Revenue which is going to lead to some frustration when the project doesn't work as effectively as the clan was hoping and that is of course when you can start to lose things like trust clients also really care about the freelancer having their best interest in mind so although at Value exchange is gonna happen throughout this process clients want the Freelancers to actually care about the projects they're creating and almost be invested in the client's success and this of course course all comes down to the trust and relationship that you can actually build with that client and a great way to build that relationship is by clearly communicating throughout the entire project so is the freelancer sending the client frequent updates about how the project is tracking along as well as being candid about any of the roadblocks they experience along the way your ability to communicate as a freelancer is going to be one of the best tools you have and I really don't see enough Freelancers take advantage of this if you go above and beyond to clearly communicate with the client throughout the entire project what you'll eventually find is that there's no nasty surprises in the end because both parties are clearly aware of how the project is tracking along and that can all be included in the overall service that the freelancer provides the level of service you provide is going to be like the overall experience your client has and of course if you were building a software application for someone user experience is a big Focus so of course you're going to want the product to be as intuitive as possible for the end user so that way they don't have any frustrations while they use it and it's actually the exact same when you're working with clients although you're selling services not a product it's just as important to deliver a nice experience for the actual client because if you remember the clients you're going to be working with are also going to be business owners so they don't want this to be a burden in their life they've got more important things they need to worry about instead they want you as the freelancer to craft a beautiful experience for them where you can lead the project and deliver on your promises and although the quote-unquote experience isn't a tangible item you'll bill out to a client it certainly does impact the price you can charge for different clients if you were working with clients who ran a business of their own I'm sure they'd pay a premium to have less stress throughout the entire process and that of course all comes down to the service you can provide as a freelancer and so when it comes to the essential soft skills you need to learn as a bubble freelancer this can include things like Rapport building so before someone even becomes a paying client it's important for you to be able to build rapport with them so that way you can not only relate to them identify their pain point but you can also deliver a value proposition that's going to be best suited to their needs and now throughout that process it's going to be essential for you to be relatable thankfully as you run your own freelancing business this actually becomes easier because as a business owner of your own if you're communicating with other business owners you can start to relate about some common problems that you might have in your day-to-day work some other important soft skills can include things like communication as I've just mentioned so how frequently and how well you can articulate the progress of the overall project so are you sending weekly updates or are you just emailing the client once the Project's done in which case you wouldn't speak to them for a month I know if I was working with a freelancer I'd want someone who would keep me in the loop it's also important as a freelancer that you take ownership of the project the clients paying a freelancer to build this because they don't want to have to worry about it themselves they want to pay someone for the skills that they already possess if the client was going to have to lead the project they may as well just learn how to use bubble themselves and so that's why it's essential for you as a freelancer to take ownership of the project not only throughout the process of actually building the application but also managing the overall project itself and this actually leads me to my next point which is being able to master time management so as a freelancer you're going to have multiple projects you're going to be working on at once and so what you'll need to be able to do is identify which particular project has a core Milestone coming up so that way you can prioritize that and then deliver that to the client on time and trust me that's going to be super easy when you've only got one client but as you start to take on more clients this can be more challenging and so that's why time management is going to be a really important soft skill to possess and when it comes to all of these soft skills here today I've actually created a dedicated module in our freelancing master class that's going to take a deep dive into each individual one of these and I'm not only going to give you the step-by-step instructions on how you can start building your skills here but I'm also going to give you a suite of TurnKey templates which allow you to master these skills without even trying and now as we wrap up this section of our master class today I just want to move through a list of action items for this particular module so at this point in time after we've reviewed both the hard and soft skills you should possess as a bubble freelancer I want you to first take the time to review your overall hard skills my job today is to of course train you on those soft skills but at this point I need you to identify where you sit with your current hard skills so that's your experience inside of bubble what I'd love for you to do is just take the time to review all of the different tiers that I've listed out before so if you remember these were our beginner intermediate and advanced tiers and what I'd like you to do is just review what kind of projects you think you'd be willing to take on as a freelancer if you were to start your business today so do you want to start with just some beginner projects which is completely fine or do you think you're ready to take on something a bit more intermediate now based on the skills that you currently have and the skills you think you need to start developing I recommend you create something almost like an education roadmap so that way you can help level up your skill set and buy an education roadmap I just mean that you grab a list of courses you think you should take in order to start building out your hard bubble skills so if you're not familiar with apis you should start just collecting a list of some API tutorials or documentation you need to sit down and read and the same thing goes for things like back-end workflows recursive workflows integrating with third-party tools and services if there was anything on that list that you weren't 100 confident in I'd recommend just doing some research to find some resources that can help and of course as I mentioned earlier I'm going to be sure to include a link to some recommended resources that I think you should check out so hopefully that'll save you some time having to search for those yourself but for now I just wanted to wrap up this module because I think we've taken the time to uncover both the hard and soft skills you need as a bubble freelancer and I can't wait to keep building out on top of these throughout our overall masterclass today thank you the purpose of this module in our overall master class today is to discuss exactly what you need to include within your own freelancing portfolio so your portfolio is going to almost be like the central hub for your freelancing business it's going to be where New Leads can find out about your service how they can see past projects that you've worked on and it's ultimately going to be a place that helps you build trust with a client so that way they can start to determine if you're someone that they actually want to work with now throughout this module today I'm not only going to walk you through these steps involved in creating a portfolio of your own but of course I'm going to streamline the whole process for you by giving you a turnkey template you can use so that way you can easily just add in all of your information and then you'll have a portfolio that's ready to go look like every other module there's so much that I want to cover inside of this so let's just jump right into it in our master class today before we can move on to the modules focused on sourcing and managing paid clients there's a little bit of housekeeping we'll need to do here first and a big part of that is running through the process of building your freelancer portfolio now having your portfolio is absolutely essential as a freelancer it's going to be the best way to demonstrate your skills as a bubble developer as well as your skills as an actual freelancer and so when it comes to a portfolio this is almost like a non-negotiable for any freelancer if you don't have a portfolio and you're trying to become a freelancer it'd almost be like trying to get to the moon without a spaceship it's just not possible a portfolio will be like an extension of yourself throughout your entire freelancing career it's a centralized place to Showcase your entire skill set not just as a bubble developer but also as a person and so today what I want to focus on is exactly what you should include throughout your own portfolio because if you haven't yet created one what I'd like to do is show show you how to build one from scratch and perhaps if you already have an existing portfolio I'd like to help you optimize that so you can increase the amount of Leverage that it gives you and so throughout this particular section of our overall masterclass I'm going to break down the exact things I believe you should include within your own portfolio and then of course I'm going to streamline the whole process by giving you a turnkey template that you can use in order to bring your portfolio to life in a fraction of the time so when it comes to an overall portfolio the number one objective you should have is that you want to showcase your tangible skills and so when it comes to freelancing trust is one of the biggest assets you'll ever need to build with a client and when it comes to building trust actions truly do speak louder than words you could say all of the right things to a client on paper however when it comes down to it if you don't know how to use bubble or you don't know how to manage a project you're not really going to be a great freelancer and so that's why it's so important to actually show your tangible skills to a client throughout your portfolio so this can include both your hard and soft skills a portfolio also helps you create social proof which once again social proof can help you generate trust it just provides a way for a potential client to get some sort of validation that you as a freelancer are good at your craft another essential use case for a portfolio is that it helps tell your story so it helps deliver your unique message as a freelancer so this is where you can really start to build relationships with a client before you even speak to them if you're able to portray your story in a way that relates to your particular client base if a lead then goes on to read more about your story and they like your persona and they think you're someone who is relatable or someone who would understand their objectives they're more likely to work with you than someone else and so that's why it's so important to include a short summary of yourself and your experience as a freelancer on your portfolio and later on of course I'm going to be sure to show you how we can actually craft that section on your portfolio itself but the last thing I just wanted to touch base on is that your portfolio will be used to build trust now I've already alluded to this before but I really can't reinforce this enough when it comes to freelancing trust is by far one of the greatest assets you will have if you can build trust with potential leads they're more likely to convert to paying customers if you can build trust and a relationship with those customers they're more likely going to give you repeat work or even refer you to their own network so trust is an absolute essential thing to build from the beginning and this can start at your portfolio but a big question I get when it comes to creating a portfolio is how you can create a portfolio with absolutely no client experience so let's say you're an existing bubble developer been using the tool for a one year plus now throughout that time you've created a lot of personal projects but you're yet to work with your first client so at this point you don't actually have any client experience so you can't talk about client projects you've worked on you can't give testimonials from clients and it might lead you to think that you can't actually create a portfolio at this point in time and look I do completely get that in imposter syndrome is a real thing when it comes to freelancing so you can sometimes think that you're not good enough or you're not yet ready to create your portfolio but today I'm actually going to show you how you can build a beautiful portfolio even if you've never worked with a freelancing client before and within that we're going to include case studies about projects we've worked on as well as testimonials from people who are relevant to our work and I'm going to show you exactly how we can do that starting by showing your initiative so let's say you've never worked with a client project before but your notorious for tinkering around in bubble building your own personal projects now some of those projects might have been actual startups you were trying to create others might have just been small little side projects you were playing around with it doesn't really matter what they are though because one thing you should understand is that although you have no commercial use for those applications anymore they are still applications that you've taken the time to build just because you're not building an application for someone else doesn't mean that that application isn't useful if you've taken the time to build something like a Marketplace a directory or a social app you've already be taking the time to structure a database build the user interface Stitch everything together with workflows and potentially even integrate with third-party tools and services so you've built a fully fledged app and that's definitely something you should discredit from yourself just because someone didn't pay you to do that doesn't mean that the skills you use to create that application aren't going to be applicable and so what I normally recommend people do is whenever they create a freelancing portfolio without any existing client projects I'd always recommend that they create one to three demo applications that they can showcase which just showcases a clear representation of something tangible that you built now if you already have an application you've created that's perfect if you haven't built anything though I'd recommend just taking the time to construct something that you'd like to list on your portfolio and if you remember when I had previously talked about the different freelancing tiers so the beginner intermediate and advanced based on where you sit between those three tiers that should determine what type of products you list on your folio so let's say you sit within the first beginner tier and if you remember from our previous module within the beginner tier this can include things like job boards and directories what you should do if you're trying to Source beginner tier clients is that you should create a dummy job board as well as a dummy directory and so that way when a client visits your portfolio they can see a tangible example of a job board and a directory you've already built and then likewise if you sit within the intermediate tier you could build something like a Marketplace and of course if you're in the advanced tier you can build something like a booking or time scheduling application if you really wanted to use your initiative you could include one application from every single tier just to show potential clients that you're capable of building almost anything inside a bubble so what I tend to find is that whatever applications you put on your portfolio that's typically the kind of client projects you're going to attract and the reason for that is because if someone goes to your portfolio and they can see you've already created a specific type of app that's automatically going to build trust with them that you know how to actually create that style of application so they're more likely to work with you to bring their own version of that to life and now let's say you've used your initiative you've gone ahead and you've created a demo application that someone can see one thing I should point out is that you need to make the application as accessible as possible so if you're providing a link for someone to be able to run a demo of that app you just need to remember that unlike other NOCO tools bubble allows you to build fully fledged applications not just static websites and so because a static website doesn't change you typically don't need features like user registration Pages as well as pay walls sections in the app whereas when you're creating a dynamic application inside a bubble you'll often restrict certain features to certain users so let's say you were creating something like a job board what you'd obviously do on the home page is display a list of all of the jobs that are available then you go ahead and create a login portal which allows companies to register and log into an account from which they can publish job ads now if if a potential client was to run a preview of that application straight away on the home page they'd see a list of all of the job ads that someone has published which is great however if they just wanted to see what the back end portal looks like for companies who are managing their job listings they'd actually be required to create an account and now I know as bubble developers that seems like it'd be a super simple process but that can actually add a ton of friction to the potential client while they're viewing our portfolio so if they have to sign up an account and validate an email address that's just time that they don't really want to spend doing laborious activities and so what I'd recommend doing is trying to make your product as accessible as possible so in that example I just gave as an alternative what you could do is already create a demo account and then you could just list the login credentials for that dummy account on the login page so that way the client can just easily copy and paste those credentials in and it will give them access to the dashboard so it's just small things like that that create a much better user experience for the client and it just allows allows them to actually see the full scope of your skills as a bubble developer it doesn't just limit them to a certain part of your application now if you're ever creating a demo application for your portfolio obviously you also want to try and make that application look as beautiful as possible and if you're not much of a designer like myself don't stress because there's plenty of design libraries you can review in