I made a couple hundred grand, mostly from upwork clients, last year and am happy to share the knowledge.

Hey all.No I’m not selling a course and I don’t want your money. Just a fellow hacker with some tips & tricks for making money independently with your friends.Here is a link to most of the materials we used including cold call scripts, upwork guides, estimate templates, our offerings & portfolio (which we attached to all of our upwork proposals.) And a bunch of other goodies!I’ve always been good at getting jobs, so I decided to “start an agency” with my friends last year. That way I could “get jobs” as my full time job! It was a fun learning experience. Our goal was to be “a learning company” that gave people a chance to grow their careers working on freelance projects. We prided ourselves on our community ethos.If you start an agency, it doesn’t have to be crazy big. It can be small. It can be you and a friend. Honestly, you’ll have more fun the smaller your agency is. Don’t go big! Take your time! Going big is much easier once you have experience and processes.Our goal was to each make enough to get by. We were happy if all 4 of us made 150k in that year. We exceeded that by far, and ended up working with somewhere around 10-15 people over the year. What a ride!I did (almost) all of the client acquisition via Upwork. The hardest part was getting clients, but I learned how to do it semi-reliably. There are a couple tips and tricks to earning over 100k as a web dev / agency owner.How I got clients:You have to show that you understand business. Every time I reached out to a client, I reached out to them as a fellow business owner. I have tried (and failed) to start a few startups over the years, and I’m familiar with the lean startup methodology. I would explain to them how I applied this methodology to be essentially a lead technical person.You have to present yourself as a leader. As I said before, I always branded myself as a tech lead. I had 8 years of experience at the time, mostly working for early stage startups, so I knew I could function as a project lead for early stage web apps.Fancy proposals and a clean website. I branded my agency and spent time building a really great website, marketing materials (PDFs I would send my clients on proposals showing them how we work),My marketing materials are all on GdriveI would sell myself but always be sure the client realized my time was valuable and although I was the lead on the project, my agency would be doing most of the work.I would basically charge for the initial consult (just a plan for how the project would be done), then I would ask them how many devs they want on the project and charge them for that. I would always recommend 2-3 devs. Some low budget clients would ask for 1 dev FT or 1 dev PT. That way we were always setting ourselves up for long term work and the client feeling like they had a “dev team.”​Every project’s revenue splits followed this general formula:20% – Agency fee – goes to agency15% – Goes to person who makes the sale15% – Goes to project manager50% – Split between lead developer and other developers in some fashion.This wasnt the exact split in every case but it followed a similar format.​How I built the agency and got developers to work for me:I found people who had just graduated from bootcamps or were otherwise new and needed a chance. I offered to give them the help they needed to get up and running. When you believe in people and give them the opportunity to prove themselves, they are really impressive!I gave them a share of each project (a % of the income) for their position. Also, if I’d hire a senior or lead dev to manage them, I’d give that dev a share. I always did project based revenue sharing because I wanted to always make a profit and to align my interests with those of the team.I got a buddy who was a non technical guy who worked at a deli to do project management for me. The job changed his life and he quit his job at a deli. He basically just had to make sure the projects were moving along smoothly and talk to clients.I would create a project plan and start the project from a seed project I had built. I would then deploy the FE/Backend on Heroku or Google Cloud kubernetes + cloudflare and pass the project off to my team.I would always hire a “project lead” who functioned as the lead developer of a project – there were times when I couldn’t be that project lead.I charged the clients by the hour ALWAYS, not on a project basis. I billed every other week for hours worked. This way clients were always on the hook for paying and if a client didn’t pay on time (within 2 weeks), we immediately stopped working. This prevented the serious losses on clients.I always aimed to charge the client 2x what I was paying my devs. I mostly would do a flat rate. My sweet spot was $75/hour charged to clients to get in the door, but on the higher budget projects we shot for $125/hour.It really helped the devs to know that I had their back and I was getting them the highest rate possible. I was really just being their advocate.Having a mission to help the people in your company improve their careers is the only way this worked out at all. If I had been shady about pay or been overly greedy, people would’ve left me high and dry.How I (mostly) kept my sanityI didn’t micromanage every project. The revenue sharing was there to give people intrinsic motivation to get the projects done. There was an agency-wide support system if people ran into problems.I kept my mind on finding new clients and hiring new devs.I hired some really great people and we kept a positive atmosphere.I was willing to say no to clients and play hardball on compensation.I read “Work the system” – highly recommend this. I built a series of internal documentation that laid out all of our processes so we weren’t running around pulling our hair out. We used a CRM to track clients and used trello to manage the agency.Challenges:Clients are resistant to hiring an agency on Upwork. You have to really prove yourself and sell yourself. It’s just a numbers game.The first $1000 made on upwork is the hardest. When you dont have a reputation you have to lower your rates and do a great job. Good reviews are everything.I am not a people manager and I didn’t end up finding a great CEO cofounder. In retrospect, it would have been 100x better to have a CEO cofounder to manage people so I could manage the tech consulting side.The mental burden of having people dependent on me (both clients and employees) broke me after a few months and I had to shut down the company.Getting off upwork and transitioning to cold calling and bigger sales was a quantum leap. I couldn’t hack it for the most part. I only got lucky doing this because of my connections – I recommend working with an experienced salesperson if you want to scale up big.Overall, it was a great learning experience, we changed a bunch of peoples lives by giving them a resume booster, but running an agency is not for me. I’m now happily working as a tech lead on a startup which is successful, and I am so grateful to my boss.If you want any tips on how to get something going, DM me. I also have a slack group where you can chill with some other entrepreneurial devs.I have also published all my relevant marketing documents and my estimate documents to google drive which may be useful to you:https://ift.tt/2YQeQ15. If enough people are interested in the transparent revenue share model, I was thinking of building an alternative to upwork for building teams to match project managers / salespeople with devs and to assemble these transparent revenue-sharing-based agency teams. This would allow people to build their own agency brands or just work as freelancers for agency brands and get a cut of the revenue, without the bookkeeping overhead that goes into it. The app would handle the billing and automate the payouts and 1099 everyone involved. Food for thought. LMK if that sounds useful or not. via /r/webdev https://ift.tt/39VQqtc