00:00:00
Hey Y'all Hey Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, no matter where you're coming from. Hope you all are doing well. What's going on everybody? How y'all doing? You already get this bag? Let's go. What's going on everybody? Welcome back, welcome back. Hope y'all are doing well, doing well. Excited you're here. By and far, my favorite class, my favorite thing to share with you all is how to freelance. And so tonight I'm pulling out everything I know, all of the things I've learned over

00:01:00
10 years of being in this game that will hopefully help you land a paid client, utilizing the skills that you already have right now. You know some HTML, you know some CSS, you can get a paid client, you can start your freelancing journey. So we're gonna get into all of that this evening. you know how we like to do though, gonna start off with some questions. So the question of the day is we saw the new trailer, new Pokemon main series game, so I gotta ask you a really important question. What is the best Pokemon starter? Grass, fire, water, electric? What are you feeling? What are you feeling? Let's see it in chat. A lot of fire, a lot of fire, a little bit of water, a few grass here and there, and a few folks with the electric.

00:02:00
The new starters just got revealed. The fire starter looks a little derpy, like I like them. The water starter looks like, what is the other one, ducklet, and then the grass cat. I don't know. I love my grass starters, but I don't know. We'll see. We'll see wait until the evolutions come out No clue I love it. I've never played Pokemon. I don't get it. I feel you. It's alright. It's cool. All right We got we got a good mix I'm always grass. I'll be grass until the the day. I'm done started off a Bulbasaur never looked back All righty, all righty, cool. Well, thank you. Before we jump in, while we let folks get in here, what questions you got for me? I was gonna start off with a few questions, let folks get in here. I know folks are running home from work and things like that, so let's go ahead and get those questions in while we give folks a few seconds to get

00:03:00
in here. What's your favorite food, vegan pho? Oh, sorry, two weeks late. Finally caught up to watch class live. Hey, welcome. Thank you, Civic. I'm still tricked by functions. That's all right. You come on Sunday. On Sunday, we're gonna review a lot of HTML, a lot of CSS. We're also gonna get some JavaScript review in too. So if you wanna see some cool layouts and then actually use JavaScript for real, like take JavaScript and do real stuff with it. Come on Sunday, we're gonna go through it. Ooh, that's a good one. Well, yeah, I'm scared to freelance. No need to be scared. We're gonna go over all the big stuff tonight. Don't worry about it. Indifferent, hey, thank you for the gifted subs. I appreciate you. Thank you for being here. Hope you're doing well.

00:04:00
Don't worry, we're gonna make everything, Make a little bit of sense. You're gonna have time to ask lots of questions at the end of tonight's class So if there are things that still don't make sense We're gonna do kind of like a normal question and answer like we normally do but the end of class So as we're going through all this freelancing stuff If there's stuff that you're still scared about things that don't make sense. We're gonna have plenty of time to work on that stuff Somebody said what is my favorite freelancing project? Um, well before I get to that do we have enough knowledge to land a paying client? Yes already you have enough information to land a paid client. So for folks that don't know, and I'm gonna bring this a little bit when we get further in, I run a bootcamp during the day, right? My day job is running another bootcamp called Resilient Coders. And in that bootcamp, we have folks in the six week of program get a paid client. So they learned HTML, they learned CSS, and

00:05:00
just a little bit of JavaScript. And then in week six, they have to get a paid client. In the five years that I have been in charge of program for that bootcamp, we have never had someone not get a client. Let that sink in for a second. In six weeks, five weeks technically, because in the six week, they have to get the client, right? All right, in the six week, after five weeks of just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, in five years, hundreds of people, we have never, ever not had someone get a paid client. Because all you need is HTML, all you need is a little bit of CSS, and all you need is the tips and tricks we're about to cover tonight. So if you have any interest in getting paid with the skills that you already have, landing freelancing clients. Tonight's the night, right? We're going to go through everything I got to help

00:06:00
you land those first few clients and we have to realize like the reason why, right, the reason why this all started, the reason why a hundred devs is even a thing is because folks. We're struggling still are due to the pandemic. And we wanted to see if there was a way to get them the skills that would help them get new jobs and to put food on the table. In the meantime, this is the way you do that, right? The freelancing helps you to be able to, between now and getting a job, have some money coming in, but also to help you get that job in the long run. The freelancing is not just a money play. It is a getting a job play, and we're going to break all that down this evening. So we're going to start from the beginnings. Here's the agenda we're going to go through tonight. We are going to, we are going to go through what is freelancing. We're going to talk about setting up your online presence to enable you to freelance,

00:07:00
to find those clients. We're going to talk about finding actual clients. I don't care if you're in the U S if you're remote, if you're in the middle of nowhere, it doesn't matter. We're going to talk about different strategies for everyone to find clients. We're going to talk about proposals with real examples. I'm going to give you examples of the proposals. So if you watch this class, you can literally copy and paste proposals, copy and paste contracts, copy and paste templates, copy and paste call like like like pitches like we have everything. It's all here in this class. We're going to talk about how to deliver for your client, how to manage that relationship. And then we're going to talk about reinvesting in continuing to grow your freelancing empire. And at the end, we're gonna leave lots of room for questions. So as we work through it, lots of things are gonna come up, lots of concerns are gonna come up. We'll share a Slido link in a few minutes. Go ahead and put your questions in that Slido link that I'll share in a few minutes. And then at the end, we'll go through

00:08:00
the top rated questions and make sure everybody feels good. And this won't be our only time that we talk about freelancing. It's gonna come up over and over again because you owe me a freelancing client. If you're participating in this bootcamp, You all owe me to get a paid client. It's one of the first big deliverables you have at the end of this month You need a signed Contract at the end of this month. You owe me a signed contract You don't have to have the project done. Most projects take two to four months to complete But I need a contract and I need it signed Alright, let's get into it You haven't checked in yet If you haven't checked in yet, go ahead and check in for me. Go ahead and like, and retweet, please let more folks find this wonderful community. Let more folks, so many folks right now need a little bit of extra money coming in. So many folks right now need a second source of ways to,

00:09:00
to, to, to put more food on the table. So many folks right now need that belief in themselves that they can do the things they need to do and to provide for their family. So let's make it so that more folks can find us and get those skills and have that confidence in themselves to be able to do the things that they do. And so please, like, tweet, so more folks can find us. Cool. Next Tuesday, we have a networking event. So we'll be doing our study community networking event. We're gonna be having some other networking events. If you're not part of a study community yet, don't worry. So just know, put on your calendars. A lot of folks ask for some heads up for the networking nights next Tuesday networking night. We're gonna talk a lot about freelancing skills tonight. Guess what? We're gonna be talking a lot about how to talk to clients. We're gonna be talking a lot about how to get someone to go from a cold call to giving you money. And then you're like Leon. Where do I practice

00:10:00
that? Where do I where can I? Where can I talk with someone to work through those those ideas those concepts? Well, guess what next week we're gonna be doing some networking and we're going to be a little bit of practice for our freelancing as well Next week keep it on your calendars, please Submitting work You all have been tasked with reading through javascript.info and at the end of some of the javascript.info chapters, there is some tasks. So tonight for homework, I want you to submit those tasks. You can either submit the code, you can submit a screenshot, it doesn't matter. Whatever you can do to show that you did the task, that's what I want, right? So you can go ahead and just put it in a code pen, You can put it in a screenshot of what you did. I don't care. Just show me that you did it. Yep. There should only been one or technically

00:11:00
two, but yeah, just the one that's fine. Cool. How do we submit the screenshot? You have to upload it to some sort of image Rehosting site slim thugga. Hey, thank you for the five good subs. Hope you're doing well. Thanks for being here Well, alrighty Next Who wants to be fancy? Who wants to who wants to show up on discord and everyone sees you? Everyone, you stand out amongst the crowd. People see you typing in Discord, and they go, ooh, who's that? All right, well, tonight's your chance to be fancy. If you clip something of the stream, after class, I am going to have

00:12:00
a thread where you can share your clip. Best clip gets a fancy color on Discord. You will be the envy of all of your friends. We're only doing one a stream to one a class, right? So you're talking about if we only have 60 classes, you'd be one of 60 out of 27 plus thousand All right So figure out how to clip during one of our breaks and whoever has the best clip posted in the thread you get the fancy Color now Leon. Why are you doing this? It's not an engagement play. I promise you that engagement play I want to Start sharing a lot of short form content Right now I just looking at where eyeballs are. Folks that are getting into tech, that are getting into learning how to code, they're not investing as much as they used to in three hour JavaScript classes, right? They are looking for short form content to see if this could be right for them. And

00:13:00
we got a lot of fun stuff to share with them that might get them excited to then come and join us live and invest in a longer form bootcamp. And so I wanna take some of the better moments from class, the things that are really educational, the things that are really funny and share that as short form content. And one way you can help me is by clipping the fun stuff we do right here. And so I'm gonna be taking these clips, I'm gonna be turning them into short form content, sharing them across other socials. Uh, so yeah, best clip it's special color on discord. All righty tonight, we are talking about a lot of stuff. We are talking about money contracts. We're talking about entering into legal agreements. And what I really need you all to understand is that I am not a lawyer. here, I am

00:14:00
not a tax professional, I am not a CPA, I would rate my level of kind of understanding this stuff and where I get my major source of understanding is bird law. And this really isn't bird law, right? So what you have to realize, right? This is just my ramblings as someone that has done this for the past 10 plus years, right? You have to realize I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a CPA. I'm not a tax professional. As you freelance, things might come up. You might get into a quandary. You might get stuck somewhere. I'm not the person to come to. You want to seek out professional help if those things do arise. So before we jump in tonight, before we start talking about how to get paid clients, how to freelance, I really want to make sure that you understand I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal

00:15:00
advice. I'm going to say that again. I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice. Hold on one second, one second. All right, I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal device. Some folks like it when I'm bigger. I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal device. Alrighty, beautiful. I am not a tax professional and none of this is tax or financial advice. Say it one more time. I am not a tax professional and none of this is tax or financial advice. This is simply the ramblings

00:16:00
of someone who has done some of this stuff before. And I think I've done a decent job at it. I think everything you could have fucked up when it comes to freelancing, I have fucked it up. I've absolutely made all the mistakes that are out there to be made. And I'm trying to synthesize the things that have helped save my butt and the butts of my students in the past. But understand the only reason I'm able to do that is because I've probably messed it all up before. So I hope tonight you get excited about freelancing. I hope you get excited about having this new avenue of expression to work with others to build really cool stuff. But realize that it's a journey, right? I'm synthesizing my journey, my perspective in an attempt to help you. Cool.

00:17:00
A big disclaimer is that this is going to be my perspective and so that's going to heavily skew to the US and the UK. Most of my contracting has happened in the US and the UK. Not that these skills won't be applicable to everyone. I really do think the things we share tonight really doesn't matter where you're located. Doesn't matter where you're coming from. You can do the stuff we're going to talk about tonight. I just want to put that as a disclaimer. I'm from the US. I know the things that have been tricky in the US, but I might not know the very specific intricacies of contract work in your country or your location, right? So that's something to keep in mind. Last cohort, we had students from all over the world. We had students in India get clients. We had students in Brazil get clients. We had students in the UK get clients. We had students in Poland get clients. We had students in all these different countries that got clients. I'm just letting you know tonight, my perspective is that as someone that's only really ever done client work in the U.S. and the U.K.

00:18:00
Now, the why. Why do I like to introduce freelancing so early and why do I like to make sure that all of my students freelance? I have two major reasons why freelancing is such a big component of all the bootcamps that I run. One is about money and the other is about experience. I shared the money issue before, but I'm gonna just reiterate it because I think it's important. It really does highlight why I do this. So for me, when I was in university, I moved off campus and I would often spend the summers working in labs or trying to get an extra study in. And there came a point where I ran out of money. I didn't even have money for food. I started asking

00:19:00
around to get help. Nobody could help and I was hungry. So what I decided to do was to see if someone would pay me for the skills that I had. I had been building websites and web applications. I'd always had an interest in entrepreneurship. I had always wanted to build stuff and I had been doing that. I had had smaller projects that I had launched, but I really just had HTML and CSS skills. There was nothing really fancy beyond that. And so for me, I was like, wait a minute. Um, let me see if someone will pay me for the HTML and CSS skills that I have. I went on Craigslist. I posted, Hey, I'll build your website, web application. I'm in the city that I was in. And literally that day, someone got back to me, said, yes, I need something built. I paid a deposit and I skipped my whole way to the grocery store to buy pasta and pasta sauce and I ate handsomely for a very long time.