order to get inspiration or almost just make a copy of specific design configurations and so if you're not familiar with these particular sites I'd recommend looking at them but if you're looking for design inspiration I'd recommend heading over to either dribble or behance over in a separate browser here I just have dribble open and if you're not familiar with dribble it's kind of like LinkedIn for designers it's actually where designers showcase their own portfolio of designs that they've created and what you'll see is that there's categories like web design ux design or even iOS design and so if we were to filter down a list of design resources through this category we can scroll on down and you'll see a long list of different websites and applications that have been created and if you find that you like a particular design you can click on this and then you can open this up and review all of the pages that sit within that application so you can start to get some inspiration as to what types of elements and components you want to add onto your own bubble app but I personally think dribble is a great resource for sourcing that if you're building landing pages within your application I'd also recommend checking something out like Landing folio it's very much the same as dribble but it's just a whole library of landing pages and you can filter these down by specific things so if you're ever building a SAS application you can Source landing pages that are relevant to that and of course when you see a design you like you can open this up you can view an overview of the actual landing page itself which is taken from the website or if you want it you can actually view The Real World website and you could see how this functions now I'll be sure to include a link to these resources within this particular module but these options really just scratch the surface of what's possible of course a simple Google search for landing page inspiration or things like ux UI design inspiration is going to show you a whole additional list of resources you can check out but just to make things easy for you I'm going to be sure to include the relevant links to these sites that I've just shown you just jumping back into my deck here though what I'd like to focus on now is walking you through the exact process of how you should construct your portfolio so this is going to include step-by-step instructions that covers everything you need to include in what particular order and I'm even going to show you real world examples of what I would include in my own portfolio as a freelancer and so the very first thing we need to cover before we can actually build out our portfolio is as I just mentioned you need to take the time to create your demo products so if you've never worked with a client before you just need to take the time to create your own demo bubble apps and of course you'll use these to Showcase tangible examples of the products you built using bubble which in turn will just give a clear representation of your skills as a bubble developer but once you've taken the time to create that I'd move on to the very first section which is going to be our hero section and so I've just taken a quick screenshot here of what I would include in the hero section of my website and this can include things like a simple one line so a one-liner should easily summarize exactly what you do as a freelancer and in my example here it says helping startup Founders bring their Visions to life now in my opinion a one-liner should be specifically related to the types of clients you'd like to work with so let's say you only want to work with clients who want to build Marketplace applications I think that'd actually be a great Niche what you could create for your one-liner is something that just summarizes that in one sentence so you could say something like helping business owners build and publish marketplaces in less than three months and right away that easily summarizes the specific value you can offer to your target client so that way when a business owner who is looking to build a Marketplace lands on your website they're immediately going to know that they're in the right place below that you should also include just a follow-on line which also just helps build some additional trust for the potential client so in my example I just mentioned that I'm an experienced bubble freelancer with over three years of experience Now by all means you could change this to whatever you would like so another option could be I've already worked with five clients to create real world marketplaces or you could say something like I've built over 20 bubble applications in the past six months alone it really is up to you to get creative with whatever you want to add into this particular section but as I mentioned the very first one liner should summarize your key value proposition as a freelancer and then the following line will just help build some additional trust now below that section you should also include a clear call to action now throughout our portfolio today when we construct our website we're going to have multiple call to actions but at the very top of the landing page you should have a clear call to action so that way if someone's immediately ready to make contact with you as a freelancer they shouldn't have to continually scroll down the page they should easily just be able to do this from the top so that's why I just have this button here that says get in touch and of course when someone clicks that it's going to take us down to a contact form which I'll show you how that looks in a moment but the very last thing you should include within your hero section is just a hero image so this can just just be a screenshot of an application that you've created so if you've ever built a nice landing page or if to my example before you're a freelancer who only builds marketplaces you could include a screenshot of a Marketplace you previously built and if you're ever wondering how you can add a screenshot into a computer like this there's a great website I use called mock your phone so it's mock you phone.com and essentially this is just a free tool that allows you to upload screenshots into devices so you can add things into phones watches or even laptops and so this is what I personally use to create beautiful screenshots and in my opinion it just makes a product look more tangible when it's in an actual device because that's of course this state it's going to be in when someone uses the application now following on from the hero section in our portfolio the next section should clearly highlight the specific services that you offer and if you're a generalized bubble developer there's normally four particular Services you would offer that's database design being able to design the interface of the application nation building workflows to stitch everything together and of course being able to integrate with third-party tools and services so that's why you'll see in my example here these are the four options I've included but if you are only building products like marketplaces perhaps you could talk about the specific key features you can create within a Marketplace so you could say something like you allow users to create listings on the marketplace you can also build an admin dashboard that allows an admin to manage the whole application or you could even add Marketplace payments through something like strike connect which is of course an essential feature for any Marketplace once again it's entirely up to you to talk about what your skills are as a bubble freelancer so here under the services section you could talk about these specific products you want to build and once again the more specific you are the more helpful it'll be at attracting the types of clients you specifically want so I'd always recommend taking the time to be thoughtful about what you add in this section once you've built out this Services section though following on from this is where you should highlight some of the past projects you've created created and this is where you can add a grid of your portfolio products so similar to what I mentioned before if you haven't actually created any client projects this section would just include the dummy projects you've created so you'll notice here this doesn't talk about client projects it says past projects because this is tangible work that you've still created as a bubble developer and so it's completely valid in showing off the tangible skills that you possess and now before you list out or link to all of the particular projects you've created I'd recommend just adding a short block of text which just highlights the projects that you like to work on so if for instance you are a generalized bubble developer this could just say something like I have experience building all kinds of applications from social media apps to marketplaces to matchmaking apps and anything else in between but if you wanted to get more specific back to my example before if you're a freelancer who only builds Marketplace applications you could say something like I've spent the last 12 months building over 10 different marketplaces these all included features like being able to create listings manage listings and also process Marketplace payments and that just gives a real good overview of the work you've had to add into these projects before the client even actually has to click on the project so once again it just helps build trust then below this text you should just include some tiles which have links to the projects now of course at the top you should include a screenshot of this project so that way the client can actually see what it looks like and the reason why I love screenshots is because if a client is trying to build something like a Marketplace and if they see that the application in this screenshot is a Marketplace that's just a whole lot more relatable to their specific need and pain point and so it just entices them because if they see a Marketplace they'll probably think to themselves oh I'd love to have exactly that application but with our branding on it so they automatically just know that they are once again in the right place and you are the right person that they should work with below this screenshot you should just include the name of the project followed by a quick one-liner that just describes a brief summary of what the application does so if it was a Marketplace for people wanting to rent boats you could just say exactly that this is a Marketplace that connects Boat Owners with boat renters and then finally below that you should have a button that includes a link to view the full project page and of course I'll be showing you an example of what you should include within that project page in a moment but before we get to that below this section on our portfolio we should add an About Me section so this is where you can finally talk about you as a person so up to this point we've only spoken about our particular work and now that's great because that's going to be relevant to the client's needs but once the client has actually figured out that we're capable of creating the type of work that they're looking for they'll just want to decide whether or not they actually want to work with us as a person and so this is where we can really start to build a relationship with the client without first actually speaking to that client So within this About Me section you should talk about once again the services that you offer so you just want to reinforce the fact that you are skilled developer who likes to build certain applications but this is also where you can include any additional fun facts about yourself so for example if you have kids you could say outside of being a bubble developer I love playing soccer with my two kids or if you're into something like snowboarding you could say something like when I'm not building bubble apps you'll catch me on the slopes and that just opens up a little bit of detail about your own personal life which just makes you more relatable than someone who is only there to talk about business or the particular apps that they're built so it just humanizes your whole portfolio so feel free to get creative with this section once again and you can make it as Quirky and relatable as you want once again it truly is up to your imagination what you want to include in this obviously as you can see I'd also recommend including a clear headshot of yourself just so someone can actually see who the person is they're going to work with and by putting a face to you it's also going to help create that initial relationship once the client has learned about you though I think it's important to include a section which is some testimonial so this is where everyone's going to be raving on about how great you are as a bubble developer and of course how great you are as a person and so once the client has taken the time to read about you in your about you section they're going to come down to these testimonials and they're just going to see that you are the best person in the world and when it comes to testimonials I'd recommend trying to include three or more and I'm actually going to take the time to explain how you can generate testimonials without having client experience in a moment but for now I just wanted to show you a quick overview of what this section looks like of course when you're displaying testimonials you'll include a headshot of the person followed by their name and their job title so once again this just helps build social proof if someone is a renowned person who's given you a testimonial that's great or if someone's in a similar job role as the potential client who's looking at your portfolio the client can see that you've worked with similar businesses in the past or people who were in the same position as the client right now and so that really just helps build social proof when they're making their decision and then finally on your main testimonial page you should obviously Inc include a contact form so this is where the client can actually get in touch with you they should just be able to submit some basic details about their project as well as their budget and of course when they hit the submit button it should send you an email so that way you can respond to them as quickly as possible now that's everything I'd include on the main page of your portfolio and I'm going to show you a real world example of that in a moment but you may have remembered that I was going to talk about what you should add on a dedicated project page so if we were to just jump back to the past project slide here this was the section where we covered some of the past projects we've worked on and of course as I mentioned someone should be able to view more details about that project so that way they can see more screenshots they can read more about the features you've added and this is where you can really get into the nitty-gritty of the details behind the build and so when you're building out that dedicated project page I'd almost recommend creating these as a case study that summarizes the entire project scope so if you've worked with the client before this is where you should first of all talk about what the client's initial goals were when they came to you as a freelancer as well as things like how long the project took to bring to life and of course the reason for this is because if you're trying to attract more clients who are similar to clients you previously worked with this just builds social proof and reinforces the fact that you can service this person's needs now if you have not worked with a client before you can still get creative with this section instead of talking about the clients goals what you could talk about is your goals so you could say something like as a bubble developer I wanted to push my skills and build a fully functional Marketplace that included features like Marketplace payments through an API a bespoke dashboard page so I could manage all of the listings or some sort of user verification feature so that way I had to approve everyone who was on the marketplace and you could really just talk about your motives behind wanting to build an application and although at that point you haven't actually worked with a client it just shows your initiative when it comes to being a bubble developer and so if a client was to land on your portfolio folio and see that in your free time you actually like to just build applications I bet they think holy this person actually lives in breathe's bubble this is someone who seems like they're on the Forefront of anything related to bubble and I can see right away how they actually think and walk through projects of their own and so whether or not you've worked with clients or not it's so important to include an overall case study about the project scope on this dedicated project page now throughout this case study you should also summarize a list of all of the features you've built so I'd even add this in a DOT Point format so you could say something like within this project it includes the following features then you could have something like a user registration page slash a login page perhaps it even has Facebook authentication it has the ability to create product listings edit product listings a dynamic product listing page the ability to process payments and look you get the point I think it's important to Showcase all of the features within an app just because if the client has a specific feature that they would like to create you if they can see that you've already built that it's kind of going to be like a no-brainer for them to work with you at that point they already know you're capable of creating that and bringing it to life now while you're building a case study on this project page it's going to include a lot of text so it's important to break these down with screenshots of the actual application itself and now I've already shown you how I create screenshots using the tool called mock your phone so I'd recommend taking screenshots on both a desktop and a mobile device if it's applicable to the application and then finally throughout this project page it's also so important to include testimonials from this specific client and so although we had testimonials on our main portfolio page it's also important to include social proof throughout this project page now of course if you haven't worked with a client and you're just building a project page for a little side project you built instead of including a testimonial from a client perhaps you could include a testimonial from someone else in the industry so do you have a friend or is there an authority figure in the industry who could review your app and just give you their thoughts on it so could you go to an existing bubble developer and just ask them hey what do you think about my Marketplace and then you could get a Verbatim from their response and add that as a testimonial so it could be something like it's crazy that Lachlan built this Marketplace in less than two weeks not only is it beautifully designed but it also includes a whole Suite of features that are essential for any Marketplace build and so although you don't have a testimonial from a paid client you're still able to build social proof and in a moment I'm going to actually take a deep dive into how you can generate more testimonials if you haven't had any client experience but before we move on I just wanted to cover a few additional things when it comes to this overall project page and one of those is that I'd