Types of UX freelancers and why freelancers love working at InfoTrust
If you had an opportunity to get involved at the onset with one of the fastest growing companies in the country to learn how they do things, so you can apply this learning to your freelance business, is that something you’d be interested in?
My name is Alex, and I am a co-founder of InfoTrust - marketing technology company that is currently pending the status of one of the fastest growing companies in the country.
Over the years we had mixed results with hiring freelancers and since we currently have a number of opportunities, I thought I will take some time to think through what types of freelancers are out there and how our company can work with each type of freelancer. In the future I am going to continue this post with some analysis of what type of freelancer makes sense for what type of organization and how to go about finding the right people.
“When I had just started my design company, InfoTrust provided me with a stable source of work and income while I got the business off the ground. That was more than four years ago. Today, I employ many of my own contractors, but I still find time to do part-time design work for InfoTrust. They provide a fun, flexible environment that is unlike any other that I have experienced in the industry. Even as a hired freelancer, they’ve been nothing but inclusive and accommodating to me, making me feel like one of their own.” — Allen Gingrich, Founder of Ideas & Pixels
Having been a freelancer myself, there are typically a couple of reasons people do freelance work:
Money — you have a full-time job but for personal reasons you need to make more money and your employer does not mind (or doesn’t know — who am I to judge?). So you are probably a part-time freelancer, working 15–20h/week nights and weekends.
Starting a services business — your business maybe be a solo-preneurship with you trying to maximize your income through contracting. Or it could be that you are trying to start an agency and right now you are primarily consulting around the top skill that you have — UX. You are probably available full-time or part-time, depending on your ongoing relationships with other clients
Starting a product business (your baby)— you are bootstrapping product development by doing consulting work to generate additional income while your baby is gaining traction. I can certainly relate to this one. You are probably working around the clock, but you do what you need to do to generate cash
Lifestyle freelancer — money and entrepreneurship are not your top motivators. You choose to be independent and you only pick projects and clients that you connect with. You are probably only working 20–30 hours per week because you want to have flexibility to do other things.
Transition — you are in between things, and you are freelancing as a way to pay the bills and to find the next good thing. You freelance during the day, in between interviews, or at night, and you are available 15–20 h/week so you would have enough time to keep looking.
Did I miss anything? Please comment.
To make the client-freelancer relationship as successful as possible, it is very important to understand not just what the freelancer and the client are looking for, but also what expectations to have from different types of freelancers and what types of freelancers are out there.
Let me start by sharing a little bit about us.
There are three types of freelance opportunities for UX people at InfoTrust.
- Consulting Services — we have an ongoing relationship, and you help us with things like banners, landing pages, and random improvements for our clients’ marketing pages. We are not in the business of web development, so the help that we need has to do with optimization of client marketing campaigns.
- Products — you help us optimize user interface of our InfoTrust products. You are a very skilled UX developer, you work part-time with our engineering team, or you provide us with mockups/wireframes and one of our engineers actually builds things that you design.
- Marketing — you help our InfoTrust marketing teams with things like our own marketing site design (both for product marketing and for services marketing), landing pages, ads, etc. We constantly redesign and try to optimize the user experience of our InfoTrust marketing sites.
So now that we discussed who you are and what we need, let’s review where we can be successful working together.
#1. You need money while you are building your product business.
As long as we are on the same page and there is no competition with our work, we’ll gladly teach you everything we know about lean startup methodologies, product testing, analytics and all other skills that you need to grow your business. Additionally, the founders will gladly take the time to mentor you and to connect you to their network. Under two conditions — you do what you say you are going to do, and you care. As far as money is concerned, there is definitely enough work to keep you busy. It will be very beneficial for you to have one large client so you can spend your time focusing on growing your business, instead of managing multiple clients.
#2. You are starting a web development or design agency.
We strongly believe that starting a business is all about building relationships. A benefit to partnering with a larger consulting organization such as InfoTrust is that every single week we get asked if we know anybody who is awesome to help with their web development. Keep in mind, that people that we deal with are the ones that appreciate the value of the types of services that we do. They are not going to expect a working site for $500. So, being a part of our extended team means that you will have access to our business network, and if you are awesome, we’ll constantly refer you to our clients and network.
#3. You need more money
There is nothing wrong with that. We all go through stages in our lives when we need an additional stream of income. When you need to maximize your freelance income, it’s important to calculate not just your hourly rate but your effective hourly rate — how much unbillable time you spend closing and managing clients. If you are committed and can show us that you can successfully manage both our needs, and your full-time job then we can help. We have a number of things that you could do from home without meeting with us during business hours. If you are truly awesome, then we will rearrange our schedule to meet with you early in the morning or after 5p so you could work with us without jeopardizing your full-time job. The important thing is getting things done, and we’ll help you maximize your income.
#4. You are a lifestyle freelancer
What’s more important to you — projects or the client? If you only want to work with the clients aligned with your values, then know this about InfoTrust: we are 3 times Best Place to Work finalist. Our company spends countless hours every year supporting our community and giving back. You will be invited to participate in our social and community events with us, and to be a part of the team that is feeding the homeless, helping sick children or doing many other awesome things. If you only care about complex projects that challenge you professionally, then try building UX for software-as-a-service platforms that scale.
#5. You are in transition
The best way to learn about somebody is to work with this person side-by-side for some time. As a matter of fact, some software companies only hire people after they paid them for 1–2 days of work side-by-side with current team members. Freelancing with us will provide you and us with an opportunity to find out if this is a relationship we’d want to grow to part-time or full-time basis. At the same time, the skills that you will be using while doing work for us are highly marketable so it will be a great opportunity for you to learn new things and check out what its like to work with us.
What drives us crazy
There are some good ways to impress us and there are some things you could do that would guarantee that we are not going to want to do anything with you. Here is a small checklist:
- Respect our time as much as you respect your own. Don’t be late, don’t get lost.
- Show professionalism. How you go about scheduling meetings and communicating with us goes a long way to show how you are going to behave as a freelancer.
- Portfolio — you better have a great portfolio. In this day and age, there is absolutely no reason for a UX person not to have an online portfolio.
- Do your homework. You can find everything about us online.
- Show that you care. Don’t impress us with just your portfolio — prepare some examples where you, as a freelancer, showed initiative and appreciation for the team that hired you. We want to build relationships with freelancers who cares.
- Bring your computer or iPad to the meeting; We are a digital company. Be a geek.
About InfoTrust
InfoTrust helps some of the largest global enterprises improve the quality of online ad campaigns through data captured by web analytics products as well as back-end systems. InfoTrust Consulting Division has achieved top level Google Analytics Partner recognition and is currently one of the few companies in the world authorized to resell Google Analytics Premium(™). InfoTrust Products Division has developed 3 Software-as-a-Service products that help organizations improve the quality of data collection while maintaining compliance with international privacy laws:
- Analyze.ly Connect — automated augmentation of web analytics data inside Google Analytics(™) with ad cost data from ad networks, product and user data from in-house CRM systems.
- Tag Inspector and Tag Monitor — marketing tag auditing products.
InfoTrust is headquartered in Blue Ash, OH
InfoTrust is a 3 times Best Place to Work Finalist in Cincinnati
Please email HR@INFOTRUSTLLC.COM with your portfolio and your resume or linkedin profile.