00:20:00
That moment changed my life. Like that, like if you think about, like, if I think about my life, that, that was it. In that moment, I knew that I had a skill that no one would be able to take away from me. I had a skill that when I needed to turn it on, would put food on the table, would make sure that I could live my life. And it clicked, something clicked in my brain that tech could be an equalizer. It could be a way if I hone those skills to not only get paid, but to have a very different life. And I had a phenomenal life since that moment, right? Went on to raise millions of dollars in venture capital. I've built some amazing companies. I've taught a lot of folks tech that have helped them get amazing jobs as well So for me the freelancing is Something that I want for every single person that ever comes into my classroom I want

00:21:00
you to have that belief in yourself to be able to get the job done and get paid Your life is different when you know, you don't have to rely on a boss We don't to rely on somebody else's job when you know, you can hustle make good money and provide for yourself and your family. So to me, that unlocked something in my brain, in my soul, in my heart, and in my life that I want for each and every single one of my students. And the honest truth is just with the skills you have now, you can do it. Just HTML, just CSS, you can do it. I have had hundreds of students with less skills than you have right now, get amazing high paid clients. I want that for you. Now, like I said, at RC, they're a bootcamp I run during the day, in week six,

00:22:00
so after just five weeks of learning, our students in the past five years have never not gotten a paid client within that week. So tonight, I'm teaching you everything that they know, everything that the last cohort of 100 devs knows to get jobs, sorry, to get clients and to do it quickly. We're gonna talk about playing the game. I'm gonna show you how to play the game. It's up to you to play it, okay? Now, the second part, the second reason why getting a client is so important has nothing to do with just the initial money. It has to do with the fact that you smell. Every student coming out of a boot camp has a, has a, has a stench, a scent, and every company you apply to the recruiter, the engineering manager, they can smell it. They can smell

00:23:00
that new engineer smell, right? And that stench, that smell, is what's going to stop you from getting jobs. And let me explain why. When somebody tries to hire an engineer, how much do you think it costs to get an engineer in the door? Like to, to find an engineer that's going to start working for you, chat, throw it in chat, how much do you think it costs to get someone in the door and ready to start working? I work with a lot of companies that really do spend that 20 to 30 grand per hire. So let's, let's just, for the sake of argument, take the higher amount. You spent 30 K to get someone in the door. Cause remember it takes a lot of interviewing time. It takes a lot of recruitment time. Maybe you're paying a recruitment fee. Maybe you're

00:24:00
paying for the advertising to get those folks in the door. Right? So let's say you're paying for the advertising to get those folks in the door. say $30,000 all in to get someone in the door. Now, most engineers take anywhere from like three to six months to fully ramp up. Right? Most engineers, they join a new team, they start getting some small wins, some small tickets completed, but like really three months to get like up to speed and feeling comfortable on the job. Right? Sometimes if you have a more complicated team, more complicated stack, poor documentation, that three months can turn into like four or five or six. But let's say three months. So you hired an engineer, it cost you 30 grand to get them in the door and their salary is 100K a year. So it's gonna take 30 grand to get them in the door, 30 grand to get them paid for

00:25:00
those first three months, probably another 10 grand on top of that in terms of like benefits, things like that. And maybe like another 10 grand in terms of like relocation bonuses, work from home bonuses, paying someone on staff to take underneath their wing. Like let's say anywhere from like 70 to 80,000 to get someone in the door and within the first three months to figure out if they're a fit. $60,000 to $80,000 just to figure out if this person can be a good fit for the company right to see if they can be an engineer that'll be there for the long haul right and the sad thing is if you invest all that money they're probably going to stay there for one to two years and they're going to jump ship to another company so it is super expensive to get engineers in the door and working and in those first three months,

00:26:00
you might not be really sure if they're fit yet and it might take you that 60K to figure it out. So now when an engineer comes to the doorstep and they don't have anything that proves that they could be a good fit, that stench is overwhelming. That scent is a proxy for risk. All of us as entry-level engineers are way too risky to hire, right? That scent is risk. No company, in their right mind, can bring on an entry-level engineer and risk $60,000 on a hunch, on a few coding challenges that you did well, on maybe one or two interviews that you knocked out the park. because even if you do that, it's still 60K on the line. So how do we get rid of this smell? How do we take a really good

00:27:00
shower? How do we de-risk ourselves? The number one way to do it is to have someone that has already employed you. If you've already been working for someone else, the hiring managers, the recruiters see that and they go, well, it worked out with those people, so probably it'll work out with us. That's why getting your second or third job is so much easier than getting your first engineering role. Because if you've already worked for somebody else for a couple of months, a year, then that risk, that stench is gone. So freelancing is great. We get the bag, we get paid clients, but it's so much more than just the money. It's the shower. It is the getting rid of the stench. It is the de-risking of yourself so that more hiring partners, more recruiters can say with gusto that you're a good fit. You

00:28:00
should join their company, knowing that they're not risking that 60K, right? And the more clients you have, the more clients that are willing to be references for you, the easier it is to get that first job. I'm gonna show you tonight some folks their portfolios their contracts that took them from Never having worked in tech to working at some of the biggest companies that we all know I'm gonna show you exactly what they did how they did it the messages that they sent their portfolios their Twitters I'm gonna show you everything this evening and know that freelancing is not just about getting the bag It's also about getting the job Does that make sense? That make sense why freelancing is so important and why I want that for you? Cool, all right. Now,

00:29:00
I am going to show you how to play the game. It is up to you if you want to play it. The things I'm going to show you tonight, I have been called shady for, I have been called scammy for, scummy for, I have been called bullshit on, because what happens when you have hundreds of people that have gotten paid clients in five weeks, when folks that have been doing this for five years haven't, is they get a little, they get a little touchy. They get, they get a little, they get a little, they get a little iteration in their heart, right? They get a little jelly. Exactly. Get a little salty, as I used to say back in the day, right? And the things

00:30:00
I'm going to show you are going to cut corners, the things I'm going to show you are going to be what folks that have never done this before might consider not the right way. And my overwhelming response to them is go fuck yourself. I've helped hundreds of students that need the money, that need the clients to put food on the table, that are in the worst of times due to the pandemic, this is for them, it's not for you. I don't care about your hot take on templates. I don't care about your hot take on free hosting. I don't care about your hot take on stuff that you have no idea what you're talking about. You can get out of here and you can go fuck yourself. All right, every time I teach this class I get DMS. I already know I'm getting DMS on Twitter Well, Leon, I don't know about that template thing. No, you're wrong Just

00:31:00
just don't just close your eyes. Take out your headphones walk away. Don't need you What I'm about to talk about are things that cut corners But at the end of the day you are still going to provide amazing value to your clients and you're gonna do what's in their best interest. Nobody else matters, right? If at the end of the day your clients are happy, they have the things that they want it, that's all that matters. They can go pound sand, exactly. So, I always like to throw out this disclaimer. That I'm gonna teach you how to play the game, it's up to you if you want to play There are going to be some folks out there that want to say that it might be shady, maybe a tad unethical, it might be bullshit, whatever else they can conjure up, but they haven't done it and they haven't done it at the scale that we've done it at RC or at 100 devs, right? And so to

00:32:00
the haters, XD, thank you for the gifted subs. to the haters, please allow me a brief reading of the folks that have played the game. You ready? So I sent out a survey to folks that graduated and we had a lot of folks that filled it out. So this reading goes out to all my haters. And one of the question was, if you landed a paid client, how much were your total contracts worth? And this is to 100 devs folks that have graduated from the last cohort. So allow me the reading. From last cohort, just the folks that filled out the survey. If you graduated and you're here and you haven't filled out the survey, I got a bone to pick with you. Fill out the survey, please. We need you to fill out the survey so that we can share this with more folks. But a rating, a reading. Okay,

00:33:00
this is from 100 devs graduates that did the last cohort. If you landed a paid client, how much were your total contracts worth? Please include your local denomination. First answer, 28,000 so far this year, 200, 200, 600, 1000 Canadian dollars, 200, 800, 3000 pounds, 6,400 U.S. dollars, no, 400, 200, 8,000, 200, 150, 2,200 U.S. D and they made a note that said it was a static website. 200, 600, $50, $50. All right. Whatever a thousand currently negotiating. Uh, more contracts, 250, 500, 250,

00:34:00
$239 and 96 cents. Okay. 2,100, 500, $1,300, 500, 250, 1,800, 1,200, 4,100, 900, 1,000, 200, 350, 1,600, 1,200, 300. It keeps going folks, it keeps going. And these are all folks from the last 100 devs cohort. Exactly, Jasmine. So I'm gonna teach you how to play the game. It's up to you if you wanna play, but I just read out for the folks that did play what it was worth it to them.

00:35:00
So you want to do a hundred devs they said well if you want to do a hundred devs here's the requirement you owe me a paid contract by the end of this month you don't have to have the project done I need the signed contract with this signed contract, the amount must be for $200 or more, and it cannot be a close friend or family member. Doesn't mean you can't use friends or family to negotiate and get somewhere else, but $200 or more, no close friends or family members. Could be a friend from three years back, the kid that sat behind you in 10th grade math class, they're fair game. No close friends, no family members, $200 U.S., whatever that is in your denomination. Now, there will be some folks that are not able to freelance. I'm not calling you out, I'm not talking about you. Some folks,

00:36:00
if this would cause you harm, please don't do it. If this would violate your visa, please don't do it. If taking or entering into a contract is not something you're actually legally able to do, please don't do this. There will be exceptions, there'll be other things to do. contributing to open source projects, um, working on larger project teams, things that volunteering, there'll be other things that you can do that'll get you most of the same benefits, but I'm not talking to those individuals. I'm talking about the folks that have the privilege of being able to do this. Signed contract end of the month. It's a beautiful day. It's the first of the month. You got a full month to do it. I'm going to show you how you can do it. No close friends or family. It can be an acquaintance. Now, there's going to be a lot of questions that come up as we work through how to freelance. And so here is the Slido for the evening.

00:37:00
You can do exclamation point ask, right? Or you can just go to slido.com and type in that number. At the end of the stream, we're going to go through the questions that are on the Slido. Please upvote the questions that you would want to be answered. Don't put just generic stuff. We're going to cover a lot of material tonight, so don't jump the gun and try and ask questions that we'll probably answer as we go through. But as things come up, if you have questions about them, throw them in the Slido. Upvote the ones that you care to see answered. At the end, we will answer them together. Cool. All right, we're gonna jump into what is freelancing

00:38:00
and take it from there. But one thing I want on your brain before we go into this, I just read off a lot of numbers. You saw some that were at the $200 range and you saw some that were in the thousands of dollars range. The only difference between someone that got 200 and someone that got a couple thousand was that they asked for a couple thousand. When it comes to freelancing, there are going to be some folks that undervalue themselves and there are going to be some folks that value themselves appropriately. That's it. That's all there is to it. Some folks know their worth and ask for it and some folks have to build up the confidence to get there. You right now have skills that no

00:39:00
one else has. The folks that you're gonna be working with to build their sites, to do this freelancing, they're not gonna put in the time that you put in. You're on class 15, hundreds of hours now spent in class, outside of class, homework, reading, doing, building. No one that's running a business is gonna take those 100 hours to do what you just did so they can understand what's going on in the things that they're building. Folks come to me and they say, Leon, what about Wix, what about Squarespace, what about all these things? And my question to you is, do you know how to use Squarespace? Because if you don't and you're an engineer, then somebody that's running a business won't, they're not gonna spend the time to figure it out. So what you have to realize is that as a freelancer What people are paying you for is not what you do But all the things you had to learn to be able to do the things that you do and they pay you

00:40:00
Right. They pay you For the things that you provide business value towards Right. So remember they're not paying you for fingers on keyboard They're paying you for the business value that you provide and all the learning and hard work you had to do to get to where You are So what the heck is freelancing I Love that this gift because it highlights what freelancing really is like in the u.s. I Think the the number is one in three professionals is a freelancer, right? 36% of professionals freelance, and that's about 59 million Americans. And so what the heck is it? Freelancing means you're working as an independent person or company rather than being employed by someone else. Right? So instead of being employed by a company, you're providing

00:41:00
value or services to another company, right, and you're working independently. Now, there are a lot of other terms when it comes to freelancing and your country might have its own terms as well. So you might have heard people referring to freelancing as self-employed, independent contractor, contract job or contract work or contract role. You might have heard the term consultant or specifically in the US 1099. these are all terms to mean right right to mean right that you are an independent person not being employed but providing value to that company now in the US specifically we have two different terms we have w-2 and 1099 Folks that are employed by a company, they have, at the end of the year, a form sent to them called a W-2. It

00:42:00
shows them the salary they got paid, all the money that got taken out for taxes, right? An independent contractor at the end of the year will get a 1099, right? It's a form in the US. Each country has their own thing. So I'm just gonna talk about the US for right now. But each country has their own different way of doing it. So at the end of the year, if you are a independent contractor, you will receive a 1099 from a company that highlights how much money you made, but they do not do anything else. When you are a freelancer or an independent contractor, no taxes are withheld. You do not get insurance. You get no work extras, no 401k contributions, no, no health benefits, no contributions to retirement. You get none of that stuff, but you get the full check. And you get to be your own boss, and you get to offset or write off some

00:43:00
of your expenses. Right? Right? And so it's something to keep in mind that when you work for someone as a W-2, you get all those taxes withheld, you get those other perks, but you're not your own boss. You're not writing off your own expenses. is it's a different beast. And so I mentioned this as a huge, huge bag that if you go this freelancing route, your taxes will not be with hell. That is on you, right? It is the first thing I must bring up to you. Remember, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a tax professional. I'm not a CPA, but please pay your taxes. When you work as an independent contractor, when you get a 1099 at the end of the year, no taxes are withheld. What most contractors do is when they get a job, 30 to 40% of that job,

00:44:00
they put in a savings account, right? At least 30%. Some people do 40% just to feel a bit more safe, right? Because a company is not taking that money out for you and sending it to the government. You have to send it yourself and if you wind up freelancing a lot You're eventually gonna be paying your taxes quarterly in the u.s So remember if you are freelancing if you are contracting if you are 1099 whatever you want to call it Where you are doing work for another company, but are not currently employed by that company You must set aside some money for your taxes Cool 30 40 percent is what most folks do All righty, now, tonight, we're going to talk through all the big things when it comes to getting a client. We're going to talk about building our online persona, and I'm going to show you some examples. We're going to talk through how to find clients. We're going to talk through the proposals

00:45:00
that you're going to send to those clients. We're going to talk about the contracts that you're going to send to those clients. We're talking about how to close a client. Like you've got somebody on the hook. How do you seal the deal? We're talking about delivering that value and then reinvesting and building your empire. Yeah. So lots of stuff to get into tonight. Lots of fun stuff to kind of dip our toes into. And what you're gonna realize, right, is that it takes a little while to get the momentum going. so a lot of this is setting ourselves up to win a lot of this stuff has to simmer before you can start to generate leads and A lot of things we're going to talk through tonight. We're gonna get to in more detail even as the cohort goes on Aiko yep always saved already

00:46:00
All right, let's talk about your online persona. It's business folks. There is the trifecta of your online presence that you need established if you're gonna do freelancing in my opinion. You wanna have a solid portfolio. You wanna have a decent Twitter and a decent LinkedIn. Now, when folks see this, the portfolio, the Twitter, the LinkedIn, they think it has to be something like really intense or well thought, like a meticulous detail. No, it's actually some stuff that are very simple to do. You just have to do it the right way. So the portfolios I'm going to show you tonight are simple but effective. The Twitter I'm going to show you is simple but effective. The link that I'm gonna show you is simple but effective. It's not something I need you to run off and spend hours and hours and hours on, no. We need

00:47:00
to set up our baseline, all right? Make sure we have the basics covered and then we have to let this stuff marinate. So when you start your professional presence online, it's gonna take about six months for all that stuff to really start showing up, right? So you want to start now, no matter if you want to use it down the line, you want to start now so that over those six months, it'll start to show up. Now, a lot of folks, what I recommend you start off with is using your first name, last name, or just your name that you identify as, as like your presence online. Some folks don't feel comfortable with their personal presence being online, and they'll start like an agency or some sort of business entity or name that they work under, and that's something you can do. But it's way easier when you use a name or a moniker or something that you can be identified as

00:48:00
that works well for your portfolio, Twitter and LinkedIn, right? Not talking about like setting up an LLC or anything like that, we'll talk about that at the end, but just like it's a decision you make. Am I gonna work underneath a business name or am I gonna work underneath my own name or the name that I identify as, right? The benefit of working underneath your name is that it's easier to be found. It is easier to enter into contracts. It's easier to kind of get a few leads, but it's a decision that you'll make. Is an LLC necessary? Not yet. We're gonna talk about that at the end though. Cool. Now, let's talk about the Trinity here. We have two examples that I wanna show you when it comes to portfolios. The first portfolio I'm gonna show you is our mod extraordinaire, Blah. Blah got an amazing $1,000 contract

00:49:00
and then an amazing job. If you came to the alumni panel, you heard about the job they landed, the amazing salary that they locked down, knowing that they went from kind of no technical experience before to a senior role for their first role and it's going well. So I want to show you Blah's portfolio. And when I was talking to them today, the thing they brought up is that. Right now, they have too much inbound interest where they're literally turning down offers or handing those those like clients off to other people. And they literally just had somebody reach out to them. They handed that off to another 100 devs member and that 100 devs member actually locked down that client. So I'm gonna show you Blah's portfolio first. And I want you to keep in mind that they got a great client, paid $1,000. They had more clients coming to them that they passed the other folks that then also got

00:50:00
those clients. They got an amazing job, right? And let's keep our mind on that. So let's look at Blah's first. This is their link to their portfolio. You can click on it or just type it in. And here's where we are. Hi, my name is Barbara. I'm a full stack software engineer. Please take a look around. And right off the bat, they can say I need a site or I need a dev, right? They're just trying to say like, what are you looking for? You need a website built? You need a developer to join your team? Is your web presence working for you, right? And then they kind of give a little pitch about the things that they're able to do. They show their past work. They talk about their services. They give a little bit about themselves and then the ability to connect. So very, very simple, right? Straight to the point, nothing too wild out here. You don't have to, you don't have to really reinvent the wheel each time here. Like it's good, but you're gonna start to notice some things as we move through here.