really recommend you get creative so perhaps instead of including just screenshots of the application could you record just like a one minute video summary kind of like what I'm doing right now with my head in the corner here and could you just walk through the features within the app so that way it actually saves the client from having to run a preview of that application to view it themselves could you just log into an account create some things in the app and just show the full functionality so it's kind of like a product demo and if you're narrating this and the client can see how excited you are talking about this application you built straight away it kind of feels like they're talking to you and they're creating some sort of connection without of course actually having to speak to you in person so something like that is just a great way to get creative and take your project page to the next level and if you wanted to get super creative and by all means this would be more time consuming could you even embed a small section of your application into this project page so if you're building your portfolio on Bubble which I'm going to give you a template in a moment could you almost include a small section of the products features inside of the project page so if you've got a project page for a Marketplace could you include something like a small section which is just an overview of what the marketplace would look like on the home page so you could almost have like a repeating group of product listings as well as a filter so that way the client could actually just open the filter and filter through all of those products perhaps when they click on that it could display a pop-up and that would just give them a really great way to interact with that product immediately so once again it just shows them your tangible skills it also impresses the heck out of them and more importantly it builds trust and so it's entirely up to you what you want to include on your project pages but I really think this is a great place to get creative when you're building your portfolio now that we've covered what you should actually include in your portfolio I just wanted to take the time to now talk about how you can logistically build your portfolio site and of course throughout this process I'm going to give you a turnkey template that you can choose to use if you just want to get a portfolio up as quickly as possible but when it comes to actually creating your portfolio the first thing you'll need to do is Select what platform you actually want to build the portfolio on so obviously you're familiar with using bubble as an OKO tool but of course there's a myriad of different NOCO tools that you can build portfolios on so things like WordPress card or webflow what you need to remember is that a portfolio is traditionally a static website it's not a fully fledged application like something you would build in bubble so a portfolio doesn't actually need to be over complicated you can choose literally any platform to build it on and if I'm going to be honest you should definitely choose what's going to be the easiest and fastest option to create it with to be frank the client actually doesn't really care about what your portfolio site was built on they don't really question that nor do they care to look into it so it's completely normal if you're a bubble freelancer and you build a portfolio website on WordPress in fact my own website is built on WordPress just because the value you're actually going to deliver isn't the portfolio website it's the individual projects that you create inside of bubble so the client's actually more focused on the projects you've listed on your portfolio than the actual way the portfolio was built so when it actually comes to building your portfolio out I strongly recommend that you actually limit the amount of time that you spend building this now I know as a skill Bible developer you're going to need to fight every single urge in your body to build out a fully fledged application as your portfolio site but your portfolio should almost be as minimal as possible you don't want to waste all your time creating your portfolio when instead you should actually be using that time to be reaching out to potential clients and so when it comes to the process of logistically creating your portfolio in my opinion it should take no longer than a day to build if it takes any longer than that I truly think you're just wasting your own time and that's time where you should be finding paid clients so back to my point about choosing any platform if you find you can create a portfolio in a tool that you've used in the past so something like WordPress card or webflow by all means please go ahead and use that instead of building it in bubble just choose the option that's going to be as fast as possible while creating something that still does look relatively nice one thing I should point out is that if you are going to be using bubble to create your portfolio they do actually have a clause where you can't use a custom domain that includes the word bubble in it so for instance if I was a freelancer and I owned the domain Lachlan freelancer.com I wouldn't actually be able to use that in bubble bubble does not allow you to use a custom domain that includes the word bubble and look this is an issue I've ran into in the past my whole brand is called building with bubble and so I actually had to build my website on WordPress and the reason for that is because of course my domain name includes the word bubble so it's not allowed in my opinion it's completely silly rule but I can see that logic behind it I think they just want to protect their own brand now if you actually want to save a whole lot of time building a portfolio from scratch I've actually created a template inside a bubble that you can feel free to use and so this template is going to be based off the screenshots that I've just shown you as we were walking through the slide deck so if I was to jump over to a separate browser here you'll see that I've created a bubble project which is this exact template that I was walking you through before so at the top of this we have a navigation menu followed by a hero section our services section our past projects about me testimonials and of course our contact form now of course whenever your boy is building an bubble everything is completely responsive here so if a client was to view this on desktop or mobile this is going to be a completely responsive experience and so what I wanted to do is actually just take the time to walk you through how I've structured this template and how you can go ahead and make changes to this so if I jump back to my UI Builder here I'm just going to scroll on up to the top now I've already taken the time to break down all of the individual sections but just one thing I'd like to point out is how you can make changes to this particular portfolio and the first thing I should note is that everything in this application is static there is no Dynamic data so if I was to go into my database there is actually no data types or Fields aside from of course the default option the bubble gives you of a user data type and the reason why I've selected to keep this as a static website is because I did want to over complicate this for you and similar to what I mentioned before when it comes to your portfolio you should build the fastest version of it as possible and by all means there's nothing wrong with the static website it's going to save you having to structure your own database build a ton of workflows to create items and on our static site things should load relatively quickly just because we're not loading data from our database so if I jump back to my design tab here what you'll see is that nothing is dynamic so when it comes down to my past project section these different tiles are not within a repeating group they're just three separate groups that sit on our page and of course they are fully responsive so they will either collapse on top of each other or move around each other accordingly if you ever want to update any text you can just open up the property editor and of course you can make changes to this text field here there will be conditions on elements that just update the responsive settings so you can see here I've created a condition that just recognizes when the page width is greater than 820 pixels it's just going to add some additional margin on the left and right hand side here and aside from that all of the additional elements are replaceable so things like the images here if we're scrolling down you can also update the testimonials so I've just got a static image here as well as some basic text elements that you can easily swap out so nothing on this portfolio is going to be over complicated it's going to be as simple as possible the only thing that's going to have some sort of functionality on this website is just going to be our contact form so on here I've added a series of input fields which just includes things like the person's name who's submitting an inquiry the company their project summary as well as a potential budget Now by all means you can feel free to swap these out with whatever budget settings you would like but again these are just some placeholder options that I've given you when someone then goes to submit this form here it's just going to run a workflow it's just going to send you an email with all of the information from the relevant input fields and then of course it's just going to reset the input field and show an alert message that just lets the client know that their message has been sent to us the only other workplace I have is also some navigation workflows which just allow us to navigate between all of our different pages so if we jump to our design Tab and scroll on up to our past project section of course as I mentioned before these projectiles should link out to a dedicated project page so this is the case study where someone can read more about this particular project and within my application I've gone ahead and I've created a series of different project Pages now I've just given these a placeholder title for the page known as project page one two and three however of course you would swap these out with the actual name of the application itself that you've built but let's say I want to go to Project page two we'll just take a look at what this looks like but I should just point out that we've also created a workflow when this button is clicked to send a user through to our project to page so of course that way they can view more information about this particular case study and so if I was to open up project page number two jump to our design Tab and then scroll all the way up to the top what you'll see is an example of the project page I'd mentioned before but I just want to show you what this actually looks like in more detail so at the top of the page I'd include a hero image which can just show some screen screenshots of the actual product and look you can get created by showing multiple screenshots across different devices or if you want it as I mentioned before you could potentially record a product demo video so you walking through the product and you could include an embedded video here below this it would then include the product's name as well as a brief one-liner about the product so to my example before if you were building a Marketplace for boats you could once again say this is a Marketplace that connects Boat Owners with people looking to rent boats and then you could include a link to the actual product itself here so you would just need to create a workflow whenever this button is clicked and of course you just need to open up an external website so you can select navigation open up an external website and just add the URL for the preview of that application but I'm just going to delete this out here because I'm going to allow you to add that in at your own pace if we continue to scroll down this page though what you'll then see is that I have this section that covers more about the project so this is where you could explain things like the Project's objective of or if you've worked with the past client what their objective was or even some more details about what the application does and I gave you some examples before but if I just want to highlight those again it could be something like this client came to me looking to solve this problem in their business the purpose of the app was to increase Revenue by 20 so that's why we created this feature this feature and this feature and we did all of this within the space of three months to then break this text up you could then add another screenshot of a particular feature and then finally if we scroll on down to the dedicated section which highlights all of the project features you could list this out as just a standard list of bullet points but if you wanted to get really creative what you could do is actually highlight the name of each feature add a description about why it's in the product and what it actually does and then you could even add a screenshot of what that looks like and I know that's going to seem like a lot of work here but it's the small things like this that's really going to separate your portfolio from someone else's so if we continually scroll down you'll see I'm just just added in three options and each of these options sit within an overall group so if you ever wanted to add in another list of features you could just add a copy it would add it to the bottom here and then of course you can make changes to it I'm just going to remove that though for the time being because below that you'll also see I've added in just a testimonial section so of course I mentioned before about what type of testimonial you could add in so if you've got some feedback from the client or perhaps you've had someone review your application and give you their thoughts this is where you can add that and then finally down the bottom I've also added a contact form so that way if someone has read this project page and they're impressed with what you've created they can easily just get in touch with you and once again of course I built out a workflow when the submit button is clicked here which is just going to send you an email as well as of course notify the potential client that that email has been sent and will be in touch with them shortly Now by all means this portfolio isn't anything super sexy if I can be completely transparent with you I think it is pretty Bare Bones as I mentioned it's just a static website built in bubble there's no great features like Parallax scrolling or anything that's super engaging to the client but when it comes to building applications inside a bubble the then clients care about is more or less the features you can create so things like the complex workflows the ability to integrate with other tools and services we're not freelance designers here building static websites on webflow which actually do really need to look engaging instead we're building applications with complex logic and so that's why one of the main roles of our portfolio is to Showcase all of the features we're able to create and that's actually everything I wanted to cover at this point in time for this portfolio template of course I'm going to be sure to include a link in the description of this module so that way you can get access to this and make a duplicate version yourself as I've mentioned all you need to do is just swap out all of these static elements here and of course this definitely isn't one of the most world-class templates but to my point you shouldn't spend more than a day building your folio so this is just going to help you get a portfolio website up and running as quickly as possible jumping back to my deck there's still a few additional things I want to cover within this section of our overall master class today and the next thing is being able to Source initial testimonials so if you remember before I talked about how important it is to include client testimonials on your portfolio in order to build trust and social proof but what happens if you've never worked with a client before and you're a bubble freelancer who's just getting started what I actually wanted to do is take the time to share some actionable ways that you can Source some initial testimonials without first having paid clients and when it comes to this list you really need to be able to think outside of the box and I think one of the best ways you can initially do this is look for a small free project that you can participate in where you're working alongside someone else who can then give you a testimonial about your input in that project and so what I actually mean by this if you've ever used the bubble Forum Twitter or bubble Facebook groups you'll know there's plenty of people who post requests looking for Bible developers to help them build specific features and if you're able to help these people solve their problems that is the perfect place in which you should Source a testimonial so although this person wouldn't be a paid client they're still going to be someone who's a stranger to you that can actually vouch on your work so a great way to actually Source this is by jumping over to the bubble Forum so I'm just going to load this up in my browser and then if I was to filter through my categories I could search for the category need help or potentially the question category but for now we'll just select this option here it's then going to filter a list of everyone posting questions where they actually need help inside a bubble and if you were able to open someone's request and see that it's something you can help them solve what you could do is either provide them with a solution and a comment or ask for a link to their bubble editor so that way you can jump in and make the change for them so it kind of is like doing some unpaid freelancing work but after you're done what you could do is ask them for a brief testimonial about your imp Hood to their project and of course at that point in time I'm sure they're going to be forever grateful for your input so they're going to have glowing things to say about you but that's just one way you could Source testimonials without having paid clients another is that if you were to use an application like Twitter where I often see bubble developers come together and work on projects in unison that's a great way to work alongside people and not only get experience to see how other people work inside a bubble but after you've finished collaborating on a project with someone that's the perfect time to ask them for a small paragraph that just shares their thoughts about your input on that project and so of course that is another great way to generate testimonials without having to Source a paying client now if you're ever looking to freelance for an agency not clients of your own which we're going to touch base on that later on throughout our master class today you might find that some agencies do require you to provide it mandatory testimonials from past clients that you've worked with so these are customers who have already paid you for your bubble experience and in this case in my opinion opinion the best way to get some quick wins on the board if you desperately need paid client testimonials is to just take on some lower paying projects from places like Fiverr and upwork now of course throughout our master class today I'm going to explain how we can avoid trying to use marketplaces like this in the long run just