If I developed apps for money, I would have most certainly failed!

Like many other developers, freelancing was not the first thing on my mind when I started developing websites or as the new generation calls them, Apps. In fact it all started as a by-product of my love for Chemistry.

Where it all began…

I distinctly remember the first time I developed a website, I was so proud of it I couldn’t stop sharing it with my friends and family, off-course not through social media, which was non-existent at that time, but by telling them verbally and showing them on computer lab’s PCs.

The year was 2006 and I was doing A levels. The go-to tool for developing sites for newbies was Dreamweaver at that time and thats the tool I chose to create my first site named ‘virtualchemistryguide.com’. I was so into love with Chemistry that I wanted to help other students with their O level and A level studies as well as provide them visual structures of Molecules and past exam papers. The first thing I did, after finishing the site and uploading some very illegal past papers, was to show it to my teacher and boy was he impressed!

Disclaimer: I didn’t know at the time that uploading past papers of O and A Levels was illegal and Cambridge was kind enough to not only explain to me that it was not allowed but in taking down my site on copyright violation, in case I had trouble understanding.

The website was a simple HTML/CSS site which had bunch of images that I created in MS Powerpoint. It was all hosted on a free server and all I had to buy was domain name itself. To be fair, I had played with some coding in my O level computer science using Turbo Basic etc but to see the code materialise into something visual which I could interact with and show to my friends was mesmerising. I knew that I had found my passion but where the life will take me from there was totally unpredictable.

Fast forward 3 years…

Once I had found my passion, I continued to create a dozen more sites including a mildly popular one i.e. surferseden.com, which was basically a forum based on open-source script. Forums were all the rage at that time and people came to them to share all kinds of stuff including asking questions from strangers and providing cracked softwares 😉 … It didn’t last more than a year though before I moved on to my next project.

It was around the time when social media siteshad started gaining momentum including Orkut and Facebook, so I decided to create my own social media site and to no one’s surprise, no one even came to say Hi 👋 to me on my site. By this time, I had finished my A Levels and was doing my Bachelors in Electrical Engineering.

Diving into Freelancing like a Pro

I was doing very well in subjects related to programming in my university and couldn’t stop bragging about all sites that I had developed and how I was rooting Android phones ( Android G1, to be precise ) to install custom ROMs.

Then one day, my close friend who deserves an honory mention, Shahbaz Aslam , recommended me to sign up on a site named oDesk, where apparently people were making money working as freelancers. I had learnt Php, MySQL, JavaScript by now and was developing full sites in Notepad ( yes, you read it right ) so I thought, why not.

After applying on dozens of projects, the first project that I won was worth $5. I had to create a contact form where users can add Name, Email, Inquiry etc and the contents were to be emailed to the client. It took me 2 days to create that and integrate into client’s site but I didn’t stop there, I kept on improving it and reading more articles about how to handle security, or at-least what I thought security meant at that time, of form submissions and stop spams etc. The client was so impressed with my work that he continued to award me projects for next 6 years, my apologies to those who never got the chance the apply on his projects because I was getting them without even bidding.

To the main topic…

Now that you have gone through my whole story without ever reading a single word related to title of this post, let us shift our attention to what brought you here.

The reason I mentioned my first project’s budget and time it took me to finish it, is that when it comes to freelancing the only thing that matters is your client’s satisfaction, Period. If you are not satisfied with the budget then don’t accept the project but if you do accept, go to extreme lengths to make sure that your client is satisfied because the only way to make money in the world of Freelancing is to have long-term clients.

You are paid to solve a problem, not to write code

Your passion comes into play when it’s actually time to solve a problem and not just write code.

If you are passionate about something, you will find a way and if you are not, you will find an excuse

I habitually ask my clients to leave a detailed feedback on the projects that I work and the prominent theme in 90% of the feedbacks that I receive is that; he knows how to solve a problem.

I am working with some clients for over 8 years now ( yes, I am that old ) and they simply can’t get rid of me because of my passion to solve problems. Around 2 years ago, I learnt NodeJs only because my client was having trouble with a script which was supposed to server millions of views daily and his server was not getting the kind of throughput he expected. The original script was in PhP and after several failed attempt in optimise it, I decided to learn a whole new architecture just so his issue can be resolved.

I have always been proud of the great lengths that I go to solve the problems of my clients and I firmly believe that if I didn’t have the passion to solve problems and learn new things, I would have most certainly failed.

A decade after starting my freelancing career with a $5 project, small things like learning new languages and frameworks still excite me. Recently I learnt React Native because client refused to hire anyone else for his project and was happy to pay for my time to learn rather than hiring a seasoned React Native developer who could be more interested in money than solving his problems.

Is developing apps / websites a right fit for you?

Only you can answer this question but make sure you have actual interest in learning programming languages and solving problems. Don’t try to force learn it only because people are making money from it and you don’t want to be left behind. All professions are important; you can be a doctor, a gym instructor, an engineer, auditor or even a lawyer who takes down sites of young kids because they uploading exam papers of your client. Sky is the limit.

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