00:51:00
Spectral salon, let's take a look at this. What does this look like, folks? What does this look like? People are like, that's our homework. Exactly, their homework. But look at it, look at what they did here. This is expert what they did here. This looks like a real salon. No one would ever know that this was homework, right? That's what I'm asking you to do. When I say make something your own, make it your own. when you do homework, make it look like a real salon, right? Looks like a real salon, you would never know. Same thing about some of their other examples too, right? An artist portfolio, a face painting business, right? They look like real sites. So even if you don't have clients yet, you can build out three sites that are probably just your homework, right? And add them to your portfolio.

00:52:00
Every single person that's been here and has done the homework, has stuff they can use for their portfolio, right? Now, the other thing, too, is we start to kind of like go down here. I noticed something here. We have like a nice contact form. The beautiful thing is that you're like, I don't know how to do contact forms. I don't know how to do email. If you use Netlify for hosting, which we're going to talk about in a second, which is completely free, you can literally have a form. You just put the Netlify tag on, right? You put Netlify on the tag, and then that's it. That's it, you're done, right? Netlify, and you're done, and your forms just work. It's literally an attribute value pair, and then your form works, and you can treat it like you can start accepting emails. So even if you're like, wait, I don't know how to do forms. I'm gonna show you, it's easy. Just put Netlify on there, it's done. No PHP, no any of that stuff. Now the very last thing is you'll see down here, Hold on,

00:53:00
HTML5 up, hmm, interesting. It's a template, it's a template, it's a template. Our fearless leader used a template, right? They did not code this from scratch, they used a template, right? You fill in the gaps and you keep moving, right? Because look, they got $1,000 client. They had so many people coming to them that they literally had to hand off clients to other people. They got an amazing six figure job and they did it with a template. All right, let's take a look. Next person. So this is Sean. Sean was one of my students at RC and now they've been a tireless mentor at 100 devs.

00:54:00
And so I wanted to keep theirs on there. Sean went from kind of real no technical experience, just doing a little bit of learning on their own to now working at Amazon. Their first client, right? Their first client was for $1,495, right? So they went from kind of no technical experience, a bootcamp and then land it an amazing client and a fang offer, right? Let's take a look at their portfolio. Hi, I'm Sean, your next software engineer. They're not pulling any stunts here. They're saying, hey, I'm your next software engineer. Hire me today, don't delay, hire me today, right? And look at their last projects. some simple Mernstack stuff that we'll do together, some fun stuff that they built, but nothing here is wild. A few sites,

00:55:00
a few games, a few full stack apps, and that's it. This portfolio got them a great paying client and an amazing job offer. Once again, what do you think they're using? Template, using a template, right? Don't waste your time. So many folks, when they first think about freelancing, think they have to do all this crap. They think they have to have an original design. They think that they have to set up an LLC. They think they have to buy a domain. They think they have to have a business entity. They think they have to do all the spending, all this money to get started you can freelance or 100% free if you're spending any money before somebody pays you you have fucked up if you have paid any money at

00:56:00
all I don't care about hosting I don't care about the means anything if you've paid any money you have messed up that first contract you lock down you take that deposit and you can use it do whatever the heck you want All right, but let's look, my favorite thing about this. It's changed now. It's changed now. Now they're making the big bucks at Amazon, right? So this changed, but look at their original link to their portfolio. Let's look at this. SeanCharles.netlify.app. What? You're telling me you can get a over $1,000 client and an amazing job without even buying a domain name. If you're hosting your stuff on Netlify, not only is

00:57:00
it free to host it on Netlify, but you can get this lovely netlify.app and nobody cares. Nobody cares all of the stuff that's in your brain saying I have to go buy a domain. I have to buy a beautiful landing, but no, it just doesn't matter. All this can be done for free. So I want to show you these two amazing examples because they took something, they made it their own and then they focused on the stuff that matters. The stuff that matters is actually talking with your clients, helping to provide value to them, building that relationship with them. All this other stuff, you can set up in a weekend, you can do it for free, you don't have to pay a dime. All right, all right. We're at the top of the hour. I want us to take our break, and then I'm gonna tell you the thing that people hate when I share. All right, I'm gonna do it, and they hate it when I share it, so we're gonna come back to that.

00:58:00
Let's go and take our break If you're new around here, we like to take a break at the top of the hour. We're in this too for the long call We're in this to be software engineers for the rest of our career I'm gonna make sure that we're if you're able we're getting up we're moving around or hydrating We're letting our eyes focus on something in the distance and we'll be back in five minutes Let's go ahead and put five minutes on we're gonna keep looking at some beautiful stuff when we get back More tips, more tricks, but the big thing take away here folks. You can start freelancing 100% for free. You don't have to pay a dime to do this. You don't have to pay for hosting, you don't have to pay for domains, you don't have to pay for templates, anything. I'm going to show you how to do it when we get back. Five minutes. I'll see you soon.

01:01:00
I forgot to run ads, I'm going to run ads for two minutes, just so folks can join us You

01:02:00
Yeah, nine seconds left on the ads. Alrighty folks, welcome back. Elden Ring ad, oh no. So folks that weren't here last class, I'm running ads during the break because you should to be taking a break anyway, and it stops folks from not being able to join and getting ads

01:03:00
or some folks are getting like while we're teaching ads. So I don't want folks to get ads while we're teaching. So we're just gonna run ads during our breaks. I'm always a grass type starter. Thank you, Rockstar, hope you're doing well. Am I required to run ads? No, I'm not. It's like not part of my agreement, but Twitch will just run them anyway. And so folks were getting them while we were teaching and that can't happen. All right, folks, come on back, come on back. Let's do this thing. All right, so show the

01:04:00
music already. So we talked about, we talked about two portfolios. I gave you two examples of folks that there's no technical experience before a bootcamp, right? Just a little bit of learning on their own went from building out a portfolio that got them over $1,000 each and also both six-figure jobs, right? So those portfolio examples I'm going to show you where you can get similar templates in a second. The next thing I want to show you are Twitters. There's two people that I think that have done Twitter really well that I want to highlight. One is Naya, who was one of my RC students and now has been a fantastic mentor for 100 devs. They did a tea spill last cohort where they shared everything that they did. Um, they are, the person has gotten the like highest paid client I've ever seen out the gate. Um, and so they shared all the details of how

01:05:00
they landed a $70,000 client. First client right out the gate. Uh, so I wanted to highlight them again because they, they destroyed the game. And so they did two things that I really loved. Uh, their Twitter changes every once in a while, every once in a while, like what, what, what they share on their Twitter. Um, but I love their sayings. Whenever you look at their Twitter, they do something really well. Uh, so their original one they had was your inclusive tech leader, founder and CTO of Afros and AI. So they branded their, their agency as Afros and AI. They labeled themselves software engineer and black tech Twitter as like the hashtag of choice. Right. When you come to their Twitter, that's what you see. That's what you think they are. Like that, like, even if you have no idea who Naya is, you see that and you're like boss mode, right? Same thing, they've, they're up, and earlier when they had with Software Engineer, Abolition Community Builder, right? They put the things in there they care about, right? Even

01:06:00
now, they changed their Twitter to Earthen Code. It's the same thing. They talk their talk, they show their strength. And I bring this up. Return of the Z, A, thank you. I bring this up because the way you describe yourself, the way you talk about yourself is what people are gonna believe about you, right? Now Naya can talk to talk and walk the walk, right? But so many folks I see when they start their freelancing journey still have aspiring In their in their Twitter bio. I'm an aspiring software engineer They have a junior in their in their in their in their title, right? No one wants to hire an aspiring software engineer No one wants to hire a junior software engineer You're a software engineer.

01:07:00
You have aspiring if you have junior take it out of your title now No one's going to hire you with that in your title. Talk your talk and then walk that walk, right? So definitely give Niha a follow. They're an amazing developer and they're a really good example of how to, through hard work and really good community building, will amazing clients and amazing contracts. Well, the other person, we can't talk about somebody that's amazing and able to build great relationships and land amazing clients without talking about Sam. So Sam is a 100 devs alumni. They're now a developer advocate and material UI and they share some of the best, right? The best, right? Some of the best information on how to freelance, how to get clients. And they have a phenomenal story about

01:08:00
how they went from learning the technical skills and immediately applying them to bring in more money than they were at their normal job. And so I love the advice that they share and they've helped a lot of other 100 devs folks make more money, get better clients, get bigger contracts. And so that's why they have their own hashtag, sorry, their own, their own command here in chat. You can do exclamation point Sam and get their link as well, but definitely give Nye and Sam a follow. There are two people that I know have done the best at taking the raw skills they have and translating it into clients and their Twitter is something that you'd want to model as well. Now we're going to talk about how to build those relationships as we kind of continue on, but the reason why a portfolio and Twitter are so important is because Twitter ranks really high. So if you are trying to get like the the the above the fold on Google

01:09:00
stacked with your name or your agency name Twitter is that thing that's gonna help boost in the search engine results and so some folks don't feel too comfortable Twitter but you gotta get comfortable with it because it will help any of your other stuff rank a little bit higher right and so that's why I push Twitter Last is LinkedIn When folks are trying to evaluate if they're going to work with you To build their like products, they're typically going to google you and hopefully they find your portfolio They find your twitter and then a lot of folks will look for your linkedin and a lot of folks Kind of freak out about their linkedin. So i'm going to show you a linkedin of someone that's gotten good clients But also has gotten a great job So andy is one of my past students and I just want to show you their LinkedIn and I have permission to share all this stuff like I'm not putting people on blast I asked the permissions when I let first did the the cohort.

01:10:00
So here's Andy's LinkedIn and I they're they're an engineer at DraftKings and I want to show just kind of their their basic Activity they have their experience as an associate software engineer They have their experience at a boot camp and they have the thing they did before That's it. Three things. You're gonna see this pattern come up over and over again of three things. I don't care what you've done in the past. I don't care what you're gonna do in the future. You really only need three things, right? So you saw one thing from their past, their bootcamp and where they're at now. If we go back and we look at Sean's examples, right? If we look at Sean's resume, you're gonna see this pattern of three show up again. They have what they did in the past. They have what they're doing now and their bootcamp experience, right? And so what you're gonna have happen

01:11:00
is that I'm gonna share eventually resume templates, right? And other templates as we kind of go on. We're always gonna have this like rule of three where you're gonna talk about something you've done in the past. You're gonna talk about your bootcamp experience. And until you get a job, your third thing is your freelance experience, right? You're going to talk about a past job, your current, your current experience, right? And then your freelance experience. And so we're going to put that on our resume. We're going to put that on our LinkedIn and the way we talk about it, right? The way we talk about it is we talk about your past experience, framing it, framing it as something that's going to lead you to tech. You talk about your bootcamp experience, not as a bootcamp. We never put those words anywhere on our resume, our LinkedIn, our portfolio. We talk about 100Devs as an agency. And if folk give you pushback,

01:12:00
you say the agency has a training program and that's what you're all in, right? You're all in 100Devs Academy, right? You're in the training program with the agency. And then you have your own freelancing, whatever you want to call it. First name, last name, consulting, whatever you want to call it. Those are the three things that you're going to put on your resume. You're going to put them on your LinkedIn. You're going to put them on your portfolio and you don't have to stress about other stuff. If you want to fill in more stuff, you have a longer work history, that's okay. A lot of folks are coming to us with maybe a shorter work history or some gaps. And so those three things are what fill the gaps. And your freelancing is smaller or larger depending on in the gaps that you have to fill. If you haven't worked for the past year due to the pandemic, it's the best time ever to say, oh, I was freelancing for that past year. If you have a larger gap, well, guess what? You were freelancing during that gap. And then you're going to get clients that are references that help you get past that smell and

01:13:00
help explain that gap. Now, As we start to work in the future, I'm gonna give you resume templates. I'm gonna give you LinkedIn templates. I'm gonna give you all this stuff that's gonna make it easier to build out those presences in terms of gearing for a job. But this week for your homework, I'm gonna ask you to build out your portfolio. I'm gonna ask you to build out your Twitter. I'm gonna ask you to build out your LinkedIn. You're gonna keep it simple, just enough that when you're talking to a client And they Google you or they look at you on LinkedIn or they look at you on Twitter They see something and they go. Oh, okay. I can talk to this person That's all we're working about. That's all we're worried about for right now in the future. We'll build more stuff. We'll do more stuff, etc Now some folks are currently working somewhere great that's one of your three, right You're gonna have wherever you're currently working and then either a hundred devs or you're

01:14:00
freelancing, but keep it simple. Nothing too wild Now, the thing that I get the most hate for, the thing that, um, I know I got a DM already for like, it just, I just, whenever I talk about this, especially we got so many people here, I just know I'm gonna have a DM about it and there's gonna be some person that's gonna be like, well, I don't know about this. Go fuck yourself. All right. So there you go. Are you a developer? True. Are you a designer? Probably not. Some of you are though, right? So if you're a designer equals true, then you should go ahead and design your portfolio. But if you're not a designer or designer is set to false, you should use a template. Okay. So are you a designer? If so, go ahead and design the portfolio of your dreams. But if you're not a designer,

01:15:00
get out, get over it, use a template. And here's the other thing too. If you're not a designer and you're working for a client, use a template for your clients. Hold on, I gotta get bigger. If you are not a designer, use a template for yourself and use a template for your clients. Remember, your job is to provide value to your clients. They are going to appreciate the cost savings that you provide to them by using a template. If they had to pay for a designer to design something and then for you to build it that cost real money. So by using a template they wind up with something very professional, something that helps them accomplish their business goals, it

01:16:00
saves them money and it's easier for you. That is a win, win, win. Cool. We all agree. All right. Can we tell them that? That's up to you. Some folks come off the cuff, I use templates, it saves you money. Some folks don't tell their clients they use templates And they go that's kind of up to you. That's your move. That's what I said. I'm gonna show you how to play the game It's up to you how you want to play it and how you want to play it Some folks don't snitch on themselves some folks snitch on themselves. It's up to you. I'll smooth a talker. Are you? Will your client care? Will your client even know what the heck you're talking about? Right. I share something that I that I'm allowed to tell you The last client wanted a Wix website.