because on freelancing marketplaces that's when you tend to compete on price not on the overall experience you can offer your clients and so of course my goal is to make sure you can get higher paying customers that are going to increase the quality of your life not lower paying customers that are only going to add stress into your life but don't get me wrong if you do need testimonials from Paid clients these marketplaces are a great way to get quick wins on the board just because by Nature they are a freelancing Marketplace so people who are posting work on there are looking to hire people as quickly as possible and then finally one of the last places I'd recommend looking for testimonials is from anyone you have an existing relationship with so perhaps you've already taken the time to work on the bubble Forum in the past or you've already collaborated with another Bible developer on a shared project instead of having to reinvent the wheel and do that again can you simply just shoot those people a message and ask them to share almost just like a small paragraph or even just one or two sentences about their thoughts of you as a bubble developer as well as what your input was on those projects so even if you don't have paying customers already there's plenty of ways you can generate testimonials and these aren't just going to be crappy testimonials from your parents telling you you know how great anything you touch is instead these are going to be tangible testimonials that speak for the actual work you deliver inside a bubble and anyone who writes these testimonials is going to be speaking from their first hand experience with working alongside you so it's still going to be a very valid way to generate social proof on your portfolio now look when it comes to building a portfolio there is one last thing I just wanted to touch base on in this section of our tutorial today and although this isn't directly related to something you would show on your portfolio itself as a freelancer you you are your business so anywhere you engage with anyone online is essentially your public portfolio and so that's why I think it's so important to optimize your social presence as a freelancer and so what do I mean by this anytime you share something online on a social platform like Twitter or LinkedIn or even the bubble Forum this gives potential clients the opportunity to stumble across your profile and if you've said something interesting or something that might be relevant to them they'll often click on your profile to read more about you and right there is the perfect opportunity to start building that relationship with the client before they even reach out to you so if you have a well-optimized social presence it can actually increase your chances of generating inbound leads which honestly that is the end goal of any freelancer realistically we don't want to spend time having to Source clients we want clients to come to us and so today I just want to talk about how you can not only optimize your social profiles but how you can also optimize the types of content that you publish to help generate inbound leads and and so the way I like to think about any profile I have on a social platform is that that's kind of like a mini portfolio that sits somewhere else on the internet away from my main portfolio so for instance I just want to give you an example today of a LinkedIn profile and this profile is going to be for a bubble freelancer who's known as Gwen Mills and the first thing you'll notice is that Gwen's gonna have a nice cover image here that's just going to include some screenshots of the previous application she's created now if you want to generate an image like this of course you can use a tool like milky phone as I've mentioned before and then within canva what I've done is I've just created a project with a solid background color and I've added all of the mock your phone assets into it and I think that this is just a really great way to show the tangible products you've created right at the top of your profile so if someone lands on your profile and they've seen that you created a Marketplace and they're a business who's looking to work with a freelancer who can actually create a marketplace right away they know that they're in the right place and you are the exact person that they should talk to the next thing you'll see I pointed out is that you should have a clear headshot now this is going to help people build trust with you because if they see that you're a happy bubbly person they're going to get the idea that they can start to trust you and almost build a relationship with you below this you'll also see that I've included some keywords as the title for Gwen's profile now this is of course a feature that's more specific to LinkedIn because of course on LinkedIn you can include things like your job title but you'll see here that we've included some keywords like bubble IO developer I build apps with no code so that way if someone ever wants to search for a bubble developer Gwen is more likely to appear in these search results and so that's also going to help her generate inbound leads and then finally within the Bio Section or the about section we've just clearly defined the types of experiences and services that Gwen can provide so it says here I love helping startup Founders bring their MVPs to life so this just tells me right away that Gwen only works with startup Founders so if I'm a startup founder that's going to be very relatable to me if you're a new freelancer who wants to work with quite a number of different clients by all means you can list those out here so you could say something like I love helping startup Founders and small to medium-sized business owners bring their MVPs to life and then below that you should talk about the kinds of applications that you can actually create so you'll see here Gwen has listed out that whether you're building a Marketplace a social network or a to-do list I'd love to collaborate on your vision and so of course because it lists the type of projects that she's capable of creating that is once again just going to clearly communicate to any potential clients that this is the person you should speak to if you're looking to build any application like that now the other big thing I wanted to talk about when it comes to optimizing your social presence is optimizing the type of content that you publish so if you remember I referred to social platforms kind of like a portfolio that sits out of your own website and so similar to a portfolio where you should continually update it with new projects that you've created it's also super important to update your social presence with any relevant updates so if you're using social platforms these are a great way to generate inbound leads and the reason for that is because unlike your portfolio which someone needs to type in or search or be sent to anything you post on a social platform is going to be placed directly in front of people who could be your target audience so if you're sharing relevant content to a relevant audience that's going to help increase the chances of sourcing inbound leads for your freelancing business and that just seems like a no-brainer to me and so what you need to be doing as a freelancer is trying to publish social content that helps you build Authority in the industry so if someone works at a company or someone is a business owner or a startup founder if they follow you and they can see that you're consistently sharing content about building projects and bubble they're going to see you as an authority figure in the industry because that is what you talk about and have domain expertise on so when it then comes around to the time where they need to build an application they're going to know exactly who they should speak to to bring that to Life publishing content on social platforms also shows that you're actively practicing and learning your craft of being a bubble developer so if you're sharing screenshots like the projects you're bringing to life or talking about some of the technical challenges you're trying to overcome in bubble this just shows that you're always on the cusp of what's new and that you're one of the best people in the industry that they should work with beyond that it also just highlights your passion for bubble which is going to help build trust for any potential clients because if they can see that you actually enjoy working inside a bubble that's going to make them think that working with you is also going to be enjoyable and more importantly social posts can kind of create like a mini portfolio within your overall social portfolio and what do I mean by that if you remember on our portfolio website we had the dedicated project page which covered a case study of every single project if you're sharing details of the projects you're creating on social platforms this also just creates a way to Showcase those dedicated case studies in a public setting so again it just creates a mini portfolio on top of a social platform and so when it comes to publishing different kinds of content I didn't want to just tell you that this is something you should do I actually want to show you some tangible examples that I think you could easily just replicate yourself so that way it makes the whole process as easy as possible for you so over on my next slide here I've just taken two screenshots one is of a LinkedIn post I've actually seen in the wild from a bubble freelancer I know and what you'll see here is that this bubble freelancer isn't actually sharing a project they've created instead they're just sharing an article about Bubble partnering with Microsoft for startups and as you can see this post would have been super simple to create they literally just grabbed a link to an article they read which took them three minutes to read and then they added three lines of text and a couple of hashtags but the sole purpose of this post was to help this person build Authority within the industry so when I saw this one of the first things that ran through my mind is that this person is constantly on the cusp of new changes happening to Bubble which means that if I was ever a potential client I could trust that this person is going to make sure my application is always up to date and is in the best possible state that it could be and this is exactly what I meant before when I mentioned that you should start building authority within the industry another example of a post here is just a draft post I've created from that Gwen Mills account I've just mentioned and this is just going to be an example where Gwen shares a bit of an overview of a project that she's just launched so we could say something like over the past week I've been building a Marketplace app that connects holiday homeowners with tourists visiting their city and you can kind of see that this text almost sounds like it came from Gwen's portfolio because if you remember on the project page of your portfolio site I mentioned that the first line should include a reason about why a client wanted to create an application or if it wasn't a client project why you created that application then go and mentioned something like I've Loved focusing on the design for this build as well as seeing my vision come to life so quickly so right away she's talking about her skills here being able to build an application in a fraction of the time using bubble and then it says something quirky like oh and did I mention that this was built without writing a single line of code I absolutely love working in bubble here's a peak of the current home page and for this image I've just grabbed a random screenshot I had on my device at the time but you can see here that this is a Marketplace like Etsy and so if this was published on LinkedIn and someone worked at a business or they owned a business where they were looking to create a marketplace right away they would see that Gwen is able to actually create a tangible Marketplace and if they like the design of this they're more often than not going to know that Gwen is the perfect person they should reach out to right now if they are serious about bringing their product to life so by all means these are just two examples of the types of content I recommend you publish when it comes to the frequency I'd recommend you publish posts about two to three times a week that's just enough that it keeps you consistent and at the top of people's minds but you shouldn't get too obsessed with this because there are other things you need to focus on with in your freelancing business and reaching out to clients managing projects and running your internal business are all going to take up a lot of time so it's completely fine if you only managed to post about two to three posts a week if things get absolutely chaotic in your business look it is completely fine if you can only publish at minimum one post a week it's not going to be the end of the world but I do think it's going to be important for you to keep some sort of consistency week over week although it's not going to gain much momentum in the beginning it's really going to compound over time and it's going to help you start to generate more inbound inquiries now look that's everything I wanted to cover within this particular module of our tutorial today I know there was a ton of stuff in this but what I wanted to do is just summarize by giving you a few action points that I really think you should take action on right now and for these points here the first thing I want you to do is build your very first portfolio project so if you don't already have a client project or an existing side project you've created that you could display on your portfolio you just need to take the time to build something generic so could you quickly whip up a Marketplace could you quickly whip up a social app and as I mentioned before it's great to have about three portfolio projects on your portfolio but at this point let's just focus on getting your first project on your portfolio once you've done that I'd recommend trying to acquire three testimonials so of course I gave you plenty of actionable ways that you could Source those the fastest way is of course going to be messaging people you've already worked with and then if you can't do that by all means you can start helping people on the bubble Forum or on social platforms so there's no shortage of ways that you can quickly Source three testimonials there then we're going to take the time to optimize our social profiles so you need to optimize all of the fields on your social profiles as well as potentially put together a bit of a plan about what type of content you could post and even set some reminders so if you want to post every Tuesday Thursday and Sunday just set a reminder on your phone or on your computer that just says you need to post something if you really wanted to take that seriously you could start using tools like Trello or buffer to build yourself a Content calendar but I think you just need to start somewhere by posting anything so if you've got got some existing projects that you can share some screenshots of that's a great way to get the ball rolling and then finally the very last action item within this particular module is going to be building your overall portfolio site now of course I'm going to be sure to include a link to the template I've shown you so you can easily just swap out the items I've added into that but if you want to build your own from scratch as I mentioned please try not to take longer than a day if you're taking longer than 24 hours you're really starting to waste your time and I'd recommend you tick off all of these items here before you move on to the next module in this series because within the next module we're going to start to focus on how you can begin sourcing your first clients and having all of these items in order is going to be essential to do that properly oh this is a section of our master class that I'm super excited to dive into within this I'm going to cover everything you need to know about mastering the art of cold Outreach as a freelancer so whether you're trying to send a cold email to a client that you want to work with or if you're getting in touch with someone who works at a no code agency you'd also like to partner with this module is going to cover literally every detail you need to know in order to help you get the outcome that you want now I'm not only going to give you actionable advice along the way but I'm also going to provide you with a turnkey template so that way it makes the whole process of cold Outreach as simple as possible this is personally a topic that I get really excited about although I know for most Freelancers it can definitely be quite daunting in the beginning let's Jump On In and I can start walking you through all of the details in this section of our overall course today I wanted to cover what I believe is one of the most important things when it comes to creating any freelance business regardless of whatever vertical you're working within and that is how you can Master the art of cold Outreach if you've ever done any freelancing work you'll know that cold Outreach is going to consume most of your time each day and in the beginning of setting up your own freelancing business it's going to be the main way that you Source work in your clients now there's so much that I want to cover within this particular module today in particular I'm super excited to explain how we can craft cold emails that convert as well as how we can build out our own internal systems for our freelancing business to manage our cold emails and of course make sure we can convert those into paying customers now in this module I'm even going to show you some real world examples of how I would personally craft called emails as a freelancer and we're going to break down the exact steps involved in crafting each of those messages but the first thing I want to do is just cover like the importance of cold Outreach in general and on top of the points that I just ran over cold Outreach is going to be essential as a bubble freelancer regardless of if you're working for clients or even as an agency partner in both of these scenarios you're going to need to master the art of cold Outreach to land your first few projects particularly in the beginning when your word of mouth Channel isn't as strong cold Outreach is going to be your best friend the most important thing to remember when it comes to being a bubble freelancer in general is that you could be the best bubble developer that is out there but if you're terrible at Cold Outreach you're going to really struggle to get your freelancing business off the ground and this is why it's just as important for any bubble developer to master the art of sales as it is to master the craft of actually using bubble itself so if you were to take away one thing from this whole tutorial today is that when it comes to setting up and managing your own freelance bubble business you should always strive to be good at bubble but at the same time exceptional sales now if you're like me you probably fell in love with bubble because it was so fun to Tinker around and build any product or even bring any vision for an app you had to life and so when it came to freelancing I always fell into the Trap of trying to prioritize my skills as a bubble developer and not my skills as a salesperson and so I'd always had a tough time trying to understand the importance of cold Outreach but the reality is is that despite what you might