How & when to break into UX freelancing
After publishing my last article on 12 things I learned during my first 12 months as a Freelance UX Researcher, I received many direct messages from UX researchers and designers who asked me how to land a first client, or more generally, how to break into UX freelancing. In this article, I want to give some tips.
I had worked in UX research for 7 years before deciding to go freelance 12 months ago. Therefore, let’s address the elephant in the room. Before you think about how to kick off your freelance career, a more relevant question is rather, when to do so.
Greeting Konstantin
I hope you are doing well. I’m a junior UX UI designer and I would like to break into freelance. I saw your post and I would ask you for recommendations from your experience on the best way to do so.
Let’s be clear: Freelancing is not for everyone, and it is in no way better than being fully employed in a company. Freelancing is not a logical next step and it might not be more enjoyable than working in a company. Only you know your own personal circumstances, preferences, and lifestyle and only you can judge whether freelancing is a good decision for you.
I would always recommend at least 4–5 years within companies before going freelance. Being part of a company will teach you so much about team dynamics, how hierarchies impact ways of working, constant change in companies, how businesses make money, how marketing works, how teams grow, and what challenges come with scaling up. All of that is free education! And you will need it later. Just from a pure UX perspective, being part of a company allows you to sit in so many meetings, listen to decision-makers, follow discussions, fail, do better, fail again, join design reviews, interview users, watch a PM fight with the design leader over decision-power and experience first hand how your feature breaks because you did not think about the edge cases.
I do not regret a single second of being part of a company, as a Junior researcher, a team lead and later a department head. These seven years allowed me to build the level of confidence that I need to apply daily as a freelancer.
Reasons for not working freelance
- Financial insecurities: You will never know how good or bad your upcoming months will be. You will experience difficult times. Only you know how fast you will start panicking.
- More administrative hassle: Do need to do your own taxes, write invoices, negotiate your contracts, and do your own accounting. If you are allergic to paperwork, think twice.
- No mentoring, no shadowing: You will not be able to observe your more senior colleagues, learn from them, and grow your skillset by observation. Neither are you given a safe space to fail. You are very much on your own and expectations are very high.
- No bigger vision: You will not be part of a long-term strategy within a company. You will not be the person who built this thing over the years. You will not be part of the big success stories companies are writing. Your contribution will soon be forgotten.
- No colleagues, no gossip: You will not be part of a company or team identity, you won’t build long-lasting relationships with your team members, you will not hear the inside jokes, all the gossip, drama, politics, all the OMG you won’t believe what I just heard!
If you appreciate, not just accept, but appreciate everything above, well then…scroll further.
Understand the landscape
Let’s jump ahead. Ultimately you want to land gigs. And ideally, you want to land one gig after another. But first, you need to understand the dynamics of booking freelancers. There is a difference between small and large companies when it comes to engaging external resources and freelancers, both from a recruiting and accounting perspective.
When smaller companies search for external support like a freelance UX person, chances are high that their team leads and HR staff will start looking around and directly approach people on Linkedin. In case of high urgency or if the profile is very difficult to find, individual recruiters might join the process to support the search for talent.
I’m based in Pakistan, where unfortunately the UX Research market is immature. As a result, I have decided to become a freelancer. Do you have any resources on how to start freelancing, maybe something like getting the first client? Looking forward to your response. Good Day!
With larger companies and global corporations, everything is more complex. Therefore, some problems are outsourced. Chances are high that an agency sits between you and the client. The agency will recruit you, but also manage your invoicing. From a client’s perspective, this makes the billing a lot easier, since they do not have to deal with potentially hundreds of individual freelancers who all send their individual invoices.
Keep in mind that these agencies or networks work for multiple clients, so once you are in their set of excellent talent, they might reach out to you for a project before they start the hunt on Linkedin.
Becoming visible
Obviously, if you want to be found, you need to show that you exist. I think it is needless to say that you need a well-structured Linkedin profile and personal website. Companies want to minimize their risks and maximize their value, so it is your job to articulate why you are great at what you do. Over time, you can add case studies to your portfolio to add extra spice.
Linkedin allows you to set an open to status that will be visible to recruiters. They will know that you can be approached for new positions. Make use of that feature to increase your visibility.
Also, add Freelance to your title. And please do yourself and the world a favor and use a clear title that says what you do! Don’t try to be fancy by writing Disrupting industries since 2015 or Pushing web 3 or Product guy. Just don’t!
I hope you skipped this chapter because all of this was clear. Let’s move forward.
Join the networks
As good talent is rare and finding people is time-consuming, you can actively reach out to some networks and agencies that work in UX. Beyond the agencies, you should join different Slack channels:
I am sure there are many more! Please let me know in the comments if you are aware of more networks and I will add them.
Contribute to the conversation
The UX community is very active in constantly evolving. We are still fighting over the role of a PM within UX, we argue over the actual value of personas, we still remind each other how to avoid leading questions, there is so much to learn about heuristics and biases when designing your survey.
Join the conversation, share your thoughts, create value for the community, be an active voice, try things and tell us how it went. If you want to raise awareness, don’t just sit and wait — do stuff! Medium, LinkedIn, but also the Slack channels above are great places to read and write.
Do great work
Nothing impacts your reputation as much as the work you do and the words you say. Whenever you get the chance to join a project, this is your moment to shine and deliver excellent work. Your work quality will be the best predictor for future jobs. If you deliver value, people will remember and recommend you. If you don’t, they won’t.
Always remember that you are your own brand. You represent your business whenever you speak and whenever you send an email.
Good luck!
Thanks so much for reading my article. I appreciate all kinds of comments and feedback, so please share your thoughts and own experiences. I will try to be more active again here on Medium, so if you are interested in reading more of my articles, please consider subscribing via email.
All the best,
Konstantin