01:17:00
Let's sink in for a second. $1,000 client wanted it done on Wix. All right, you want it done on Wix? I'm happy to do it. Do you know how to use Wix? The client will say, no, great. I will build you the site of your dreams on Wix. It's gonna cost $1,000, right? That's it, that's how the conversation went, right? Remember, it's about the value you provide, not the tools you use. Alrighty, now, I've shown some templates. The place I like to start with templates, right? The place I wanna start with templates is HTML5 Up. They're completely free, and from what I could find, They're just not shady a lot of these places where you download free templates. It's always weird stuff weird ads I don't know. It's a

01:18:00
hot mess, but HTML 5 up from what I can see and what I've used are Pretty good templates just regular HTML nothing more wild than HTML and CSS right completely free to use and no shady stuff and and You'll notice as you look through HTML 5 up, I think we really broke it Oh great as you look through it, you'll start to notice some stuff. Wait a minute. Huh? this editorial template That looks pretty similar And if we keep scrolling Let's see Where's the other, oh. This Photon template looks kind of similar, I don't know. We gave it the old 100 devs hug of death, that's all right. It'll come back up when we're done. All right, so HTML5 up, completely free, easy to

01:19:00
use, free to download, has helped lots of folks get high paying clients. Why would you use anything else? Right? Why would you use anything else? Well, after you get your first client, right? After you get your first client, you wanna reinvest, right? You wanna reinvest. And so after your first client, you might move on to some more advanced templates that are a little bit closer to the niche or the job that you're trying to do. And you might look at things like wrap bootstrap or theme forest. These are like pretty popular places to get templates There are so many other places to get templates But the idea here is you don't do this on your first your first rodeo, right? after you get Some money coming in the door. You can always upgrade but the idea here is that you can do it for free cool

01:20:00
Hosting, you can do it for free. Netlify.com slash drop is the easiest hosting you will ever find. You literally take your folder and drag it to the browser window and it is hosted. You can then change the domain to whatever you want it to be at netlify.app, right? 100% free. I have so many clients and I know so many of my students have their clients solely on Netlify entirely for free because for most of the clients you're working with early on you're talking more like mom and pop businesses, is lower traffic, where it just doesn't matter, right? How much traffic they're gonna get. They're just not gonna get a lot, right?

01:21:00
And so Netlify is completely free. You get a Netlify app if you want. And then if they want to get a domain, you charge them for it. Like you put that in part of your proposal, right? This works everywhere, yeah. It should work for pretty much everyone. It's completely free hosting. It's super easy to host stuff. You literally drag your folder into the browser and it's hosted. That's it That's it. You're done. All right, so you don't have to worry about hosting. You don't have to worry about templates. It's all free How did how is it free how do they make a profit Well, it's very cheap to host static sites and by static we just mean like HTML CSS a little bit of JavaScript Now that's kind of trivial to host. It's very little money, but they want you to integrate Netlify as your development tool Right. So, um, now that I build bigger sites with beefier front ends, I still use Netlify. I got, got, they hooked me with free stuff that I use for myself and all my clients. But as I want more feature

01:22:00
full stuff, I want bigger stuff. I want other stuff than you pay a little bit. Right. But the idea here is that you don't, you don't have to pay out the gate just works. It's free. It's easy to use. Uh, yeah, but it's not, but it's, it's very like, I don't want to like say that people like, Oh, like I'm going to, no, it's, It's just that there are other services that they provide. And once you're already in the ecosystem, it's just easy to use those other services too. Juicy said, do we need to write server side stuff for these basic websites? That's up to you and your client. A lot of the first clients you'll probably work with won't have back ends. And if you do get with a client that wants a backend, we're gonna talk about how to handle that in a bit. Domains. I showed you someone that got an amazing

01:23:00
high paying client, a job at a fang company and they just use netlify.app. So you don't need anything other than netlify.app for yourself. A lot of times your clients will want to put their site on their own domain, right. And so what I'll typically do is I'll have them buy a domain on one of these two registrars, or if you want your own domain, you can buy it on these two registrars. I love Namecheap. I've been a Namecheap customer for 10 years now, plus probably. They have always had amazing support. Whenever something's been a problem, They have helped me, they've gone out of their way. They do the most, right? They do the most in the best way possible. And they've just been a phenomenal host, right? So a phenomenal domain host provider, right? And so for me, I use Namecheap for all my domains. Now,

01:24:00
sometimes Namecheap doesn't have like the special TLDs, like the really weird endings, like not .com, .org, but like the weird ones. And when I want a weird one that Namecheap doesn't have, I use I want my name, right? So Namecheap and I want my name are pretty much what I use for all my domains. You don't have to really look anywhere else. I love Namecheap, an interesting anecdote for right now, like 70% of their employees are from Ukraine. And so right now they're getting a lot of, Like Namecheap is doing right by their employees, which I always love to see. And so if you're interested in supporting a company that employs Ukrainians, like that's another value add for Namecheap right now. Cool. Particus, hey, thank you for the hydration. Cheers to you. What about GoDaddy? No, just no. GoDaddy is a horrible company

01:25:00
with horrible support, the most misogynistic commercials I've ever seen. Like, no, just stop. GoDaddy is the Papa John's of the domain world, exactly. GoDaddy is the Papa John's of the domain world. And normally I'm pretty like, I don't like to make, I don't like to say stuff like that on stream, but no, they deserve, no, just don't use GoDaddy. Namecheap is amazing. I want my name is amazing. And just don't like, this is like one of the things where it's like, just take my advice on these two, please. There's so many other domain providers that are out there. I've used them all, like I've used a lot of them. And I just constantly come back to these two because they just work, they get out of your way. They have great support. A lot of the other domains are kind of owned by like two or three big companies. And so even if you think like they're separate, they're not. Namecheap is now kind of part of one of those, but yeah.

01:26:00
Just don't go, you won't go wrong using these two. Cool. And none of these are like, just to put out there, none of these links are like scammy, like none of these are like referral links or anything like that. Like I would never use those without like, I would just never use those. So these are just like my actual opinions. There's no like referral link or anything happening there. Cool. All right. So now we've talked about how to set up your online presence. You now have a decent portfolio that's using a domain for free, hosting for free, templates for free. You set up a Twitter that has a great intro that explains that you are a software engineer, not aspiring, not junior. You got rid of all that stuff during the break and you have a LinkedIn that's just simple. You're keeping it to three things. That way all that stuff can start to marinate Right all that stuff can start to marinate and when folks eventually look for you online, they find those things So now

01:27:00
we're gonna talk about finding clients And this is the part where folks get a little a little scared a little a little a little little shooketh But it's not it's not wild. I'm gonna give you a process that has worked for all of my students We're gonna go through it together. Cool When you're looking for clients, right, start close, start close, tell your friends, tell your family and post on social media, all your social medias, even if you got to dust off the Facebook and post for the first time in three years, put everything out there. You will be surprised when you talk to your friends that somebody from your third grade soccer team, they now run a barbershop and they need a website, right? Tell your family, you never know your brothers, cousins, uncles, best friends, twice

01:28:00
removed. They're starting a new coffee company and they need a new website. The more you put out there to your friends and your family and honestly explain to them what you do, hey, I'm a software engineer, I build websites and web applications for different clients. If you ever know someone that needs a website or web application, send them my way. It's that simple. But tell all your friends, tell all your family, you will be surprised who comes out of the would work to say, oh, I heard from so-and-so that you do websites or web applications. I need help, right? Put it on your Zanga, put it on your aim away message, exactly, whatever you got, put it out there, right? By telling your friends and family, you will be surprised. I say this every single time I teach this class and I get all these messages, Leon, somebody twice removed from church is best friend's brother. They want me to build something and they get the client. So please tell

01:29:00
your friends tell your family and then share it on the social media that you have and you will be surprised What comes to you? That's the first place you're gonna get clients right now The next thing you want to start doing is going local Right. All of you are networking locally, right the idea is that You try going local first, and then if local's not the bee's knees, you go to the closest metro area. It's the same thing for freelancing. The being local is the biggest advantage you will ever have when it comes to freelancing. We're going to talk about ways for folks that live in the middle of nowhere that don't have a local area to network with or to get clients from. and we're gonna talk about how to do that, but you have to understand for folks that do have the ability to be local, that is your biggest

01:30:00
advantage. And so you wanna make sure that as you are networking, you are introducing yourself appropriately. When you're going to these meetups, you're going to these events, right? And you introduce yourself, you say, hey, I am so-and-so, I am a software engineer, And I build websites and web applications for clients in the, and then you say wherever you're from. So I would say, hi, I'm Leon. I'm a software engineer. I build websites and web applications for clients in the LA area. I do that to every single person. I meet Southpaw said, what if I don't want my current employer to know we are doing this? Don't tell them they don't know what meetups you're going to. They don't know where you're, where you're going. You might have to be a little bit safer on your social media. But that's that's up to you. I'm going to show you how to play the game or it's up to you when to play and how you're going to play it. Right? So

01:31:00
the joke that people always give when I when I mention this is that if you ever watch The Office, there is one character that does this amazingly. Well, it's Bob Vance Bob Vance Vance refrigeration throughout the entire show Bob always introduces himself as Bob Vance Vance refrigeration. You will never meet Bob Vance from Vance's refrigeration and not know what they do. It seems funny, but it works. Every single person that has ever watched the office knows who's Bob Vance is and they know what they do. Who like, if you think about any other TV characters, do you know what their profession is like off the rip? This is like a secondary, a minor character in a show. and we all remember what their profession is because that idea works. And so when you're going to these meetups, Bob's Burgers, exactly. When you go to these meetups, it sounds a little silly at first, but hey, I'm Leon. Nice to meet you. I'm a

01:32:00
software engineer. I build websites and web applications for clients in the LA area. How are you doing? What are you, why'd you come here tonight, right? Like it seems a little odd at first, but the more you do it, the easier it becomes. And then every single person you meet, you build that relationship with Knows what the heck you do and you're local to start, right? You're local to start and so as you're networking you're meeting these folks Locally start telling them what you do and maybe off the rip with the the introductions a little bit hard But maybe you try and let folks know throughout the conversation Now you've told your friends. You've told your families. You've put it out there on social as you're networking You're letting folks know what you do. That's like how like 70% of my students get clients. Like off the rip, 70%, friends, family, social media, and networking. That's like 70% of how folks get clients. It just works, right?

01:33:00
Next is listings. Using local listings. So local listings are things like Craigslist, Facebook marketplace, Facebook groups, Nextdoor, your local chamber of commerce, right? Any of these places that are local. Now, a lot of them are crap. Like a lot of them just don't work or there's a lot of weird stuff that happens on them. But a lot of my students still get amazing clients. Heck, I even get amazing clients from things like Craigslist. Like you're like, what? It's not gonna be your main vertical. It's not gonna be the main way you get clients But it's worth it to check once a week and to post once a week if you're able that hey I'm a local software engineer you put it in big bright letters. I am local I will meet you at and you insert the famous hot dog site I would love to talk to you about your web development needs right remember

01:34:00
Remember the the the local thing is your shtick. When folks are putting stuff on these listings or putting it out there, they're gonna get inundated with like hundreds of messages of folks that are not local. You have to infuse the localness in the way you talk, the lingo that you use, and the messages that you send, right? So if you are talking to someone, you say like, hey, I'm a local to Nashville, let's go to this wonderful hot dog site and talk about your project, right? You got to infuse that locality to help you stand out. We're gonna talk about other folks that are not local. We're gonna talk about that in a second, but local is your value add. It is the thing that'll help you stand out from the onslaught of other folks that are reaching out on these listings. Now, you've done friends, you've done family, you've done social, you've done told every single person you've been networking with. Remember, you're networking every week. You owe me three coffee chats. I'm sorry, three

01:35:00
network connections and two coffee chats a week. That's a lot of folks that now know you are a freelancer and it compounds. The more you network, the more people that know, the more people that are willing to come your way, you're now putting out on all these listings. You're talking to folks on Facebook marketplace. You're talking to Facebook groups that are local to you. You're, you're doing all these things. You now have like a strong base. The next step is to talk to places that you know, right? The places that you go to, right? Your barber, the nail salon, the hair salon, the restaurants, right? Look at the places that you know. Is there something that they don't have about their web presence? Do they have a web presence, right? Help them, right? You know them, you know, they're they're they're offering best Talk to them Right a