think a cold Outreach is more of a science than an art which is awesome if you're used to being a no coder because you can really start to think about the logic behind quality Outreach itself and now what I mean by Cold Outreach being a science is that it is purely a numbers game and if you were to really break it down this is the science behind it so if you were to think of cold Outreach like a funnel which essentially it is at the top you need to be able to identify how much potential opportunity you're pouring into that funnel so let's say if we were to send a hundred cold emails out and just for the point of this argument let's say one in 20 of those reply which is a pretty realistic conversion rate from those 100 emails that you initially send out only five of those would then become potential leads so that's five people who potentially respond to your initial email and now from that let's say if only one in five of those leads was to actually close that means you would now have one paying customer and so what does this mean when it comes to the signs I guess as I mentioned about cold Outreach itself because we know what these numbers are going to be between each stage of our funnel we can easily tweak and modify these to work in our favor so following the same conversion rate as before if we were to now scale the amount of cold emails that we input at the top of our funnel so let's say we're sending a thousand emails instead of a hundred and at the same conversion rate as before if only one in 20 of those were to respond instead of having five leads we were down 50 leads which of course means that if one in five of those close we now have 10 paying customers which if you're a freelancer charging a couple thousand dollars per project or even if you're looking at charging tens of thousands of dollars per project that's going to quickly add up to a very profitable business for you in fact what you'll probably find is that 10 customers is actually too much for you to handle as one freelancer alone and so this is where you can really start to see the numbers come into cold Outreach as I mentioned sales is purely a numbers game and you can tweak it to work in your favor based on whatever your input is going to be but of course it's not all just about the input of how many people you send emails to of course there needs to be some sort of level of quality that you maintain throughout that process and that is exactly what I'm here to help with today today I'm going to teach you how to craft the perfect cold emails to send out and I'm going to show you some great examples of emails that you can copy and I'm even going to give you templates to actually duplicate those emails yourself and so the next thing I want to cover is how we can craft the perfect cold email now I'm sure that at this point in time in your whole career you more than likely had to send a cold email or you've received a cold email and on the the sending side of things you probably know how nerve-wracking it can be to type in a cold email send it to someone and hope that they're going to take the time out of their day to respond to your message and of course on the receiving end you're probably also very familiar with how annoying cold emails can be and sometimes even potentially spammy and this is where cold Outreach can get a really bad rap for itself a lot of people just think that they're going to need to blast a bunch of spare messages to a bunch of different people and then magically those people are going to respond and say Yes I want what you're selling and that couldn't be further from the truth the reality with cold Outreach is that although it is cold we need to still take the necessary time to create a warm introduction and of course what do I mean by that I want someone to essentially receive our cold email and by the end of them reading that email I want to have already created some sort of relationship with that person or shown them that I'm genuinely here to care about them and help them Reach their objectives which of course means that I'm going to have to put their needs before my own and so when it comes to crafting the perfect cold email I wanted to break this down into a bunch of actionable steps for you so the first thing you'll need to do is your research I can't stress this enough most cold emails I receive are from people where they've just scraped a large database of emails and they just send out a blanket email about their service or a product that they're selling and I can clearly see they've just used some sort of automated tool to just replace the first name with my name and sometimes to my surprise they'll even get that wrong I don't know how but it really couldn't get any worse and so that's why it's important to actually do your research because today when it comes to cold Outreach I'm going to show you how to craft the most personable cold emails as possible as I mentioned because by the end of these cold emails we want to make a warm introduction and so what do I mean by doing your research you may have remembered that just before I mentioned when when it comes to creating a cold email our objective isn't to tell the client about how good we are and how we're going to essentially profit from whatever we're selling to them instead what I want to do is take the time to understand the client themselves so I want to understand their needs their goals their objectives as well as any potential challenges they have in their lives and what I really want to do is essentially just help them Reach their end goal in life whatever that may be it might be making them more money it might be saving them time or it might even be saving them money and of course in order to understand how you're going to help that client reach their objective you need to understand what their goals are themselves so if you're reaching out to let's say the founder of a startup who's building a new product from scratch you need to understand what their goals are have they just raised money have they got investors that they need to please if they don't yet have a product to Market obviously their goal right now isn't to get to a hundred million dollars in Revenue it's to get to their first dollar in Revenue and so by taking the time to do our research we can really understand the client's current goals which is a nice segue to the next point on my list which will allow us to identify any potential roadblocks this client will have in getting to their goal so is there anything currently stopping the client from reaching their goal that you can help them achieve and so again to my example before if a startup founder is wanting to bring their product to Market is a potential roadblock that they just don't have the money to hire a proper engineering team or is it that they actually don't know any programming languages so they don't know how to even hire a software developer or could it potentially be that they want to launch their product as quickly as possible so hiring a full engineering team might just take too long and they might actually miss potential opportunity and so by identifying the client's potential roadblocks this is also where you can really start to see the potential value that you could add to this client because if you can alleviate any key pain points in their life it'd almost be a no-brainer for them to work with you and that also leads to next point which is understanding where the client is within their journey and So within the same example I've used you may have noticed that straight away I automatically vetted that the client let's say didn't have a potential product but they needed to launch it right away so I can see that within the client's Journey they're at the early stage where they don't yet have a product but of course they might need something other clients of course might be existing businesses that are looking to build an internal tool within their business or if you wanted to work with a no code agency there might actually be an established agency that's just looking to hire additional contractors regardless understanding where the client is within their journey is not only going to help you identify what your timelines and pricing is going to be like when it comes to scoping out a project for this client but it's also going to help you identify what type of value you can add to them within their current life cycle so normally all businesses will require different things and they'll have different needs at different stages of their Journey so depending on where they are within their overall Journey it will definitely influence the amount of value you could add to them throughout any given cycle and finally the last thing I just wanted to point out when it comes to doing your research is just trying to identify who the person you're going to sell to will report to themselves now there's a really good saying that says the person you're trying to sell to is not actually the person you're talking to it's the person that they're trying to sell to so in my example before with the startup founder in this case they are probably the person who's going to be calling the shots so in that case you would only need to sell to them but another thing you might need to factor in is that if they have potential investors is the founder going to have to go to their investors and say Hey I want to build our MVP using no code and of course if they are that's going to impact the way in which you pitch your services to that founder similarly if you're pitching to a manager within a company they might need to get buy-in from their manager or even the CEO so it's really important to understand where any person you're pitching to sits within the overall I guess you could say all chart when it comes to the decision making process because at the end of the day that person's manager or the person that they're reporting to is the actual person who's going to make the purchasing decision so they could either make or break a freelance project now when it comes to the overall research phase I would actually recommend you jot all of these points down so whenever you find a potential client that you would like to work with you can literally add bullet points to each of these topics here and take the time to actually thoughtfully do some research so use tools at your disposal like LinkedIn crunchbase Twitter Google search of course use literally everything and anything you can to try and Source information and what I'll find is that when it comes to the actual initial Outreach so when you're crafting the email about 80 of the time will actually be spent on this research component whereas 20 will be spent actually cracking the email so you can really start to see how important this stage of the whole cold Outreach process is now let's say you've gone ahead and you've taken the time to do your research and you're starting to craft your cold email there's one thing I wanted to point out that I see a lot of people do terribly when it comes to cold Outreach and that is that they're too formal throughout the process now I can completely understand why people want to try and present themselves well and be formal when it comes to cold Outreach and truly I do also understand that it can also be a cultural difference in different parts of the world it can be potentially considered Rouge to be direct with people whereas in other cultures it's just the norm but from my own experience if you're trying to be a freelancer in a western Market being too formal is actually going to give you a disadvantage more than anything and so what do I mean by this if I ever receive a cold email and the first line is dear sir I immediately just closed that email because it just shows to me that this person is too formal they're not personable they haven't taken the time to get to know me or my brand or my objectives of goals it just gives the impression that they're not personable they're like a robot they just have no emotion attached to them and so that kind of makes me think straight away that this is just going to be a transactional email where they're just going to be asking me for something whereas if someone was to open up an email and be like hey Lachlan or hey mate or even hey locky so using an abbreviated version of my name it shows that that person has taken the time to know who I am and by even taking the time to abbreviate my name or call me something else like champ mate buddy literally anything else that's friendly it just shows that I'm speaking to another person on the other side of this email not some automated script so please when you're structuring your emails don't be too formal at the beginning and also likewise at the end you don't need to take yourself so seriously and at the end say kind regards or I hope this finds you well this really does add little value to the actual email itself and especially when it comes to drafting a cold email every single word is going to count and so you don't want to have to fill it with text that's not related to the actual value you can add as a freelancer to someone's business so again just to reiterate don't be too formal be more human which leads me to my next point which is that you should also try and eliminate small talk now I understand when I get an email from someone who hasn't reached out to me and want to know how I'm doing today well they want to hope that I'm doing well within my life which is a nice gesture however what I found from my own experience particularly again in the Western Market is that when you're not direct with someone it actually shows that you don't respect or value their time so if you are in fact direct and you get straight to the point it just shows that you're transparent about your intentions so you're not just Meandering around trying to build some sort of fake relationship so that way you can eventually ask them for something if you're direct about your intention straight away it'll give that person an opportunity to assess if you are someone they want to interact with or not and it's going to straight up save you a whole bunch of time I'm having to figure out that later so it's best off just getting straight to the point and finding that out right now and now while I encourage everyone to be direct that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be personable I think there'll be a fine balance between the two that you'll need to embed with in your email but in the beginning when it comes to your first cold Outreach email your main objective is to clearly communicate what amount of value you can add to this person's life so anything else should be completely irrelevant which is the perfect segue for my next point that I want to cover which is making the email about the person you're actually messaging now there's the age-old saying which is everyone's favorite topic is themselves and it couldn't be more true when it comes to people and their work within your cold email obviously you want to get an outcome out of the message that you're sending there's no denying that you want a new freelance client but within the first initial email you need to make this as much about the potential client as possible and as little about you at the same time by the end of the first cold email that you've sent you want the potential lead or client to be thinking wow this person really is going to add value to my life and so a great way you can start doing this within the actual email is by pointing out something personal that you've taken the time to research about their business or their work now a tangible way I like to actually achieve that is just flicking through my research notes to see if there's anything notable I can mention about this client that they might have said or done recently so by pointing out something personal to this potential client it just shows that you've used your initiative and you've actually done the research so let's say for instance a potential client is a business owner and they've publish something on LinkedIn recently about their thoughts in an industry a good way to make the email about them while also being personable is to just add your own thoughts about the post that they've shared so you could say hey first name John Tracy whatever it may be I saw your post on LinkedIn the other day about how you wanted to change the industry in this way I've recently been doing some research on that industry as well and I think you make a great point about X Y and Z of course that is just one fictional example but you get the point if you've taken the time to do your research it should be a breeze being able to speak to this customer like you already know them which again not only shows to them that you have the initiative to have done your research but it shows you're quite Vigilant about not only their business but also their industry and it's only once that you've truly shown to them that you care about their work and their particular problems that you should start talking about your solution and now when it comes to the solution this is where I see a lot of people get lost most people who are no co-developers including myself love to talk about features and not specifically outcomes and I'm going to be completely transparent this potential client couldn't care less about the features that you're going to add into their product or the specifics of any Logistics that are going to work behind the scenes they truly at this point only care about the overall outcome you can give them and that's going to be the point of difference that will help them determine if they want to work with you or not and so what do I mean by outcomes instead of talking about how you could build certain features within an app that will help them what you need to talk about is actually how this application you're going to build them is going to save them time money or even make the money so if you are building let's say a Marketplace for someone you're not going to talk about how you built a feature that let's say matches people with product suggestions but instead you should say I want to help build a Marketplace for you that's going to help Drive revenue between customers looking to Source new products and I really think it could do X for your business so right away you're not only showing to this potential client that you understand their business needs but also how you can help them get to their desired outcome now when you're talking about your solution you truly only have a limited amount of someone's attention before they tune out and just filter this as spam within their mind and so what you need to do do is be as succinct as possible you're not going to have time to go into every single detail about your vision or as I mentioned the product features but if you can share enough detail and insight about how your potential solution could help this person reach their outcome it's going to encourage them to actually respond to your email so that way they can learn more and that is exactly the goal of why you're sending this first cold email it is of course so that way you can continually qualify in this lead and start building an actual relationship with them now another essential thing when you're talking about your solution is to make sure you actually add credibility as well and of course with credibility comes trust and a great way to build trust when you're initially sending a cold email as a bubble freelancer is by showing someone tangible examples of the previous work that you've done in the past and so if you've ever worked on a similar