Finding freelance clients during COVID-19

Published in

Studio Lagier

10 min readApr 30, 2020

My wife and I had a pretty awesome dream over the last three years. We were going to quit our cushy Silicon Valley tech jobs and see the world in a 10 month globe-trotting sabbatical. It took a lot of saving, a lot of anxiety, and a lot of planning, but we finally pulled it off — come February, we got on a jet for Mexico City and didn’t plan on setting foot back in the States until November.

Some timing, huh?

We made it about 5 weeks before the pleading of our families, our government, and common sense brought us home to the Bay. Doing some soul-searching, we decided that this would be a good time to try and get our freelancing careers off the ground. We put our heads together during our 14-day quarantine, figuring out the best way to get clients and make rent.

We’re far from out of the woods, but we’ve got a couple of successful projects under our belt and more in the queue. I thought it might help other fresh freelancers if I shared some of the strategies we’ve used to get clients during this time.

Leverage your network

This one is common knowledge — the best source of freelance clients is people you already know.

You might roll your eyes and say “I hate networking, I’m not a social person!”

I’d encourage you to push past that. The reality is, a good chunk of your time — around half — is going to be devoted to finding and managing clients. If you want to be a successful freelancer, you’re going to need those soft skills.

Beyond that, though, if you really sit and think, you’d be shocked at how many people you know. Here’s a quick list of places we started with.

Family and friends. The best way to reach these people is typically through social media. Don’t be shy, let people know you’re looking for work! Facebook and Twitter are how I got my first few contacts.
Prior coworkers, teachers, and colleagues. You should reach out to anyone you were close to at previous jobs, especially managers. You never know who’s looking for a little extra bandwidth on a particular project.
Social groups. This one can be a little trickier depending on the context of the group, but letting your Meetup groups, your Discord servers, and your Facebook groups know that you’re looking for work can be a good way to get the message out.
LinkedIn. You likely have a decent professional network here — use it. LinkedIn is a powerful tool for advertising your skillset and connecting with people that might be two or three degrees away. It also allows you to connect with recruiters which might have short-term contract work.
Referrals and past clients. Ask every client you work with for an endorsement and referrals. These are likely where the bulk of your sustainable work will come from. Doesn’t help much when you don’t have any clients, but get into the habit right from the start.

You’ve got a unique advantage right now — people are extremely connected, and extremely online. Chances are good that if you reach out to everyone, you’ll get a few people interested in your skillset.

Build a brand

Tapping your network is a great way to get started, but it doesn’t scale too well — especially right now, without conventions or in-person meet-ups. You will likely find that after a week or two you’ve exhausted your entire network and you might not have much to show for it.

It’s important to think about how you can be building a presence such that people who don’t know you might find you. Getting your profile in front of strangers is tough right now — most of the freelance platforms are swamped. Finding ways to connect with people you don’t know will take a bit of doing.

Here are some things we’ve done to try and get ourselves out there.

Build a website. You might have a website already, but it’s a good time to tune it up. Make sure it showcases your latest work and looks good. Do a pass with Lighthouse to check its performance and SEO.
Get active in communities. For me, Hacker News, Reddit, and some Discord servers have yielded contacts and contracts. Remember, huge numbers of people are online right now, so finding discussion boards and groups is the perfect place to make connections with people who could refer or hire you.
Find a niche. I’m still working on this one, but it’s solid advice — focusing your efforts on a specific set of clients makes you more valuable, and gives you structure to the places that you might look for new work. There are plenty of niches that COVID has shined a spotlight on such as remote education, social medicine, and delivery logistics.
Create. People are hungry for content. Be it art, blog posts, YouTube videos, tweets, memes, whatever. Find something you can do well, and put it in front of people. This is a great way to expand your reach, and it can help you find a niche as well.

Use all the platforms!

I’m not a big fan of the freelancing platforms, especially right now. They can be really useful, especially to people just getting started. Remember, make sure you have a contract before you do any work, and don’t be afraid to raise your rates as soon as you start getting some traction.

Here are some platforms to investigate if you’re not having much luck finding work through your network or brand. We do web development, so I mostly know that market, but many of the platforms are for all sorts of freelancers.