01:36:00
lot of my students first clients are their barbers a lot of my first students are the restaurant that they've been going to Since they were little that doesn't have a website right now a lot of these local places are hurting Folks went digital when the when kovat hit like that people went digital And so if they haven't kept up with that wave, they're missing out on a lot of clients They're missing out on a lot of opportunities. You could provide them tremendous value by helping them modernize or making whatever they did sign up with during the pandemic actually work better. Right. And so you've now told friends, family, you you've put it on social. You've been networking and telling everyone you've done the listings. You talk to the places, you know, the next thing is to be outbound. Pick a niche and go for it. So When I used to teach in the classroom at RC

01:37:00
We would do we call it we call this process hustle week So they have you have five weeks of instruction and then your six week We have off and all you do is get a client right hundreds of folks in that week You've gotten a client but every once in a while We have some students that struggle and so one of the very first times I did this We had a small group of folks that were struggling. And so I said, Hey, let's get a client together today. And that's what we did. We did a three-step process that got us two clients in one day. Let me say that again, two clients, one day. So in the morning we picked a niche. We said we were located in Boston and he said, all right, what's that? What's a niche? What, what, what can we help folks with? Like who could we provide value and what are there a lot of? And so our answer was restaurants. We said, all right, well, restaurants right now are having to modernize. They're having to go online. They need digital menus. They need ability for folks to order, right. They're getting,

01:38:00
if they're competitors on Uber and they're not, they're, they're getting disrupted. Right. And so we're like, we could probably provide a lot of value to restaurants and help them modernize and come online. And so we said, all right, we're going to go at restaurants. and for two hours, all me and my students that were doing this process with me, we compiled a list of every single restaurant in Boston. It only really took us like two hours to put it up against all of us. We found all the restaurants in Boston and Mecca Pre A 609, thank you so much for the 10 gifted subs, that's wild. Thank you so much, thank you for being here. Appreciate you, right? We made a list of all the restaurants And so I'm going to share a list of restaurants. All of this is public info, but don't be like a weirdo and start calling people or anything like that. So these are all restaurants that, um, we're in the Boston and we found them. And we put, we, we found their, their business name. Right. And

01:39:00
then we said, do they have a website and is it shitty? I should probably, I need to change that. So we just, we just found all these, we found all these places and we We split it up by different people, right? So there's different, different people for different, different restaurants, right? We found all these restaurants. We said, do they have a website? And is it bad? And then we dialed for dollars, right? We said, all right, we have all these restaurants. We found them all. We're going to start calling. And our goal is if they don't have a website to get them a website and that they have a bad website to get them a better one, right? And so we, we started dialing for dollars And, um, you'll notice we kind of have like three different color combinations. Uh, red was, uh, they didn't answer or they told us to fuck off. They're just like, don't ever call me again. Um, and then blue was like, we couldn't talk to the manager or something weird was happening. And green was like, they were interested. Like, they were like, all right. Like, like

01:40:00
we left a message or like, there was something that we could probably reach back out to them again. And so what you'll notice is that like, or like half of them, we told Like, like we got rejected the other, like third, like nobody, like it just didn't, we didn't work out. And then like a third was like people that are like, Oh, interesting. Tell me more. Nobody picks up the phone anymore. They're not getting called and they're not getting calls and they're not getting calls from people that are local. Remember a local is an advantage. Right. And so we were like, all right, I'm not some sales guru. I've run sales teams in the past, but these are some folks that have never sold anything in their life. So for folks that were not charismatic, that's something just saying charismatic, some folks that had never dialed for dollars before, how did they do it? Well, I gave them a script and the script was super simple. It's not some, some wild script that they had memorized where they were elite sales teams. No.

01:41:00
Right. It was a very simple script. Hi, this is Bob. Do you have a website where I could see your menu? That's what we would say on the phone. Hey, do you have a website where I could see your menu? And then there is a decision tree. If they said no, right. Uh, if they like, so they'd be like, all right, huh. Odd question. Um, can we see your menu? Right. They say, uh, you'd like to have a menu and then that was the kick kick off the conversation, right? Like, Hey, do you have a menu? Now get the conversation going. Right. And then I would say, huh, odd question, but is the business owner available? So it didn't matter if they had a menu or they didn't have a menu. It didn't matter, it was just to get them talking, right? Then I would say, huh, odd question, is the business owner available? Right, and you're like business owner, who says that, right? But then if they said no, then I would say, hey, what is their name and when are they normally around, right? And if they asked why, I would say, oh, I'm a Boston-based web developer, I make websites and would love to help out a local business. If they said yes, I am the owner, we would say, great,

01:42:00
I'm a Boston-based web developer, I make websites and would love to help out a local business. If they say yes, they are busy, I'll say, great, I'll call back in a few minutes. That was it. This was the simple script that we used. I had, what was it? Five or six students dialing for dollars. This is not some Wolf of Wall Street thing that like folks are saying. This was it. This is the super simple, simple decision tree. And there was two things that I held my students to, right? Two things. You could only ever get off the phone if one of these two things happened. One, they had to agree to a package of at least $100 or two, they had to hang up on you. That was it. That was the only outcome for my students. The person had to agree to a package of at least $100 where we set up their website or they had to hang up on us. And we were calm,

01:43:00
we were persistent, but we weren't mean, we weren't pressuring them. We were asking lots of great questions good qualifying deals right like we weren't we weren't doing anything. That would be like Like bad we just weren't getting off the phone until they agreed to a package or they hung up on us Right and we got hung up on a lot, but we were calm. We were cool. We were collected. We were professional We were nice the whole time we were trying to joke and have fun with them Right and they would either hang up or they agree and so my students did this for all the restaurants that you just saw. And at the end of the day, we had two clients and the clients weren't for a hundred dollars. We had a client for, I think it was like 500 and 800. All right. And we, so people are like, what's InstaDine? We called this company InstaDine.tech. It's not up anymore, but it was for a while. We built a really quick landing page using a template. And when people asked us who we were, we would say, oh, we're InstaDine.tech. We're a local agency that helps restaurants like

01:44:00
yours. And that's it, dialed for dollars, had a short and simple script. And by the end of that day, we had two clients. So you can start with friends, you can start with family, you can start with your social, you can add your networking, letting folks know, you can be local using your listings. And if that doesn't work, you can always dial for dollars. It does work. Now, I showed you how I created a list, I gave you my script to call folks, it works. You're going to get hung up on a lot. You're going to get rejected over and over and over again. But in the end, it works. And some folks go really deep into the sales world. They

01:45:00
watch the video. I asked you to watch today called Fuck You Pay Me. And they start to really like the sales process and they get better at this outbound outbound exactly is a numbers game. It's not the game I really play anymore. I have a lot of inbound now, but I did a lot of networking to get that inbound coming in. So it's kind of a personal preference which way you go about it. Inbound outbound. Some people prefer some some folks really hate the networking piece. So they'd rather just talk to a thousand strangers That's just what they like to do. All right up to you Pickle cat a thank you for the hydration. Cheers to you Alrighty, what if getting away from cold calling is one of the reasons I like the sound of web development? Well, good. You don't have to cold call to get clients. I don't

01:46:00
cold call anymore ever to get clients. Mine's all inbound, but I'm just showing different strokes for different folks, right? Like some folks like the dialing for dollars. Some folks really like the networking. Some folks prefer just to keep it friends, family, and social. It's up to you. Alrighty. Last in this realm of finding clients is going wide. So you've done the local game. You've done everything you can locally. The next thing is going wide. So, there are kind of three big things when it comes to going wide, and this is also the advice for folks that are not, they don't have a local area to invest in, right? They're maybe not close to a metro area, local's not a thing for them. And so they have to start going wide. One of the first places that folks start off by going wide are gig sites. They'll

01:47:00
go to Upwork or Fiverr or Freelance like all these gig sites now Gig sites are really really hard because you're competing a lot against a lot of folks And so if you're gonna use gig sites, you have to do two things I've had hundreds of students try using gig sites. The only ones I've ever seen be really successful do two things One they invest heavily and making sure that their presence on that gig site is all up to par They get all the all of the like accoutrements you can put on your profile everything And then the second thing is they price everything really high right when you Use these gig sites there. It's a term. I don't like to use but it's the truth. It's a race to the bottom Right. It's a race to the bottom, right? It's it's It's this idea that there's so many people competing and they're all just racing to give the

01:48:00
cheapest price because they think competing on price is the thing to do. Never, ever, ever compete on price. It doesn't help you land good clients. The clients that are that price sensitive are not the clients you wanna work with. If you go on these gig sites and you price higher, folks see that and they go, huh, they must be providing a lot of value to price it at a thousand when everyone else is pricing it at 100, right? And so the folks that did gig sites, the only way that it's ever worked is by having a really tricked out profile and then also valuing high. But otherwise I stay away from the gig sites. I've tried them all. It's just not the best time investment. There is a better time investment and that's building authority, right? Folks that build authority can get around a lot. So what do I mean by that? Pick a niche, right? Pick a niche. If you are in an

01:49:00
area where there is no localness, you are fully remote. You'll never have a Metro area near you where you can do this in, or you're in an area, some folks like to think that certain areas are saturated to rarely are. But for some reason you think maybe local can't work for you. The best strategy I have seen for folks to get clients when they don't have a local area to Balance off of is to build authority around a niche Do you pick something and you become the expert at that thing? It could be restaurants. It could be barbershops. It could be nail salons It could be something where you know that industry inside and out and you build a presence around that niche I've done this before with dental offices. I built up a whole agency that just worked with dentists. It was great. Dentists are horrible clients to work with, but I had an amazing blog. I had a lot of

01:50:00
content. When I would talk to dentists, they would see that I was the authority on how to get clients to come into dental offices, how to build their web presence, right? And so they would pick me over all the other folks that we're talking to them because I built up authority. You can do this. I don't care if you live in the middle of nowhere, have no network. You start today. You pick your niche. You build a blog. You build authority. You put out content. Right. Right. You put out content and you slowly build up that train of content and then you build out a list of folks that are in that niche and you reach out to them, right? Takes a long time, but it's a way to get through it. You can start a blog tonight, Hashnode, former sponsor of the stream, completely free to start a blog. Sam has an amazing blog that they

01:51:00
started that helped them build authority in the freelancing world, right? In the freelancing world. And so yeah, exclamation point Hashnode, thank you Indifferent. You can start a blog tonight. And so for folks that can't go local, building authority is the way to go. This would seem like a long-term investment. It is. We're talking about building a niche and becoming the expert in it so that you can serve your clients best. Awesome. All right. Now, the next thing we're gonna talk about is we've built up our online presence. We're either going local or building authority now We we have found a client And we start the conversations with those clients now. It's time to build our proposal. Like what are we sending to them? What are we negotiating with them? How are we getting them to pay us? Like how do we do the pricing?

01:52:00
How do we how do we know like what to charge them? Well, that's what we're going to talk about next but before we do so, we're going to take a break. So let's bring our five minutes up here. When we come back from five minutes, we're going to talk about how do you price effectively? Like how do you like actually figure out how much you're going to charge someone, right? We're going to talk about the proposal you send to them. Once you agree on what's going to be built, I'm going to show you real actual proposal templates that you can use starting today. I'm going to show you real contracts that you can use starting today We're going to paint a beautiful picture We're gonna walk through all that stuff together and then we're gonna take probably about 30 minutes to answer all your questions You might have about freelancing If you haven't already submit your questions to the Slido and upvote the questions You want to see answered during the question and answer period? All righty, folks. Let's start the timer if you're able to please get

01:53:00
up move around the hydrate Let your eyes focus on something that's not the screen and we'll be back in five I'm gonna run ads because we we should be running ads. So folks don't get cut off during stream At cm5 folks you

01:54:00
you you

01:55:00
you you

01:56:00
you I have a coworker that I'm friendly with who has a YouTube channel

01:57:00
but no dedicated website. Do they count? Yeah, those count, just like not your best friend or your family, like you want to push yourself to try this stuff. Folks won't see ads if they have a sub. These are folks asking. Spell I use a short SM7B. How many paid clients will you have by the end of this cohort? It's up to you, the requirement's at least one. Is PayPal okay for taking payment? It can be if that's the way that works best for you, but Check is also good. Hey pals weird because then you have to worry about like chargebacks and stuff like that All right folks Tricking some cold brew tonight Yeah, a lot of folks will use Zelle or check or some sort of wire stripe There are there are a bunch of platforms that you can use

01:58:00
All right folks come on through come on through Can you get a signed contract over email? Yeah, and there are plenty of platforms that do contracts now to like docusign and stuff like that I'm not shuffling paper anymore these days really, especially with the pandemic. All right, so talk about a lot of ways to one, build our presence and two, to start finding clients. And it's a process. At first finding clients is very hard, but it's something you tackle one at a time. You tackle building your presence, then you tackle talking to friends and family, then you tackle trying to do it while you're networking. It's pieces that you build up over time, right? But the thing is, you can do it. I've

01:59:00
had hundreds of students do it from all walks of life. It feels really uncomfortable at first, but you have the skills, you have the ability. You will be able to do it. And if you get stuck or have questions or you're trying to find ways to make it work for you, ask lots of questions. especially this coming weeks on Discord, trying to figure out something that's going to work for you. And then, like I said, if there's things that are actual barriers to you doing this process, we're going to have side things that you can do, either volunteering, working on open source projects, things like that. Cool. Alrighty. So we've used some of these channels to maybe get a client. We're starting to talk to them. We are going to want to send them a proposal. So what the heck is a proposal? A proposal is kind of like a simple walkthrough of what you are going to Provide right you are going to come to an agreement on What they need and what you can provide that satisfies those

02:00:00
needs and then you're gonna send them a proposal that details Everything that's gonna be delivered to them in the end and we're gonna talk about like how to come to that agreement We're going to talk about like how to figure out what the charge for that but for now Let's just get that proposal idea in our brains that we can explain that in a second or two So there are two really great proposal Templates that I recommend and that's propose if I and hand a doc They're both completely free and you can click through and look at them. I think we might give them the hug of death so here's the propose if I that I linked to and And it's just a really good template. You can see it's an overview of goals, the scope of services, additional recommendations, and a bunch of other stuff. Time frame, all that stuff goes in here. So I actually recommend, right? I actually recommend combining this Proposify and this PandaDoc1 together,