project in the past you could say something like hey I see you want to build a Marketplace I've built a Marketplace for ex-client within four weeks you if you'd like to check it out here is a link to the live product or if you're brand new into your bubble freelancing experience you could of course create a portfolio of products so these might be products that actually weren't built for a customer but instead you just Tinker around and build your own Marketplace you could say hey I've actually already built a Marketplace of my own you can see a tangible example of it over here and look at the end of the day it's all good and well for someone to tell you that they can do something but nothing is more powerful than actually seeing a real example of it so that's why it's so important to ensure that you add credibility into any cold email that you actually send remember that when it comes to freelancing trust is one of your greatest assets that you're going to need to leverage so from the beginning you should really be starting to build a sense of trust with any clients that you're going to work with and look finally the last thing you'll need to include within any cold email is just a real clear call to action of course like anything in life if you don't ask for it you will never receive it which is why it's more important than ever to include a call to action within any cold email that you send and look a call to action can be at one of many things but to be honest when it comes to sending your first initial called email your call to action should be as simple as possible so you want to remove as much friction from the process and so that way your call to action is so simple that it actually just takes the client seconds to act upon it so this could be something like instead of asking the client to hop on an hour-long Discovery call to see if you're a good fit for them just ask them to respond to email and send through any additional information about the project if you could lower the initial commitment that someone has to act upon within your cold email you're more than likely going to increase your chances of actually getting a response and if you remember the slide I'd shown you at the beginning of our module here where we had broken down the funnel of cold Outreach if you can increase your conversion rate at the top of the funnel you're definitely going to increase your conversion rate to paying customers at the bottom of your funnel now one last thing I want to touch based on when it comes to the top of having a call to action is that you should only have one CTA within your overall email the last thing you want to do is overwhelm someone with a lot of different options and almost give them like decision paralysis you just want to make the decision for them to take action to truly be as simple as it possibly can now everything I covered within our slides up to this point in time actually fall under a really great framework I like to follow when it comes to crafting cold emails or even for that matter any copywriting at all so whether I'm writing an email a landing page or even something like a social post whenever I create content in the written form I like to follow this process called Ada now Ada is just an acronym which breaks down the process in which you should structure any copywriting content that you create and this framework is broken into four different steps there's attention interest decision and action and if you were to break these down into the process of creating a cold email at the beginning when it comes to attention you want to use a hook to get the user's attention so that way they don't just close your email and continue on with their day you of course want them to read on to the next line with your email where you can start talking about the actual meat of The Proposal that you want to send to this person which is where you can then address the intersection of this framework so after you get someone's attention you want to maintain their interest and this is where you can start talking about their problem so this shows that you can actually relate to this person and if you're talking about a problem that this user is facing in their life they're going to be interested because they know that this is something that they actually need to solve which following on from that is the perfect time to then add in the decision now the decision is where you introduce Your solution so after you've got someone's interest and you've made them realize that they have a problem that they need to solve by introducing Your solution you can start to actually help them make the decision to act on that problem which then leads you to your next point which is where you can finally take action so this is where you add your call to action into the email so that way you can tell this person exactly how they need to proceed if they ever want to solve that problem in their life so again whenever I'm crafting a cold email this is the exact process I like to follow in fact what I'll often do is even write these points within my Gmail client and then under each heading I actually write out these sentences that fit under each section and of course this just helps me keep things concise and it just makes the whole cold email flow from top to bottom now today I didn't just want to sit here and tell you about how you can craft your own great email without my help instead I actually wanted to show you some tangible examples of how I would craft a cold email and I want to give you this as an actual template that you can copy and paste so whenever you're reaching out to your clients you can use this exact template which is going to save you a whole lot of time throughout the process of sourcing clients and I'm not only going to show you one example today but I'm going to show you two examples for two unique use cases the first example I want to show you today is how we can draft a cold email for a potential client and the second one is going to be how we can draft a called email to a no code agency so let's say in our first example I'm just going to create a fictional use case we have a startup that's just raised a 250 000 seed round and at this point in time we've done our research and we know that they want to build a Marketplace for boat rentals so you can kind of think like Airbnb for boats and of course because we've done our research we know the founder of this startup their name is John and the reason you know they've raised a 250 000 seat run is because you've recently seen his Twitter post announcing the big news now super exciting for John but also super exciting for you because you've done your research you know that this is a brand new startup so right away you can qualify that they're going to need a product they've also raised some money so they have money to spend and you know exactly what the product is that they're going to create so in this case they want it to be a Marketplace for boats so that straightaway tells us that if we were freelancing for them we're going to be building a Marketplace so right away we've gone from a cold Outreach to something slightly warmer because now we know how to personalize our message to suit John's needs and help him reach his desired outcome so how would I craft a cold email to our startup founder John let me just show you exactly how over in a notion document here I've created a cold email template that you're more than welcome to use and just as a side note when it comes to freelancing tools and how you can actually manage your business notion is my go-to tool it's definitely a lifesaver I use it across every aspect of my life so I definitely recommend keeping some documentation for things like old email drafts or even client projects all within one place and I just personally find that notion is the best place to do that now inside of this dock what you'll see is that I've written our first email here but not only have I just written the email but I've actually tried to break this down following the the Ada framework that I've just explained to you and the best way to break this down is just by color coding each section so right here for our example number one this is the client that we're pitching so I would start my email by saying something like hey John or if I really wanted to be personal I could say something like hey mate I probably wouldn't go as far to say Army Hardy's like a pirate but you get the point there's no dear sir Madame Master nothing showing that Jon is any better than myself as a human being the way I'm sending him a message is that we're two friends simply about to have a conversation over email now from here of course I need to say something that's going to grab his attention and throughout that I'd also like to be concise and straight to the point so I'm going to say hey John you don't know me but my name is Lachlan Kirkwood I help startups like insert company name so any clients that I previously worked with so in this case I could say startups like cars.com or any other company that's potentially relevant to his industry or that he might know of so I help startups like inset startup build and launch a fully functional marketplaces in less than a month so straight away here we have communicated to John that we not only have experience in his industry but we've helped build social proof by showing him that we've built a product that he's looking for in the past within a month time frame so we're addressing that problem that he might have which is that he needs to launch a product to Market as soon as possible now that is just two quick sentences which is going to grab his attention because it's going to show that we are capable of producing results from here I then want to jump into the interest section of our Ada framework which is where we can start to talk about his potential problem that he has before we can then introduce our solution So within the intro section I could say I wanted to reach out as I'd seen you'd recently raised a seed run to bring your product Vision to life now the purpose of that sentence there was to just indicate that we've actually taken the time to do our research and we understand where he is within his business lifestyle we're then going to say I'm sure you've already started looking for engineering talent but I at least wanted to get in touch about helping build a solution with bubble's no code tool now the main purpose of that sentence there is just to show yet again that we understand where John is within his life cycle so at this point he's obviously already started looking for engineering resources so he might potentially be looking to already hire software developers and by acknowledging that we're not coming across as desperate we're just saying hey John look I understand you're already in the process of this but this might be something you might consider which of course just shows we're not coming from a place of desperation instead we're coming from a place of professionalism but it kind of seems silly for him to not consider using a no code tool as well then from here once we've completed the intro section I want to then introduce my solution throughout the decision so this is where I can really start to introduce my little part of the pitch as well as the services I offer so I could say using a tool like bubble can not only save you tens of thousands of dollars but can also help you get an initial product to Market and a tenth of the time of traditional code now if John has raised a 250 000 seat round if you were to save him tens of thousands of dollars that's going to help him extend the runway of his startup's life which as you might know will make or break a startup so right away the value proposition you've just given to John is going to be immense it's almost like your first mic drop moment but from here I don't want to stop I want to add in one additional sentence that once again helps him make his decision so I want to say in the past year I've helped two similar startups build and launch their Marketplace apps in just under a month now of course I completely understand that if you're new to Bubble freelancing you obviously wouldn't have helped two startups in the past but let's say if you built two marketplaces within your own portfolio so for side projects that you've tinkered with or just something that you built with friends there's no harm in just saying in the past year I built two similar products to the marketplace you're trying to create and I brought each one of those to life in under a month now just when we've got John making his decision what we want to do is just give him a real clear call to action so that way we can help him make that decision as simple as possible and of course because this is our first cold email I want to reduce as much friction as possible from this decision so I'm going to say I completely understand if you already have an engineering team in mind but if you're interested in a solution like this I'd love to learn more about your project and now within that call to action you can obviously see that I don't ask John to jump on a call immediately and give up his precious time so that way I can tell him more about my awesome solution instead I just indicate to him that I'm actually learning more about him himself obviously I've done my research but there's still so much I could learn directly from him and so this call to action just prompts John to reply and say something like hey Lachlan sure I'd love to talk more let's jump on a call and of course this whole email here is relatively short and concise it's not like I'm sending John my entire life story about why he should work with me instead I'm just condensing as much information and value as I possibly can within one short message now that is the first example I want to show you and of course as I mentioned I'll be adding a link into this video so that way you can make a duplicate version of this template but what I want to do is show you a second cold email example which is going to be more catered towards those people who want to work for no code agencies So within our second example let's say we've done some research about the bubble ecosystem and we found a couple of no code agencies that have remote workforces that we want to actually work for and just for this example let's say you've connected with one of the product managers at this no code agency we're going to call her Lucy on LinkedIn now obviously the template of this called email I'm about to show you could also be retrofitted to LinkedIn but regardless what you'll see is that I'm still going to follow the same Ada framework where I get someone's attention talk about their interests introduce the decision and then of course have the call to action and so back in my notion doc I'm going to scroll on down to my second cold email template and this of course is the one towards our no code agency so once again I'm going to start things off relatively friendly and simple in this case you could say something like hey Lucy then I'm going to get straight into the attention point and so if a no code agency was looking to ever hire no code bubble developers what we need to do is understand what's going going to really get their attention within the first line and in this case I've written it as you don't know me but my name's Lachlan Kirkwood I've been building and launching a suite of bubble built products over the past X months so right away that's going to show that we have tangible experience using bubbles tool which of course if they're ever looking to hire Bible developers shows that we are in the right place now when it comes to the interest component I want to say that I'd seen that agency so insert their name there was on the hunt for skill bubble developers so I wanted to get in touch and talk about my experience again this part of our email address is that they are currently on the hunt for bubble developers and that just readies them for the solution that we're about to bring to them and within the decision part of our email I want to say having built marketplaces social apps delivery apps internal dashboards and more I'm familiar with the process of scoping Planning and Building Products from the ground up right away that's just going to show our full hand of cards to this particular agency and it's going to lay down that we have a solid amount of experience building all of these apps which of course just shows our diversity as a bubble developer and how well of a good fit we're going to be for this agency and you know how it is when it comes to anything I work on we're not just going to tell them but we're also going to show them we're going to need to back up this claim by showing them a tangible list of our work so I'm going to say you can see a list of my previous work at my portfolio here straight up that's going to show them that we have taken the initiative to not only create a portfolio but it's going to also make their decision process as simple as possible just because all they have to do is click on that link to view everything you've ever created not only are we going to show them our ability to work well as a bubble developer but we're going to go above and beyond and we're also going to talk about our interpersonal skills which is really what's going to separate us from any other bubble developer out there who knows how to use the no code tool and so we're going to say in the past I've used tools like and if you've done your research and you've found out whatever tools they use internally so this can be things like slack Loom or Trello whatever they use to manage projects or client communication what you can do is say that you've used these tools to share project insights and feedback with clients in the past now if you've never worked with clients before because you are a brand new bubble freelancer make sure you don't discredit yourself if you've never used these tools working with clients if you're a part of some slack communities or you've ever created a Trello board to manage your life or you might have even recorded a loom video just to share a video with a friend these are all tangible skills you have that can help separate you as a bubble freelancer and this just sends a huge green flag to the agency because not only do you have the bubble no coding skills but you also have the ability to quickly get up to speed with their internal tools that they use so that way you as a candidate will be onboarded much faster than anyone else applying for a position now of course finally we're going to wrap this email up by including our call to action so you're going to say I completely understand if you've already found a suitable team of bubblers but I'd love to catch up and share more details about the value I could bring to their agency now once again this just completely levels the playing field between both parties here because you're showing that you're not desperate to get a job at this agency it shows them that as a bubble developer and a freelancer you not only value your time but you could also potentially have other options and of course you know what they say true to me keep them Keen only in this case we're not going to be mean we're just going to be concise now that is everything I wanted to cover within our second template here of course by all means feel free to create a duplicate of this notion doc so that way you can use these templates within any day-to-day cold emails that you send but regardless of if you're pitching to a client or a no code agency I think