The pursuit of Freelancing

I began working in a startup as soon as I graduated. Worked with a couple of startups in the next three years. We created some great web applications there and had a great time learning new technologies. I like to work with small teams like these . The only thing that mattered was that we get the work done. No corporate baggage. No boring meetings for hours.

I wanted to work on other projects in my free time and wanted to see if freelancing is my thing. I wanted to see if it is better than my startup job. I bid on a couple of small projects that hardly needed a day to finish. So, I just sent one of the clients code before even bagging the project and asked him to send me whatever money he thinks it’s worth. He was so glad that he paid for it and also gave me more work. I loved to freelance from then on. I began enjoying it more than my job. You get paid more than whatever job you are currently doing. And you get to work from home. And get to plan your work and vacations as you wish.

I eventually convinced a few of my friends to give up jobs and take up freelancing. Bagged a few large projects and finished them. It’s been three years and it’s awesome.

I got new clients from online portals like upwork and through personal contacts for our team. Online portals like upwork are good to begin with but it’s hard to get quality long term projects and the pay what we deserve for the work. You need to spend a lot of time searching for new clients and the pay is not on par to the quality of the work we provide. The next step for us was to search for a better quality platform. Toptal is exactly that. Toptal web Developer group beats other portals by having a better screening process. It gives us visibility among the best companies. And the pay is better.

This is going be a new adventure for us working on the toptal platform, for new clients and more challenging projects.