02:01:00
right? Like there's two different ways about going through it. but you kind of take what you want from each of them, but completely ready to go proposals. You don't have to pay somebody else. You don't have to find them. They're completely free. This is what you're going to use. It's going to break down like what you're going to do and what you're going to send to the client in the end. That's what a proposal is, right? The other thing folks kind of worry about are contracts. We're gonna get that into a second. So here is a real example from one of my past students that's now at Amazon. I have the permission to share this with you all. And so here's like what their proposal looked like that they sent to a client. Design logo for the organization. Ibrahim has agreed that the client will be able to request multiple edits of the logo design. Estimate for the logo design was $300. The final website development QA would be 700 and the total estimate would be $1,000. When the website is completed, the client agrees to pay $100

02:02:00
monthly. that keeps the website functional and updated occasionally. The client can end this agreement at any time if they feel there's no longer need for this service any longer. So this is just a real example of a simple piece of a proposal that has actually wound up paying one of my students $1,000 and they actually worked in a retainer. Some students really liked the idea of a retainer having that monthly coming in. And so the retainer is something that I no longer do, but I used to do a lot. And the idea is that you can charge clients maybe one billable hour a month, where they know that each month they get at least an hour of your time and you have that recurring money coming in. So a lot of folks like to do that. A lot of my students do it. I don't do that anymore just because I didn't want to be on the hook for it. I don't want calls at like three o'clock in the morning to bring people's sites back up. And I didn't feel like I was providing enough value or that time. I feel like I, I felt like I was kind of tricking

02:03:00
them, right? Like they signed up, maybe they used it for the first month and then they just forgot about it. And for me, business relationships are always about providing value both ways. And if I'm not providing value, I don't feel comfortable with it. So I stopped, you know, but this is a real world example, definitely give Ibrahim a follow just because people are, don't share their contracts. People don't share their proposals, but this is like a real world example where they broke it down. Also, creating logos and stuff like that is pretty easy. Namecheap has a free logo maker that's really easy to create logos. I love it. Namecheap's amazing. I love their logo maker. Brand is 100 devs. Create a free logo. All right, let's create our logo with the Namecheap logo maker. Left, middle, or right chat? We got left, L, M, or R, L, M, or R. All right, we got M, L, M, or

02:04:00
R, left, middle, or right. Ooh, this one's close. We're going M again. L, M, or R. You people are getting caught up in the slow-mo too. Well a lot of a lot of L's here cool L M or R Definitely Oh Middle yeah, I think still the L L M or R Well ours got it this time we want the thick boys and Definitely a M again cool color I'm just going to pick blue. Blue, green, purple, red, brown, or orange, throw it in chat. Blue, purple, red. I think the blues or greens have it.

02:05:00
I'm going to go. Oh, purple Oh, came through to green. Green has it. All right. We go get. Favorite icon. Let's do like, let's search for computers. Nah, let's search for code. Ooh, fancy. I like that one. I like that one. Maybe the thicker or that one too. There we go. Maybe not this one, maybe that one. Cool. All right, let's continue with those three icons. There we go, all right. So now there's like a bazillion different logos that you can choose from. Everyone you like the most. Y'all picked horrible fonts, y

02:06:00
'all picked horrible fonts. Oh, I like this one, this one's clean. There we go, and there we go, look, looks good on the business card, good on the T-shirt, merch coming soon, folks. Look at that, beautiful. And then you can just download it, and there you go. Super easy, throw that in your proposal. Oh, you're off to the races. That'll be $300, please. Cool. So proposals, you can use either one of these examples or combine them. I like combining them. This is a real world example. And then the last kind of piece here is the contract before we talk about like how to price and how to send the proposal, okay? So contracts are something that kind of gets a lot of folks It's kind of uneasy, they don't know like what a contract really is, they get nervous about it. But contracts shouldn't make you feel uneasy,

02:07:00
they shouldn't be scary. Contracts are simply there to protect both parties, right? So a contract should be a two-way thing, it shouldn't be in favor, it shouldn't favor one person more than the other, it's actually like not a good contract and might not hold up. Remember, I'm not a lawyer, none of this is legal advice. But for me, a contract is really important because it just says what happens when something goes wrong. And as you are freelancing, stuff will go wrong. You will send out shitty proposals. Your proposals get better with time. You will agree to things that maybe you shouldn't have agreed to. You will take on clients that pay you too little and ask for too much, right? Like freelancing is hard. It takes a while to get good at freelancing. Right. And so, uh, a contract is really just there to make sure the parties know

02:08:00
what happens when things go wrong. Not that things will go wrong, but if they do, you both know how things are going to shake out. The video I had you watch the fuck you pay me video is all about this. It's just about like why contracts are good, why they help both parties and why you should always use one. Now I asked you to start off with friends, families. You definitely need contracts, even if it's my mom's getting a contract, right? I don't care who you are. You're getting a contract and you're getting a proposal because contracts are there just to help both parties and to say what happens when things don't go right. The closer you are to somebody, the more you want a contract because you want that relationship to be good and for both parties to agree to what happens before things go wrong. Right. Right. You want a contract just so that you know what happens when things go wrong and to have thought, thought about those things and talk through them

02:09:00
together before something happened. It's not about trust. It's not about having to enter into litigation or anything like that. It's just so that when things don't happen the way that you expected them to happen, you'd know what the next steps are. And that just eases the process for everyone. It has nothing to do with like those other pieces. It's all about everyone coming into an agreement as to how you're going to treat the relationship. Cool. I like to use the contract killer. It is a completely free contract that you can use, right? That has all this stuff spelled out, right? It has all this stuff spelled out. You tell a story of a sign something went wrong. I, like I told you in the beginning, anything you could mess up, I've messed up. I have done it all. I'll talk about it. I'll talk about that in a second. Let me, let me talk about the contracts

02:10:00
and I'll talk about the time things went wrong. All right. I like contract templates to start, right? After you get your first client, then you upgrade. So there are two contract templates that I really like. The first is the Contract Killer template. You can click on it. It's on GitHub and they also have their own website. And it's a full breakdown of everything that you need to put into your contract for when you're working, right? When you're working with a client. It's all here. It's everything you need not to worry about anything else There's maybe like two additions that I would make sure that are also in here, but it's a really great place to start For your contract. You don't have to worry about figuring out something else. You can use this and be off to the races This is really cool. I really like the people that did this if you get your first Client and you use their contract they have like a way to donate to them I would donate if you get a thousand dollar client and you use their contract give them a donation. That's worth it to me Um, but our,

02:11:00
one of our fearless alumni that we always talk about, Sam, they actually took this contract killer and they changed some of the language. So contract killer is made by people in the UK. So there's some spelling. There's some like words that we might not use in the U S so Sam went through it and actually changed the wording, uh, so that it matched what we might say in the U S. And so there's a second link here to like Sam's updates and I definitely highly recommend that as well Right, so depending on where you're coming from or which one you want to use. They're both there So now you have an online presence. You've figured out some ways to find some clients You have a way to create good proposals. You have a good way to write a decent contract there are some important bits that I want you to have in the contracts before we talk about like sealing the deal and closing the opportunity, right? Now, the two big things

02:12:00
that you must have in every single contract are the two paragraphs here. Never, ever agree to do any work without these two things in place. The first thing is an indemnification clause. The indemnification clause says, hey, we're writing code, things can and will go wrong because it's code, it's never going to be perfect. And what this means is if the code that I write does something that causes you to lose money or to incur some damages in any way, shape or form, it's not my fault. That's the risk that you're agreeing to when you work with me and we write code that may not be perfect, right? So let's say you went down the restaurant niche, right? You went down the restaurant niche and you build out a restaurant website that has online ordering, and that online ordering platform messes up and they drop

02:13:00
a couple orders, right? So maybe they drop a couple hundred dollars worth of orders. That indemnification clause saves it from being your fault, right? So you don't ever wanna do work without that first paragraph in line because it stops them from coming after you. Well, it's not gonna stop them coming after you, but it stops it from being on your end, right? So always have an indemnification clause. And then the second piece is kind of what happens and who owns the code that you write. And so this clause here talks about giving a, let me, I'm just gonna read it and then I'll explain what it means. We'll own any intellectual property rights we've developed prior to or developed separately from this project and not paid for by you. We'll own the unique combination of these elements that constitutes a complete design and we'll license it to you once paid in full, exclusively and

02:14:00
in perpetuity for this project only unless we agree otherwise. So what this means is that you don't own any of the other work that I've done. You only own the work that I've done for you and technically, right? Technically, you don't actually own the work, I do. I am giving you a license to this content that is exclusive and in perpetuity and for this project only. Now, why do you think we do this? Why do we do this but give them a license, an exclusive license, why do we do that? for our portfolios, exactly. We still own it all, so we can still highlight it, demo it on our portfolio. And if we're freelancing, there

02:15:00
are probably pieces of our code that we're gonna reuse over and over and over again in other projects. So if we don't own our code, we can't reuse it in other projects, that doesn't make sense. We did all this work, we can't put it on our portfolio, That doesn't make sense. So we do our work and we give them an exclusive perpetual license to it so that we can still be able to do the work that we do. Right? Now, the other big piece here was once paid in full. Amazing movie. They do not get this license, right? Until they have paid us in full, right? And so they might have seen the work. They might've been playing with the work, but they do not have any claim to it. And so we have all of our monies. When you enter into an agreement to work with someone, I always recommend that you get a deposit. Uh, I only do work with 50% upfront.

02:16:00
I will never work with you unless you pay me a 50% deposit upfront. I do that 50% of the work, right? You're happy with it. Then you pay another 25% upfront. I work, you feel happy with it. I finish that last bit and I am paid in full. And once I am paid in full, I transfer things onto your server. You will never have access to the code. It'll never be on your servers. You will not have your license to it until I am paid in full. Is the deposit refundable? Absolutely not because you're paying me to do the work I don't want to get halfway through a project and then you no longer want to do it I only do work that I have been paid for I only do work that I've been paid for So I'm gonna do 50% of the work because you've paid me 50% up front. You're gonna pay me the next tranche I'm gonna do that work. You're gonna pay me in full and I'll finish it up

02:17:00
Alright, and so that's how I save myself from getting getting burned. Asked me why? Somebody asked me why I do it that way. Somebody asked me why I do it that way. Guess why? Because I have been stiffed plenty of times. I have not gotten paid. I have been burned. I've been, people have tried to pay me less. Anything that could happen has happened. And so I get a deposit, right? And in fact, actually my very first project, I got a deposit, right? I knew enough to ask for a deposit up front. That's how I bought my pasta and pasta sauce. So I've been burnt any way you can be burnt. So get a deposit only work for work that has been paid for. Now, when folks are first starting out, it's harder to ask for like 50% upfront, but something in good faith is always worthwhile asking for. 10%, 25%, right? You wanna make sure that they have skin in the game too. It doesn't make sense

02:18:00
to do all this work for them to just not pay you in the end. All right. So don't get got. Make sure you have these two important bits in your contract. And then the last thing I want to talk about is how to close. You have an online presence, right? You have an online presence. You start to reach out to, you start to reach out to clients. Clients are reaching out to you. You're building out proposals that have all the highlights what you're going to build for them. You are sending out good contracts. The last thing I want to talk about is how to close. And how I close comes down to one magical question. I love being on the phone. For me, whenever I'm working with a client, it's always on the phone. And I do one thing on the phone and one thing only. tell me about your project.

02:19:00
That's it. There's not some amazing speech I give them, not anything that's wild. I just say, hey, it sounds like you have a really interesting idea. Tell me everything about your project. And I let them talk. They'll talk for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour sometimes if I give them the time. And I'm taking really good notes. Everything, their dreams, their wishes, their hopes, their desires, their third grade crush, everything they could ever want in this project. I'm listening. Okay. Amazing. I'm digging a little bit deeper. Tell me a little bit more. You said you want this thing. Tell me a little bit more about that thing, right? I just let them go off on the largest tangent ever about everything they could ever want to be in this project, right? And then at the end, I say, wow, this sounds like an amazing project. There is a lot here. What is your ballpark budget?

02:20:00
And some folks go, how dare you ask me about money? What do you think I am? Right? And you go, wait a minute. There's a lot here. We just talked for 30 minutes about all the bells and whistles and everything that you want. I need to know what budget you're working with to build all of this stuff Because here's what I want to do for you. I Want to build you a proposal that highlights everything I can get done at that budget Now I could build a proposal for a thousand dollars. Sorry. I know I would never say a thousand dollars I would say I could build a proposal for ten thousand dollars a hundred thousand dollars I could put a proposal for 1 million dollars that doesn't help us if we're not in the same ballpark I don't have that time to build out all these different proposals at all these different price points So what is your ballpark budget? It doesn't have to be exactly where what are you talking about? We talking about a thousand five thousand ten thousand, right?

02:21:00
And then they'll give you the budget sometimes. They'll say I actually what is your hourly rate? No. No, I don't do hourly rate I need to know what your ballpark budget So I know where we're at least talking about and I'll tell you everything I can get done at that budget You gave me a huge laundry list. I'm going to tell you exactly what I can get done off this list that I think is the most impactful, and I'm going to get it done at your budget. Right. So I never give them an hourly rate and I'll have, I'll keep saying this over and over again, and 99% of the time, they'll eventually give me the ballpark budget, uh, skipping hourly rate is really important because hourly rate does nothing. Um, there is, uh, an amazing YouTube channel called the future, um, which is about building an agency and they have something that I, there's this one talk that I really love and they talk about hourly rate and to the hourly rate punishes me, right? It punishes me. Christo exactly. That's their

02:22:00
name. Christo, um, punishes me for being good at my job, right? Because if I take more time, right? If I take more time, you pay me more money, but I'm not gonna take that time. I'm good at my job. So I'm gonna do less time, but you're gonna get a better product. So you're actually punishing me for being good at my job. That doesn't make sense. So how about you give me your ballpark budget. I let you know what I can get done at that budget. And if we agree, great. If not, I'm going to connect you with three other freelancers that might be able to do more for you right at that price point So I would love to build you a wonderful proposal that takes in everything that we just talked about At your budget that I think would be a huge win for you and your business, but if it doesn't work out, that's okay I'll connect you with some folks that I know are really great friends that won't steer you wrong

02:23:00
And that's it, that's it. They give you the ballpark budget and then you build them a phenomenal proposal that takes into account all the things that you wrote down about what they want that you think you can get done at that price point. And you're doing the back of the menu, like the back of the napkin numbers in your brain to be like, all right, I think it's gonna take me this amount of time. So this is how much I can get done, right? But you you do that on your end, right? You think about all right if the Ballpark budget is five thousand dollars. What can I get done for them at that five thousand dollars that leaves me the things I need left right You're gonna need to think through that that like, all right, I Think it's going to take me This number of hours I want to make this amount of money per hour right you do that all yourself If you're not ever going to share that with them, but you're trying to figure out, all right, what can I build at that price point? All right. When you're talking to clients, there's

02:24:00
a couple of big things that you need to keep in mind. The what is your ballpark budget is the magic question. But when you're talking with clients, I need you to do a few things. You need to be firm, right? Not mean, not pushy, but firm, right? Don't let someone try and convince you to take less money or to do more work. Those clients never work out. Be firm with what you can get done at what price point, and that means you're going to lose some clients. But that is always a good thing. Losing a client is the best thing that could ever happen because if it's starting off like trouble, it's going to be trouble and it's gonna end with trouble, right? So be firm, be clear in what you can get done and what you can provide and what you can do. And then there's two things that you must always live up to as a freelancer under promise and then over deliver.