both of these templates are going to be incredibly valuable in terms of helping you structure the right message to send but before we wrap up this section of our module there is just one last thing I want to cover and that is how you can go above and beyond to really outperform with your cold emails and so back in my slide deck I just wanted to give you a couple of bonus tips to help you take your cold emails to the next level now a couple of bonus tips I have for you is to double down on making your emails more personable but of course the more you do this the more time consuming it will be so it can be a little bit harder to do at scale but if you ever really do just want to Target one specific person with a good cold email I definitely recommend following through with these steps and so a couple of tips I have is that when you're sending your first cold email I'd recommend checking out tools like lemlist and Loom to create a more personalized message learn list if you're not familiar is just a great tool that allows you to automate the process of creating personalized videos I remember the first time I got a cold Outreach video from lemlist I was actually blown away just because I thought someone took so much time out of their day to send me such a personalized message because I kind of felt obligated to respond to it another great tool I use is something like Loom so that way if you wanted to introduce yourself as a person and not just a wall of text in an email you can record a loom video introducing yourself and you can embed that within your email so you could just say something like hi my name is Lachlan I'm a Bible freelancer I've been working for 12 months building my own projects I've been using these tools on the side to manage these projects and now I'm interested in working for your agency then you could even mention their name directly you could say something like Lucy look I'd love to jump on a call with you if you ever wanted to learn more about me let's just jump on a 20 minute chat so we can see if we're going to be a good fit and then on top of that another great recommendation I'd have is just trying to attach or even just insert any images of some screenshots of a product that you've built in the past that might be relevant to the potential client so if for instance in our first example where we were reaching out to John the startup founder if he was building a Marketplace what I could do is just insert a little screenshot of a Marketplace I built in the past just so that way he can get a real tangible idea of what I'm capable of creating and if you ever want to create screenshots like this there is a tool called a mock you phone that I'd recommend checking out that's Mock You phone the U in that is literally just the letter U not the word you and if you really wanted to take this to the next level if you were super committed to land this clone and it was your dream project to work on what you could actually do is go into bubble and create an example version of what their specific application might look like so you don't need to build out all the workflows behind the scenes but you could just create like a mock-up of what the product you want to build them will look like and you could just say something like hey I've already taken the time to mock something up if you ever wanted to see this in action just respond to my email and I'd love to show you a guided walkthrough and that's truly just going to show that you've gone above and beyond to personalize your whole cold Outreach and I'm almost certain at that point that if your email has not landed in someone's spam or promotions folder they are most likely going to respond to it which then leads me to the last section I wanted to cover within this overall module today and that is how you can follow up with cold emails as well as respond to someone's response to your initial cold email now I wanted to give this a dedicated section within our tutorial today as I believe that following up to a cold email is just as important to actually sending the initial cold email itself because the reality is is that not everyone is going to respond straight away to your initial called message so it's important that you should always follow up to make sure that this opportunity doesn't slide and of course throughout this section I'm not only going to explain why it's important to follow up on an initial cold email but of course I'm also going to give you something tangible you can use so I'm going to show you some real examples of follow-up emails that I would personally send as well as give you access to some templates that you can use along the way so when it comes to follow-up emails why are they so important contrary to what most Freelancers think follow-up emails are just as important if not more important than the initial called message you'll send now I know a lot of Freelancers themselves worry that they're going to be spamming people with messages and just flooding their inbox and look I completely get where they're coming from but that's not always the case the reason why it's so important to send follow-up messages is just because you never know the intentions behind a potential lead in some instances by all means they might be trying to avoid your messages but what I've found from my own personal experience is that in most cases people are just busy and they miss your initial messages now this couldn't be more true if you're trying to reach out to a startup who's building their MVP because when you think about it the startup Founders trying to raise money grow a team manage all of their resources and look their inbox is more than likely going to be flooded with messages so that's why it's so important to follow up on your initial called email because the tough truth to swallow is that your message probably actually just got lost in their inbox so they never actually saw the first cold email you sent which is why it's important to essentially nudge that to the top of their inbox so that way they can not only read your follow-up message but also read through the initial offer you sent in the first cold email something else I've also found to be true in the past is that potential leads are actually interested in the service you want to provide or the value proposition you give them and they have great intentions to reply but unfortunately just life gets in the way just because you're not at the top of their to-do list now look people are busy they're of course on their own mission to reach their own objectives so sometimes you obviously just won't sit at the top of their priority list which means that they'll just never get around to actually responding to your message so again this is nothing personal at all it's not like they're trying to intentionally avoid you it's just simply a matter of that they don't have the time or the attention to give you that dedicated response that you're craving so again this is why it's so important to send a follow-up message now when it comes to follow-up messages one thing I will agree with most Freelancers is that you don't want to seem spammy or you don't want to flood someone's inbox with separate emails which is why when I send follow-up messages myself I always acknowledge my previous messages so I don't act as if I'm being ignorant instead I want to show them that I'm just being consistent and of course showing consistency is a great trait to have as a freelancer it just shows that you're willing to hang in there and put in more work than others so it can actually be a great way to help build trust with the actual potential lead now I do also find that when I acknowledge my previous messages I've sent it just humanizes the whole email it doesn't make it seem like it's just some automated email sequence that they've been signed up to and it just shows that there's a real human being behind the message which of course is another great way to build trust as a freelancer and in a moment I'm going to show you some great examples of how you can follow up with your initial called email and throughout that I'm going to show you how we can easily acknowledge our previous messages within that process but before I show you that I just wanted to also touch base on the Cadence in which you should send a follow-up message so when it comes to follow-up messages you obviously don't want to spam someone's inbox with a whole series of messages but at the same time you want to make sure you've got a frequent Cadence so that way the person doesn't completely forget about you by the time you send a second follow-up message and so that sweet spot in between I've personally found is just following up to your email every single week so that way it not only gives the person time to think about your message as well as process any thoughts they might have but if you're to follow up again in seven days you can still be relatively top of mind to this person particularly if you've given them a good enough value proposition but more importantly from here I just want to talk about how you can also manage your follow-up emails now I think this is so important to any freelancer just because if you don't create a system that makes it as easy as possible to manage your follow-up emails you will give up on them that is just the reality of the sales process if following up with leads becomes more work it'll definitely deter you from continually reaching out and so today I want to share with you the system that I created myself to make it as easy as possible to follow up with potential leads and turn them into paying clients and of course I'm not just going to talk the talk but I'm also going to give you a template that you can use which will help you manage any potential leads yourself but before I show you that template and give you a version of it I just wanted to touch base on some key points that are going to be included within that so as I mentioned when it comes to managing follow-up emails you need to make a system that's going to be as easy as possible for you now the system I'm going to show you today is my preferred way of doing things but by all means if you find that you have a system of your own that works better than mine I definitely encourage you to go with that what I found in the past is that if the process is not dead simple for me and I start to get confused about who I followed up with and who I haven't I simply just give up on the lead and I don't follow follow up at all which then goes on to break my whole sales funnel so if you remember at the start of this tutorial I'd shown you the visualization of a sales funnel so at the top we're sending a thousand emails in the middle we then have all of the people who have replied to our emails so these are the people who actually become leads and then we have the people at the bottom of our funnel who close to become customers now if you're doing a great job at opening the top of your funnel with cold emails but then a terrible job at following up on those cold emails you're not going to have anyone fall down to the middle section of your funnel which then means that the output of your customers is also then going to be constrained and so that's why it's so important to build a system that's going to help you maximize the potential amount of people you can follow up with and today the system I'm going to show you of my own is just through the use of a simple care man board but I'm also going to share with you a few unique configurations that I add to my kanban board to help make this whole process as easy as possible but another powerful tool I use and it almost seems so basic that so many people forget to use it is just setting manual reminders so every single time I send a cold email to a potential lead the first thing I'll do after sending that message is open up my reminders app on either my phone or my computer and I'll set a reminder that goes off seven days after that particular date and within that reminder I just tell myself to follow up with that cold email and inside of that reminder I'll also include the email address of the person that I've sent the email to so that way it makes it as easy as possible for me to just copy in that email address paste it into my inbox and review the existing message that I've sent them because I find that if I don't remember for instance the exact message I've sent it then becomes work to then have to try and re-research the company as well as what my value proposition is so I just want to make it as simple as possible to open up the existing email I've sent and then from there I can tailor my first follow-up message to suit the initial pitch that I send and so what I'd love to do is just show you an example of first of all my kanban board I've created to be almost like the operating system for my follow-up emails and from there I'm also going to break down a series of follow-up emails that I would personally send to potential leads and of course I'm going to give you a version of that as a template so you can easily just use that within your own freelancing business over in a notion dock here I have created another template which of course I'm going to include a link in this video too and within this template the first thing you'll see is the kanban board that I mentioned to manage follow-up emails and so the way I've got this structured is that each column is titled as a specific step within our overall follow-up life cycle and so today within our life cycle I'm going to explain how we can send three follow-up messages to someone after our initial called email but what I love about a camband board particularly in notion is that you can easily just drag cards across each particular column so that way you can easily track where each customer is within your overall life cycle so the first thing I'll normally do is whenever I find a potential lead that I'd like to work with I create a card within this First Column here and on this card it'll just include the customer's name but I'll also add some additional Fields so I can add some information about who this customer is as well as what their objectives might be so I can easily identify what value I can add to them and so a couple notable fields that I'll add into here and if you're creating your own template from scratch by all means feel free to use these within that but if you're duplicating this template I'll just give you a quick rundown of how I've set things up so within one of the first important Fields I have this set out to be the point of contact so this is the person that I'm going to be messaging let's say I have a point of contact and the name is John Smith because they are the founder of the startup I want to work with I'm just going to add their name into here then below this I have a field called notes which just allows you to add any notes onto this card so that way you can easily reference that at any point in the future so I could just say something like the company recently raise 250k in seed funding and that's just great to know because whenever I view this customer's card that's important information that I can easily just reiterate with myself so if I'm ever feeling down about the fact that this customer has not responded to my initial called email I can remember that they've just raised 250 000 to build out their MVP so this is actually a hot lead that I should follow up with and that's going to give me that incentive to want to send a follow-up message then below this I also just include a link to their website that's relatively straightforward but finally I also add in a series of fields just to Mark the date in which I first contacted this person so let's say I sent an email today I could select this then when I send a second email so my first follow-up I can Mark what date that was and so on and now another thing I like to do on each of my customers card is just add as many comments as possible to include any details of any actions or events that have happened with this lead so a great example is within this card here for customer number one so every single time I take an action I'll obviously need to Mark the date in which that occurred but then what I like to do is add as detailed of a comment as possible so that way future me can easily come back and pick up from where present me has left off so after I've sent an initial called email I'll write a comment which says something like I sent the contact name in this case John who is the founder of the company a cold email on the date I'm currently awaiting their response but we'll follow up again on and I'll add in the dates seven days from now now this just makes it that if I ever need to find out where this customer is within our overall sales process I can easily just pull up my notes Here review my comments and just see where things were left off so that way I don't have to go and search through my inbox and find what emails I've sent them in the past and everything I need to know is on this card here which now just means that I've reduced the initial workload to send another follow-up email to this person which means I'm more likely to take that action if I had to come to this card and I didn't see any details about this customer and if I had to do research there's honestly just going to be days where I won't want to do that to tens or hundreds of potential leads because it's going to become a lot of work and so by making things as simple as possible it just increases my likelihood of actually sending a follow-up email to this person which then increases the likelihood of that person closing into a paying customer then of course if let's say I hadn't heard back from this customer so I send them a follow-up email I would add another comment on that date and say I hadn't heard back from John in this case in seven days but I can see they were recently active on LinkedIn so I've sent them another follow-up email today just by taking the time to research John's on LinkedIn in this case and see that he was active it can just let me know that he is in fact active so I know that he's not away in holidays so there might be another reason as to why he didn't respond to my first cold email now of course as I send my follow-up emails I will move it through my chain of columns here so I've got my first follow-up my second my third and then if the lead still doesn't respond to my third email I'll move it over to my archived folder which although that might seem like a loss you should actually be really proud of yourself for following through with all of the follow-up emails because at this point you've truly given this potential opportunity everything you could now this is how I'll manage my overall cold email lifecycle but what I'd love to do is now show you a series of tangible follow-up emails that you can copy and use and as you can see here I break these down into a series of three emails so if we just scrolling down in our template here we'll see the first follow-up email now as you'll see in my notes here this follow-up email should be sent exactly a week after you send your very first cold email so let's say you haven't heard back from a potential lead after you sent your cold email what you're going to do is send a follow-up message that just says something like hey their name just wanted to follow up on my previous email about bringing your product to life using a no code solution now right away that's just going to remind them of the proposition you've sent them within your previous email then I'd say something like I know you're busy but I think a solution