02:25:00
Right. Under promise the things that you can do and then exceed their wildest expectations. Right. The other thing that you have to do as you're negotiating or figuring out what's going to go into the proposal is that you have to leave room to get help both in time and money. Every contract I have ever worked on, I take how long I think it's going to take me to finish and I double it. If I think it's going to take me a month, I say two months. If I think it's going to take me two months, I say four. If I think it's going to be three, I say six. I leave myself enough room that if I get in trouble, I can get help. This is the biggest thing you have to do for your first freelancing client, because you might run into some trouble and you're going to need to get help. Right? So I always leave room in my timeline to get help from other folks. And

02:26:00
I always leave room in my budget to get help from other engineers. A lot of times there might be problems that I can't solve on my own and I'll need to bring in some other engineer to help me with that problem. So I always leave room, my budget for that to happen. If I really do feel like I can really crush the project and I don't think I would have any trouble, I still leave room for something odd to come up. Maybe there's some like weird bit of functionality that I don't feel comfortable building out and I'll bring someone else on, right. A lot of times with higher paid clients, I'm upfront with it. hey, I'm really good at talking with clients, making sure that you're getting the best value out of this relationship possible, but I work with a team of other engineers that are gonna help me get some of the work done, right? And so always leave room for time and always leave room for money. Get a deposit, we already talked about this. In the beginning, your deposits might be lower and then you'll

02:27:00
build up to getting at least a 50% deposit. And then it's time to deliver the goods, right? Delivering the goods comes down to a few things. Remember, when we're delivering on the project, we've done all the hard work. We built out our presence. We've done the work to get the client in the door. We've given them a monster proposal. We've given them a monster contract. They're super happy with the value that we're going to provide at the price point that we feel comfortable doing it. We left ourself room in both time and money. Now it's time to deliver the goods when it comes to delivering the goods. Remember, always under promise, always over deliver and always communicate regularly. People that communicate regularly can get away with anything they want when working with a client. If you are,

02:28:00
if you are communicating regularly, you can get away with being a little short on time. You can get away with sometimes asking for more money. The most common thing that happens with folks when they hire or work with another freelancer is that they get ghosted or they don't really know what's happening. Every Friday, send your client an email. Here's what we got done. Here's where we're going to go. This is where we're at. Every Friday, every Friday my clients get an email. I don't care if I got nothing done that week or if I got everything done this week. They have to know that consistently I'm not going to leave them in the dark. I'm going to communicate and they're always going to know where we stand. This will help you get out of so much hot water. When you need an extra week, they're going to give it to you every single time because they never had to guess where you are If you're a little over budget

02:29:00
on something there, they'll at least come back to the table, right? So I like to make sure every Friday my clients get an email I actually schedule them and then I add more stuff to them as the week goes on and then actually ping them on Wednesdays Too so on Wednesday, I'd be like, oh we just did this really cool thing, right? So Wednesday to get a message that says I hope you're doing well today. Like we just did this really cool thing. This features live, look at it on the test server, whatever. And then Friday is like the formal update. Here's everything we did the week. At the end, that's why my clients come back, right? Time and time again, my clients have come back because they value that communication and how quick I am with it and how much detail I give, right? A lot of folks hold stuff back. They're afraid to give the full picture. No, I don't care if it's good. I don't care if it's bad you're going to get you're going to always know where I stand and that Takes a lot of weight off their shoulders. It gives them a lot of relief and they'll come back for that and so that kind of leads me to this, uh

02:30:00
idea of of kind of coming back There's one other step here and then we talk about this idea of coming back Get help when you need it, right? You're communicating regularly. There might be start to realize wait. I'm not going to hit this deadline I'm not gonna be able to figure this thing out. Get help. You've left enough room to get help You left enough room to figure things out get help come to discord. I don't know how to solve this problem, right? There would be so many people that are ready ready to help you even with your client work There would be so many folks that maybe you can bring on board to help with the project Right and so get help right get help don't suffer in silence Make sure you get help, especially when working with clients, right? So many folks from a hundred devs last cohort came to discord when they were working on their client projects to talk through details, to figure things out, to ask for recommendations about how to solve problems. That's what we're here for. Make sure you ask for help, even with client work.

02:31:00
Cool. Last thing is reinvest. All this stuff is going to suck at first. Your proposals are going to suck. Your contracts are going to suck. Your, your portfolio site's going to suck. It just is. Cause we're, we're, we're using stuff off the shelf. We're doing it just to, to get stuff done. We're bad as we write bad code. Right. But as you get that first client and take that money to reinvest and, and if you have the privilege to reinvest, right. If you have the privilege to reinvest, use that to bolster everything. Now I talked about this idea before we get into reinvestment about like clients coming back and why that's so important. I've had years where my income has relied on freelancing. If I wasn't freelancing, I wouldn't have had any money in some of the years that I've been doing this, right? When things got tough, I knew I could freelance to bring money in the door. I've had years where I have freelanced, my freelancing has brought in more money than my day job. Right? So this could be a really powerful thing.

02:32:00
But what I don't want folks to think is that it's easy. it is very hard to freelance. It is very hard to go out on your own, right? And have the amount of clients it takes to sustain your salary, right? So many folks think, oh, I'm gonna quit my job, I'm gonna freelance and that's gonna be it. No, freelancing is the most stressful thing you will ever do if that's what you rely on. If you don't have an emergency fund, right? If you don't have an emergency fund and you go a month without a client, That shit will will devastate you the lowest lows I've had are when I was freelancing and didn't have enough money in the bank to like tie me through to the next client So when folks are thinking about this I need you to keep in mind that freelancing is something that at first is Supplemental and you can build up to it. And eventually the way most freelancers make their money is through repeat clients

02:33:00
I I looked at my, my contracting from the past couple of years, 50% of my freelancing income came from one client. 50% came from one client that came back continuously time after time. We call these evergreen clients. It's really hard to find an evergreen client, but it's what makes up most freelancers money. They have some clients that just come back with work time and time again, and they come back to me, right? Because I get what they need to get done at a good budget. I communicate my ass off and they're never left in the dark about what the heck's going on. So they give me all their business. I say that to highlight that all the other freelancers that I know that freelance full-time, they either have an amazing network or they have a few of those evergreen clients that they can rely on and they have a war chest. Like six months of expenses fully ready rocked and rolled That's not

02:34:00
touching anything else so that if they get through a slump where they're not getting any new clients. They're good to go So I say that Because if your goal is to just do freelancing you're in for a really wild ride Do I have lots of friends that do it? Yes, do they love it? some of them do some of them hate it, but just know that you need to to build up to it, right? All of these things we talked about tonight are not easy. And at first they're gonna be kind of, they're gonna be pretty hard and not really that great. All right. After your first client, if you have the privilege, reinvesting those monies can be put to really good use. Right? Can be put to good use, right? You can build a better portfolio. You can build a better proposal. You can build a better contract. You might want to set up a business entity. You might want to bring in a lawyer to look at your proposals, to look at your contracts. You might need a CPA or a bookkeeper to handle all the inbound

02:35:00
stuff that you're coming in, right? And so after your first client, if you have the privilege, do things the right way, right? I showed you the free way. That's good enough to get started. Once you have monies coming in, maybe reinvest if you have the privilege in doing things a little bit better, right? And so a lot of folks ask me, Leon, do I need a business entity? Do I need an LLC? Not in the beginning, LLCs, limited liability corporations. What they do is they help protect you from your assets. If you don't have any assets, you don't need an LLC. Nobody's coming after your bubble gum collection, right? So if you don't have a house or expensive car or things like that, nobody's coming after you for, for nothing. Right. So you don't need an LLC. And LLC is just there to protect you, like your business from your assets. Right. So a lot of people like come out the gate with an LLC, you know, like you just wasted five, 10 grand setting all that up. Um,

02:36:00
cause you'd use the lawyer to do it when you could have just went through the like States way of doing it, which would have cost you way, like a 10th of that, right. Um, so just be careful. The first, the first run through this, your first few clients give you the cash flow, and if you have the privilege to use that, then you reinvest in all this other stuff. Yeah. Yeah. LLCs don't cost five, 10 K. You can normally, if you're in the U S each state has a different process, anywhere from like 50 bucks to I think what's California now, like five, 800, like each, each state's different. Right. Or you can use like one of those services to help you set it up. But in the beginning, you don't need any of that. Get some clients coming in the door and then reinvest those monies and things that you might need to do the right way. Cool. And once again, I'm not a tax professional, I'm not a lawyer. All this is just ramblings of things that I've learned on my journey through this. Right back at it. Hey, thank you for the hydration. Cheers. Do you.

02:37:00
All righty. So we talked a lot tonight, folks. We talked about, we talked about building our online presence. I gave you some good examples that I hope you go back to look at their Portfolios look at their Twitters look at their LinkedIn's copy everything right Was a good artist copy great artist steel, right? The reason I gave you all these things is that you can go back and use them look at them make them your own Look at their Twitters look to their LinkedIn's Then we talked about how to get clients think about what strategy you're gonna use first You're going to talk to friends, family, you're going to put it on all your social. You're going to talk about it when you do your networking this week. Maybe you're going to dabble in some, uh, doing some local postings. Maybe you're going to dabble in a little bit of cold calling, whatever you need to do, think through some things, get the ball rolling at first. It's hard. It feels weird. It feels awkward. It feels uncomfortable, but it gets

02:38:00
easier with time. All right. Then we looked at some proposals. You could go, you're going to go back, look at those proposals. You're going to see, oh, that's the layout. That's how they do a timeline. That's how they break down the design and all that stuff. Right. Then you can look at the contract. Oh, that's what the contractor said. There's too much detail for us to cover it in one class. You got to go back and look at it. Right. Then we talked about how to close, how to seal the deal, the magic question. And what's your ballpark budget. We talked about how to price don't price hourly price based on their ballpark budget, provide them a proposal at that level where you can get done at that level. And then in the end, we talked about how to reinvest, right? You got some monies coming in. If you have the poetry, use them, the other thing set up cool. So we got about 20 minutes left and I, I promised that I would save it for questions. So you can use the Slido link, uh, slido.com, use the exclamation point, ask here in, in discord, I'm sorry, discord and Twitch chat, and you'll get the link.

02:39:00
And I'm going to go through the questions. Cause I know there's a lot of questions about this. We're gonna have a couple of our office hour sessions where we just spend time on this freelancing stuff, right? So I know there's a lot here and there's a lot of other questions you might have. And so we'll have time when we talk about this again, right? This is not our only class where we talk about freelancing. We're gonna incorporate a lot of this stuff into our homework. It's not that's gonna come up in classes over and over, but let's go ahead and take a look at some of these questions and then we'll end with a read. All right, first question. Remember, you can upvote the questions that you care about. How do we handle hosting for a website for a client? You use Netlify, right? You open up Netlify, you drag it in, and you're done. Hold on, let's see if I can make sure. Let me see real quick, netlify.com slash drop. All right, here we go. So here's netlify.com

02:40:00
slash drop. You literally drag a folder onto this location and you're done. So I would typically ask my client to set up a Netlify account. They'll share their credentials with me in something like LastPass or I don't know, 1Password, any of the password managers, they'll share it with me. And then I will take a folder. So let's look at bachelor code from last class. All right, here we go. Here's my bachelor code number one. I'm just going to drag the folder here. It's uploading and then boom, here you go. The site is live. That's the link. You can change this link to be whatever you want and we're good. Now, Bitwarden, exactly. Any of those password managers doesn't matter. Whatever you use. And then you can change that link if you want. So a lot of times it's on their account. I don't use my account. I make them set up their own stuff sometimes when I'm ready to

02:41:00
host it for them. Remember, I'm always working on my server, right? On my Netlify until they've paid me in full and then I go and do this on their server, right? That's it. And so you saw me do it in three seconds. I literally just dragged it over. We can go ahead and change this URL if we want. So normally I'll set one up where it is like the client's name at Netlify on my account, Once they pay me in full, I do the same thing for their account. We're done and dusted. Now, if you're doing full stack web applications, of course, hosting is a little bit different. We're not there yet. Next question. Hi, Leon. How are we supposed to deliver a website for a client? Don't we need to know quite a bit about hosting databases back in in general? No. Most of your clients at first will just be static sites. Just like, just

02:42:00
basic stuff. HTML, CSS, a little bit of JavaScript. You're gonna be using templates for most of this stuff. That's it, right? And so you won't really need anything else. You won't need databases or things like that. Once we get further into the cohort and you learn how to do back-end web development, then yes, then you'll need some other things. But by that point, you'll know how to do all those things as well. Should we use other hosts? Not really. The other hosts are more complicated. They don't give you as many features and they're not free, all of them. So I really do like Netlify for this simple stuff. Yeah, do they give you passwords? No, we use a password manager. So I'll get them set up with any of the normal password managers, Bitwarden, LastPass, 1Password. They'll create their accounts, they'll put their passwords in there and they can share them with me when it comes time to transfer stuff. Remember, everything's done on my servers until I'm ready to put it on their servers. And that's when we ask for all the passwords and stuff. What about GitHub to host? Yeah, that's fine.

02:43:00
How many sites can we deploy on Netlify? I don't know if there's a max, it's a lot. What do you recommend for getting paid like an invoicing system? That's kind of your personal preference. Checks, Zelle is typically the way to go. I've even done like Cash App and Venmo with some more hipper clients. Eventually, once you have a lot of freelancing work coming in, you'll use a bigger platform to do your freelancing. A lot of folks use like FreshBooks or Xero or QuickBooks or things like that. But in the beginning, you don't need any of that stuff. You don't need to pay for any of that stuff. You can just ask for a check or a Zelle transfer or something like that. And you send them an invoice. You send them an invoice. There's a, you can just Google invoice generator and that's what I've used for pretty much all my invoices, what kind of work should we avoid that's up to you. I think anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, just don't

02:44:00
do if the client's asking for too much and too little time, if the client's asking for too much with too little money, you just got to let those clients go. It should be a good, you should feel good going into an arrangement. If you ever feel like it has, it isn't going well, like the contract didn't go well. The proposal didn't go well. It's time to stop and let that client go. It's you should both feel happy. You should both feel like you're both getting value, right? The client should feel like they're getting a tremendous amount of value. You should feel like you're getting a tremendous amount of time and money for your, your services, right? If you're under 18, can you land a freelancing gig? Yeah. I've, I've had a lot of folks under 18 get, get jobs as freelancers. Should we include monthly maintenance in our contract or

02:45:00
is it more a headache than it's worth? That is a huge decision that you will have to make for yourself. A lot of my students love maintenance contracts. I personally used to do them a lot. I don't do them anymore I really want I realized that my clients come back as I provide a lot of value You might be providing a lot of value with that maintenance contract. If you're not providing value, then I wouldn't do it I don't like maintenance contracts because some folks kind of like Sucker people into them or like they don't they feel like I'm not gonna have to do any work and I still get money Each month. I think that's a wrong way to go about your freelancing The way that my freelancing has always grown is because people have been always well, not always like I've had some stuff go bad Right, but by and far most folks have been like Leon was great to work with and they tell other people That's how your freelancing grows, right? And so I just if I don't if I'm not giving a lot of value I don't want to do it

02:46:00
What's an example of maintenance you would do? Sometimes they want to update some texts. They want to make some quick changes. Maybe they want to replace a menu each month, right? Or maybe the site went down and they need some help getting it back up, stuff like that. Can you show the password manager for clients? It's just, you're going to use LastPass. Bitwarden, one pass, just Google password managers and pick one. It's not really like anything special. Last pass, yeah, just use one. And that's only at the end. That's after you've built everything. Remember, everything's on your servers until the end. Cool. Are we responsible for the copy on the site? Sometimes it's up to you. If I'm working with a client that has no idea what they want. Sometimes I'll throw that into my proposal. Hey, I'm doing the design, which will be a template. I'm doing the copy, which is just

02:47:00
stuff I'm going to make up. Right. And that all adds to the money in the proposal. Sometimes you'll work with a copy editor or you work with somebody else to do the copy or they already have copy they want to throw in kind of up to you. If we build a website with Squarespace, Wix, etc. Is that something you can put in your portfolio?" Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. What is copy? Copy is like the text on a website. Like the text on a website. Yeah. Like the words that you put. Yeah. Yeah. Text on the site. A lot of freelancers or folks when they're new to freelancing, they get worried about Squarespace or they get worried about Wix. So they get worried about like these static site builders, but they're just tools that you can use to make your life easier. Uh, and a lot of clients, some, some clients want to use them. And so it's up to you to decide if you're going to use them or not, or if your clients want them or not, but they're just tools, right?

02:48:00
Somebody that's running a business doesn't want to have to learn how to use those tools. They might, but a lot of these folks that I work with early on were older. They didn't like want to invest the time. They had like kids and like they're at their jobs all day long. And then at night they want to spend time with their family. They don't want to be investing their nights and weekends in learning how to use Squarespace or Wix, right? So they pay me to not have to worry about it. And then even if they did use those other website builders, right, something happens, right? Like they don't know how to like make that bigger or move it around, right? And then it just caused them headaches. They'd rather pay me to come in and do their logo, do their design, do the setting up the site, make sure it all works and have someone to talk to to help with ideas, to help figure out how to do online payments and all this stuff that they don't know how to do. Your job as a software engineer is to solve problems.

02:49:00
And the moment you become a freelancer, not only are you solving technical problems, but you're solving business problems too. And so instead of them having to think about how to do it, you do that research. If they're a restaurant and they want to offer online ordering, it's your job to figure out what is the best way to get them hooked up with online ordering, right? You have to do the research. You'll have to play around with it. You have to ask questions on discord and then bake that into the site, right? You're, you're going to figure out how to do all this. And at first you, you just ask a lot of questions, right? And you figure it out. What are your feelings on WordPress? Yeah, it's good. Certain clients really like it. A lot of clients will ask for a CMS or a content management system, something where they can go in and make quick changes and not have to bother you to make those changes. WordPress is one of the biggest versions of those, so a lot of clients ask for it. And then you'll have to watch a tutorial on how to use WordPress. It's not hard, you'll figure it out. But there are plenty other CMSs

02:50:00
that are way easier to get up and running than, um, then, uh, then WordPress, including Netlify. Netlify has their own CMS built in, which is pretty cool. How quickly do you make a proposal? Oh, amazing question. I hope we still have everyone. This is a huge bit of information that I did not share early on that I needed to. On the conversation where I asked them the magical question, this, um, I'm so glad you asked that question. and I would have been really pissed if I had forgotten this. All right. When you finish that conversation about the ballpark budget, right? And they give you the ballpark budget, your immediate response should be, great, I'm gonna build you a proposal that incorporates all the things we talked about at that budget. Do you have time to talk on Thursday? Right, like the next day. Like two, do you have time to talk this week? How about Thursday?

02:51:00
So today's Tuesday, I would say, Hey, I'm going to build you an amazing proposal. I'm going to send you the proposal tonight. You're going to get that proposal tonight. It's it's, it's nine 30, but you're going to get the proposal tonight. I work quick. I do. I deliver a lot of value and I want to show you that we're going to start this relationship off, right? So tonight you're going to get the proposal. Do you have time this week to discuss the proposal together? Uh, how about Thursday? You make sure that you have scheduled the next call, right? It doesn't have to be tonight. It could be tomorrow, right? Like I'm going to get this thing in your inbox first thing tomorrow morning, right? Right, but you make sure that you get it to them quickly and then you don't hang up until you know the next time you're talking to them. You don't want the lead to fizzle, right? A lot of times you'll send a proposal and then you'll go back and forth for a week trying to find the next time. If you're already talking to them, make sure you set up the next call, send them

02:52:00
a calendar invite saying discussing such-and-such proposal right, and Then you work on the proposal you send it to them as quickly as you can same day next day in that proposal You say look really looking forward to our call on Thursday On Thursday you get in that call and you work through the proposal with them I like to do it on the phone because you can hear, you can hear what they like, what they don't like, you can hear the ugh, or I don't know, right? And then you can massage the proposal to fit what they're looking for. Sometimes you might have to charge a little bit more money. Maybe you might do a little bit less, right? Maybe you negotiate on time. One of the biggest things I negotiate on before we leave the proposal stage and go to the contract stage is how long I'm gonna take to work on it. Sometimes I won't negotiate more money, I'll just negotiate. Hey, you know what? This is a big project. It's going to take me more time. So instead of four months, how about five or six? Right.

02:53:00
And so the idea here is that you want to make sure that you don't let leads fizzle, you have the magic question, what's your ballpark budget? You're going to get the proposal same next day. Then you already scheduled a call to talk to them next. Cool. Are you normally one client at a time? No, I normally have like two clients at a time sometimes more times less How do I price things that we don't know how to do you're never pricing anything You're looking at their budget and then you're gonna think through what you can do at that budget so if they say they have a budget of 3,000 you're gonna look through everything they want and you're gonna sit there be like hmm Is there a reasonable way for me to build what they want? You're going to Google, you're going to look at, you're going to look at different builders. You're going to look at different tools. You're going to look at different things. Is there a way for me to piece

02:54:00
through what they want? And can I give myself enough time and enough money to get it done? Right? And so you never are pricing anything. You're just working off their budget and what you think you can get done at that budget. You got a hundred dollar budget. I'll, I'll give you a wink and a smile and send you an invoice, right? Like I'll work with you. I don't care what your budget is. I'll tell you what I can get done at that budget. Um, I take every meeting. Anybody that has an idea, I take the meeting, I find a way to provide them value, even if it's a wink and a smile and a firm handshake, right? I've given a lot of firm handshakes and never worked with that person, but I try to hand them off to other engineers that might be able to work with them at that price point, you know, and so I actually have referred a lot of folks to other people and when they have a bigger project, they come back to me. They remember how I treated them. They remember that I still gave them 30 minutes of my time that I still answered all their questions. And then I referred to somebody that worked really great

02:55:00
with them. So they either go back to that person. They come to me with a larger project. How would you fire a client? That's typically in my contract. There is a walkaway clause that's in all my contracts. What does $200 of web dev look like? That's up to you and how much you want to build. A lot of my students by this point in program, they can take a template and write some HTML and CSS to make it look good, to plug in their info, right? Let's say you have a restaurant, you would find a restaurant template, you would plug in all their info. It might take you four hours and that might be a $200 project for you. Four hours of work at $50 an hour. It's not bad. Um, the original, the original two projects that I did, um, like the original two packages we sold in the example where we dialed for

02:56:00
dollars, that was 500 and 800, if you're working minimum wage, you just made minimum wage in one day. Like your whole month, you made your whole month's salary in one day, if you do this process, right? So it's kind of up to you and what you feel like you want to get done at that price point. And then remember taxes and stuff like that as well. What do we show our first client as a portfolio or skill set based on what we know right now? Look at Blal's portfolio. They got a thousand dollar client and an amazing job and the stuff that's on their portfolio are the homework assignments that we did. This is the homework assignment right here. I've already given you what needs to be on your portfolio. If

02:57:00
you have done the homework, you've made the homework your own, you have portfolio pieces. Y'all get it now? You see what I'm trying to do? what I'm trying to build, what I'm trying to shape you into, it all builds on top of each other. We add pieces block by block by block, and we make it. All right, do you get it? There's a reason why I gave you the hair salon. There's a reason why I gave you a restaurant website. We just talked for four hours about a restaurant website, three hours about a restaurant website. Do you get it now, do you see? Do you see what I'm trying to do? Oh, I love that question. All right, let's answer like five more questions and then we'll do a raid.

02:58:00
Five more questions and we'll do a raid. We don't get God, we go get it. Exactly, we don't get God, we go get it. All right, how do you pass a sniff test when you're building a template website for clients? They don't know and they probably won't ever. Yeah, it's up to you to massage the templates to look good, but a lot of times they'll have no idea. Like if we look at Blah's site, this is a template. This looks like a template. I think it's a template, but this is beautiful. This is perfect. Don't snitch on yourself and ship it. This looks great. What hair salon wouldn't be happy with that, you know? So it just won't come up. I'm currently laid

02:59:00
off by taking a client I would avoid my unemployment what suggestions to avoid this talk to the unemployment office I have seen folks make deals with unemployment to be able to do freelancing So first step is to talk to unemployment I have tons of folks that have still been able to freelance and be on employment at the same time Don't do anything that would fuck up your unemployment. So talk to them first And like I said, we're going to offer other suggestions that help you get rid of that smell, right? That'll be like working on open source projects, that'll be volunteering, things like that. You can do all this stuff, but not have the payment piece. Still have contracts, you still have proposals. So my favorite thing is like, if you, same applies to disability exactly. My favorite thing is like, if you know that you can't charge, you still do the exact same process and then you give them a discount on your

03:00:00
services. So you, you, you find a nonprofit that needs all this stuff, right? And you, they have a budget of $5,000. You go through the exact same process and you go, you know what, I really enjoy working with you all. I'm going to give you a $5,000 discount on this first project, but I need you to be a reference customer for not only this, like for any future clients that I have, any jobs, things like that, I'll give you a $5,000 discount. We'll get this project done at no cost, but you have to be the best reference that has ever existed in Tarnation. And I'm gonna put you to work for a couple of other contracts, right? So you still do everything the same way and you still get value. The value to you might be different though. What's a good timeline strategy? Whatever you think it might take you, you double. So I think most of my like first timers do like around four months of their project.

03:01:00
What do we do with the clips? I'll create a thread in probably the general channel after class. My wife owns a marketing firm. She's willing to pass me some work helping her with editing websites also creating websites. Would this be okay? I think it's great to do but push yourself to get clients that come not from close close friends or family So I think it's still great to do but you still want to push yourself to figure out this process independent of that Our templates red flags and interviews no What's the best way to handle billing collecting payment kind of already talked about this? There are plenty of services online that help you, but just a normal check or Zelle is also fine. Just make sure it's in the comment. All right. What if I'm not entirely confident in my ability to code yet, especially with JavaScript?

03:02:00
Doesn't matter. I would say most of my students that get clients don't know JavaScript yet, right? Yeah, they just don't, because it's only HTML and CSS. You're talking about like taking a template and filling in their info, that doesn't take any JavaScript. It's just HTML or CSS. And your JavaScript skill will increase, your backend skills will increase, and then you'll keep adding stuff onto this as you go. There's a lot more questions here. So I actually really like these questions. Keep adding questions, keep uploading questions. And I think I'm gonna do like a special session this week. Maybe the tomorrow night I might just play Pokemon and answer your freelancing questions or something weird just cuz there's a lot of them and we're gonna answer more During office hours, but if folks want to keep asking more freelancing questions I think we'll just create like a time to to answer those questions. So I'll probably

03:03:00
go live like either. Yeah, probably tomorrow or Friday And we'll just we'll just go through rest of these questions Thoughts on Gen 9, I'm all for it. I'll always play a mainline game. But yeah, so we'll find a time to answer more of these questions. This Sunday, we're gonna do a more in-depth office hours. We're going to do HTML and CSS review. We're gonna look at some layouts. We're gonna add JavaScript to those layouts, and then we'll talk a little bit more about freelancing as well. I think that office hours will go a little bit later than we normally do them. And so let's go ahead and end with a lovely Raid, you know, we like to We like to spread some love some positivity You haven't given them a follow give them a follow give them some likes and then I will see you all. I Will see you all on Thursday. If not tomorrow, let's go ahead and raid When I set it up right now one second

03:04:00
Alright, Hiccup Interactive is live, they're an amazing developer, they also do game development, so let's go ahead and give them a raid, remember you get extra channel points for doing the raid, I'll see you all over there, have a good rest of your night, hope you're excited to start freelancing. Let's get some, let's do a raid. Thank you everyone. Hope you had a great night. See you over there. Peace!