like this will help their company have a fully functional product to Market in the next 30 days so right there you're adding an additional tidbit of value which can be used to just grab their attention and of course show the true value proposition that you can give to them as a freelancer and then finally you'd include a call to action within this email and it could be something like if it was easier I'd be happy to share everything you need to know on a short 20-minute call now one thing I'd like to point out is that unlike our initial called email it is now now acceptable to ask this person to jump on a call just because in this case we're showing them that we actually respect their time and it might be easier for them to actually learn more through a quick call as opposed to having to send back and forth emails and you'll notice here that the period I've sent through wasn't a 60 Minute call it was just a short 20-minute call which just lowers the barrier to entry for this lead to respond to you so if you were to say something like hey I want to jump on a 60 Minute call with you so I can tell you all about what I can do a 60 Minute block is quite a large chunk of someone's day so they're going to be less inclined to jump on that opportunity whereas with a 20-minute call even if your value proposition isn't what they're looking for them losing 20 minutes of their day versus 60 minutes it's not going to completely take away so much value from their work so they'll be more inclined to take you up on that 20 minute offer and then you can just wrap up the email by saying let me know what works for you now one thing I'd also just like to point out is that with this email it was very succinct I didn't try and re-pitch them on my initial idea that I'd sent through my cold email and the reason I did that is because with my follow-up email if I'm replying to my existing cold email if the value proposition of this email is so good so telling them that I can have a product to Market in the next 30 days they're more than likely going to click on my first cold email and read over all of the content that I've sent them there now after sending this first follow-up message I would of course jump into my kanban board here I'd open the customer's card I would update the second point of contact I would add a comment saying when I responded to them and then I would move this card over to the sent first follow-up column so that way I know that I have in fact followed up with this customer and then finally I would set a manual reminder that says to follow up with this person again in seven days time which let's say come seven days time this person still hasn't responded to our first follow-up message we can scroll on down to the second email that we would say with so this is our second follow-up message now in this I would just start the email nice and simple once again by saying hey their name I would then reintroduce myself I'll say Lachlan here again so that way they know they're speaking to an actual person apologies for spamming you with messages I just wanted to make sure my last message didn't get buried in your inbox and right away the first thing you'll notice here is that I'm being completely transparent about the fact that I'm following up with them again so that way they know that I'm not just being obnoxious and being consistent and on the last line here this also just shows that I completely understand how important their time is to them just because I know they're busy so that way their inbox is always going to be filled and it just shows that I'm willing to work around them as a freelancer so I'm easily going to fit into their current system and process I then say something like as I'd mentioned I'd love to help bring your product to Market in a fraction of the time it took me less than a month to build my last fully functional Marketplace for a similar claim now straight away that's going to help build trust because it shows social proof of the previous work we've done and of course it shows that you're capable of already doing the exact work that you need to do for this client so you're just going to be replicating a process you've already put into motion now of course as you would know talking the talk is one thing but it's another thing to show tangible examples to a lead so what I would personally do is just include a screenshot of that product that you've built so that way they can get an idea of what your existing work looks like and of course if it looks great they're going to be more inclined to see the value that you can offer them as a potential client and if you haven't had the chance to work with clients in the past because you are a new freelancer there's definitely no harm in saying it took me less than a month to build my last fully functional Marketplace full stop and then of course you can still include a screenshot of a Marketplace that you built for your portfolio or even a side project because that is still tangible value that you can offer them finally I then wrap up the email by saying I'd always be happy to catch up and share more details so in this case you're encouraging them to take action once they can clearly see the value you can offer now of course after sending this follow-up email I would once again scrolling up to my camera board I would update the card for this customer move them across to the relevant column in our care mem board itself and then finally set a reminder to follow up with them again in seven days time and let's say seven days has passed they still have not yet responded to our second follow-up email this is where we're going to send our third and a final follow-up message so within this email I'd say once again hey their name I just wanted to follow up one last time on my previous message so right away we're acknowledging that we're creating a bit of a sense of urgency here as this is their last chance to take action on your offer as I mentioned I'd absolutely love to help bring your product to life if it helps you can see a portfolio of my Real World products I built in the past here now by providing a link to your portfolio it allows them to actually build trust with you on their terms so if they were a bit hesitant to jump on a call with you just because they didn't know who you were what you can do is send them through to your portfolio where they can see a tangible list of all of the projects you've done in the past as well as get to know more about you as a person so if you've got like an About Me section on your portfolio where you really portray your story quite well as well as what your skills and capabilities are as a bubble freelancer this is going to help them build trust without actually having to jump on a call with you so it lowers that friction to learn more about you yourself and it allows them to do it on their terms so these people of course are always going to be busy they're not always going to have time to jump on a call so this just incentivizes them to whenever they've got a moment look at your portfolio and see what you're capable of creating then from here I'd say I also completely understand if this isn't something you're interested in this will be the last message I send you about the project and again we're just wrapping up by creating a true sense of urgency because at this point we've clearly portrayed our value proposition and so if they're able to see what value you can offer them this is just going to time box how long they have to take action on that then we'd wrap up by saying let me know if you'd like me to share additional insights about what's possible cheers or thanks then of course I would jump to my kanban board once again update where the customer's card is in my list and set a reminder to put this into my archive folder in seven days if I still don't hear back from them and of course by that point as you can see we've really done everything in our power to potentially turn this lead into a paying customer so again you really shouldn't be disappointed if they don't respond at this point sales is truly just a numbers game and once you can understand that you'll really start to see how valuable it is to be consistent throughout your whole sales process and now up to this point I've explained how you can send follow-up emails to a potential lead that has not responded to your initial cold email but one thing that's just as important to show you is how you can actually respond to a lead who does respond to a cold email so in the best case scenario someone takes the time out of their day they see the value proposition that you can offer them and they're interested to learn more great let's say they follow up with your email how should you respond to their initial response look when it comes to responding to an interested lead you really don't want to ruin this opportunity so it's so important to have an actionable list of items that you can follow so you can move them down to the next stage of your funnel which is becoming a paying customer now if someone responds to your initial called email your sole objective here should be to get them on a call so this is like a discovery call where you can learn more about their project as well as their goals objectives and even things like that budget and timeline so your main priority of your response to their email should always be to schedule a call whilst also being respectful of their time once again you don't want to just assume people are going to want to jump on a 60-minute call with you because that's not going to be the case instead you should say something like I don't want to waste your time but jumping on a 20-minute call to ask you a few specific questions is going to save us a bunch of back and forth within our email and that just shows that you're being respectful of that time and it of course creates an opportunity for you to meet face to face and build a real relationship with this person because it's one thing to talk to someone over email but once you speak face to face that's where you can really start to build a bond build trust and build a relationship with this potential client and I find that once you have them on a call it truly does increase your chances of closing them into a potential customer now when it comes to getting them to jump on a call it's always still so important to reduce as much friction out of the pro process as possible so that way it increases the chances of someone actually jumping on a call with you and a great way you can do that is by using a tool like calendly to schedule in a call time if you're not familiar with calendly it's a tool that syncs with your calendar and allows you to select what potential times you're available to talk to someone from which you can then send a link to someone and they can click on that and they'll be able to select a time slot that also works for them and now it's also based on each person's specific time zone so all of the times you've marked as available are automatically going to be localized to that person's location so that way it just saves you sending a whole lot of back and forth emails about trying to find a time zone or a time slot that works to jump on a call so once again it's going to reduce as much friction as possible now calendly does have a free TR and of course there are alternatives you can use but that's just my tool of choice so I'd recommend checking it out and the last thing I just wanted to touch base on when it comes to responding to an interested lead is that you should always avoid talking about the price before you have the chance to jump on a call and scope out the project if a client responds and they bring on the heat by asking a question about the price of the project or how long it's going to take to build these are all things that you actually don't know because you haven't had the chance to ask them about all the features they want to create when they need it launched by as well as who their Target customers are and so if you give them pricing information before you know these details you're actually doing an injustice for not only yourself but also for the client just because you're creating some sort of proposal based on nothing but an assumption which is why if a customer responds and asks you about price before you jump on a call mention to them that you can give them that information once you learn more about the project and if for some reason the lead doesn't want to hop on a call with you until you give them that information that's actually not the worst problem in the world having a barrier to entry of a call is a great way to filter out shitty clients it's honestly the nicest way to say it but if someone is so focused on picking someone based on price they are not the client you want to work for trust me they're going to give you a ton of extra work and they're going to be a nightmare to deal with because all they value is price they don't value your time the quality of their work their own time they only care about one simple objective so if for some reason a lead doesn't want to jump on a call with you please celebrate that as a win because you just saved 20 minutes of your life as well as any potential headache down the track having to work with them now while it's all good and well for me to talk about what you should include within a response to a lead your boy here is always down to show you tangible examples that you can easily copy and replicate into your own freelancing business and so what I'm going to do is jump over to notion again and walk you through an example I previously created within the same template that I had worked in before I'm just going to scroll right down to the bottom and what you'll see is a templated response here which is a response to a leads response to your initial called email and I've also just taken the time to type in a rough example of what you can expect for a lead to respond to your cold message so let's say they've said something like hey your name I'm interested in learning more I have a couple of questions mainly how much is this going to cost and how well can the platform scale now straight away they're bringing in the heat with the heavy questions and of course as I mentioned these are questions you do not want to answer straight up in your email without first qualifying the customer as well as their overall project so how can we weave around their difficult question and get them on a call so that way we're not basing this project on price but instead we're basing it on the relationship we can form and the mutual exchange of a value we can offer to them as a freelancer So within my response to their response I would say hey their name appreciate you getting back to me I'd love to share more in insights about the whole building process from the initial scope through to the timeline and cost so right away here we're acknowledging that we will provide them with this information before I piece anything together it'd be great to learn more about the specific details of your project and your goals so now we've reverted this project being something based purely on price to being something that's going to create the best outcome for them which truly just shows our values as a freelancer we care about them reaching their goals not just us making a quick Buck I then say I know you're busy but if you had time this week I'd love to catch up on a 20-minute call to ask a few specific questions now the purpose of this sentence is to show that I not only value their time but also my time so because I have a few specific questions I want to ask it just shows that I've done this process before and so it's going to make me look like I've worked with freelance clients in the past which of course helps build trust because they know that I'm a skilled freelancer I would then wrap up the email by saying to save back and forth of planning a Time feel free to grab a slot in my calendar that works best on your RAM so here I'm of course once again showing that I respect both of our time and I'm giving them the option to pick a slot in my calendar that not only works for me but works on their terms as well I then just say something like looking forward to it just to finish on a nice positive note then of course what I found in the past is that after sending this email a lead is very likely to book a slot in your calendar however of course in the circumstance where they are determined they want to know the price feel free to just respond and say hey look unfortunately I can't provide that information without knowing more if it's not something you can provide me with it's no harm if you don't want to pursue this opportunity and I know that's easier said than done when you're a brand new freelancer and you really want to close your first deal but trust me once again these are not the clients you want to work with so I definitely recommend moving on and focusing your time and energy on someone else and that is everything I wanted to cover when it comes to our examples today as I mentioned all of these emails are going to be in a template that you can duplicate and Implement into your own freelancing business the last thing I just wanted to cover is a few action items I'd recommend you acting upon after watching this tutorial so the first thing I do is go ahead and create a list of all of the people you'd like to work with whether that be either potential clients or even no code agencies that you're interested in and then I'd start sending them some cold emails so you can use the template that I've created for you it's going to save you a ton of time but the one caveat to this is that you should only do this if you've already created a portfolio for yourself because if you have not done that you're just going to be wasting your time so please go ahead and create a portfolio of all of your projects as well as a summary of yourself as a freelancer before you start sending cold emails and then finally of course as you start sending these emails and follow-up messages be sure to log any activity within your kanban board just so that way you can start creating a systemized process of how you can follow up with these potential leads and turn them into paying customers hours and and there's still so much that I need to cover from this masterclass in as much detail as possible if you were ever interested in starting your own freelancing business as a paid bubble developer I'd always recommend checking out the full freelancing masterclass through the link in the description of this video in the full masterclass I cover every important detail and question you might have about becoming a full-time freelancer this includes things like how to determine your rate as a freelancer how to manage client calls how to scope an entire project from start to finish how to invoice clients how to hand over a project how to build confidence as a freelancer and so much more look I'd hate for you to miss your chance to build a career doing what you love I really hope to see you in the master class too thank you foreign

Channel: Building With Bubble

Views: 3,770

Keywords: Bubble, bubble.io, no-code, no code, no-code development, visual programming, buildcamp, coaching no-code apps, makerpad, adalo, webflow, zapier, no-code tools, app development, minimum viable product, MVP, Bubble no-code, software development, Freelancing, No-code freelancing, Freelancing course, Bubble freelancer, No-code developer, Bubble developer

Id: ew8bNOsMmW4

Length: 179min 30sec (10770 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2023