Upwork. More like Ughwork, am I right? This is the biggest freelancer platform, and it’s also the most saturated — with scams, low bidders, and outright fraud aplenty. It’s got incredible reach, but competition is fierce which drives prices down.
TopTal. A more selective freelancer platform, you’ll need to go through their interview gauntlet to get access to the jobs. You’ll still be competing against other freelancers, but because of the selective interviewing process you’ll have a lot less competition. The interview process takes a lot of investment, but this is probably the best place to start if you don’t have much work experience. If you can get in, you’ll be set for a few years of growth.
PeoplePerHour. I’ve heard really good things about them, but my experience has been mixed. The listings seem to be generally higher-quality, but I have not seen much work in my price range and the few proposals I have put out have been unanswered.
WeWorkRemotely. This is more of a job board for remote work, but they have a few freelance and contract listings. I made a couple of connections through here, but did not land any contracts (yet). Overall the listings seem well curated and the contacts that I’ve made have been solid.
Craigslist. Ah yes, our favorite human-to-human exchange platform. Depending on what you’re doing, this can be a goldmine. Budgets tend to skew low and scams tend to skew high, but the geographic restricting of the work can be a good way to connect with people and groups you might not. Everyone is remote right now, so checking other cities or regions for work is a good idea.
r/jobbit and HackerNews hiring threads. These can be spotty, but I landed my largest contract to date through Jobbit. It doesn’t take long to post a quick schpiel, and these platforms tend to have a higher-than-average income bracket, so it’s definitely worth putting something up. It’s also a great place to see how other freelancers are marketing themselves.

Overall, platforms seem to be a pretty mixed bag, with heavy investment in no way correlated to returns. I’d recommend doing the minimum on any given platform to get a profile together, and then focusing your energy on the ones that seem like they’re generating positive results.

Be persistent

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the number of ways to find work, and even easier to get discouraged when all your hard work seems like it’s going nowhere.

Don’t give up! There’s work out there, plenty of people making their living doing exactly what you’re trying to do. It’s all about pushing your face and skills in front of as many people as possible until you find the few connections it takes to bootstrap your business.

Here’s what we’ve done to keep positive and keep going.

Try to act on 3–5 leads per day. This feels like a sweet spot — it’s enough to feel like you’ve got good momentum, but not so many that you’re burning out from spending hours a day scrutinizing job boards.
Don’t be too picky. Keep an open mind about what you send a proposal to, as long as it meets your criteria for payment and doesn’t seem like a scam. Even if it’s not a perfect fit, one good call can turn into a connection which can become a referral and an avenue for future work.
Save your proposals. You really want to spend as little time as possible on the initial contact without seeming like a robot. Try not to get too invested in a single proposal, and reuse what you can. It’s tough to give a good proposal from the initial description, anyway.
Push for face-to-face calls. This is the best way to understand if a project is a good fit, to gather the details for a good proposal, and to connect with people. If possible, just introduce yourself and your skills briefly over email and then ask for a call as the next step.
Don’t count your chickens. It’s tempting to think that if things are going well during the proposal or negotiation phases, the contract is a sure thing. Circumstances rapidly change during COVID, and it’s important to be adaptable. Keep looking for new leads, even if a contract seems likely.
Take a break. When you don’t have a contract, it’s easy to feel stressed and anxious — work brings finances, stability, and frequently self-worth. Unfortunately, you can’t just turn the “jobs” nozzle. You’re going to have downtime. Give yourself space to relax, to create, and for new postings to open up. A typical 5-on 2-off week is a good schedule to hold, even when you’re searching for that first contract.

Do a great job

Remember that your current client is your single best connection to the next one. Set boundaries in the contract, but do your absolute best to impress them and surpass their expectations. Once things are going well, make sure to ask for endorsements, referrals, and to use the work in your portfolio.

Spend time on the contract. The contract protects you and the client if things go south, but it’s also an important way to explore mutual expectations and build trust. Try to structure the contract such that it’s clear how it benefits both parties. Be crystal clear about things like dates, payment terms, working hours, and asset ownership.
Focus on value. It’s easy to get bogged down in technical details and minutiae, and it’s also easy to encode expectations in a contract that the real world does not support. During the length of the project, make sure that you’re laser-focused on what is going to bring value (i.e. money) to the client. Be vocal if you think the client is making a mistake, or if something that isn’t high value is taking a lot of time.
Be flexible. Circumstances change and humans are lousy at estimating. It’s unlikely you or the client will be able to perfectly predict the scope of the project or the state of the world as you progress through it. By making sure that you allow for revisions, provide clauses for optional extensions, and meet with the client regularly to prioritize and adjust tasks, you ensure that you’re working on what’s important.
Communicate well. It’s important that the client trusts you. One way I try to build this trust is to talk, a lot. I try to check in daily, at least, and make sure that the client knows when I’ve encountered difficulties or need their input. The client may not have as much bandwidth to communicate back, so I try to be graceful and help them by providing clear decision points and means of feedback.

I want to end by saying — you can do it! It’s a tough environment out there right now, but there are unique opportunities as well. By being persistent, thrifty, and flexible, you’ll be able to find the contact you need to bootstrap your freelance career.

If you’ve got a tip for finding work right now, I’d love to hear it — here in the comments or on Twitter.

If you’re looking for a web developer (and miraculously still reading), drop me a line at hello@lagiers.studio. I’d love to chat about your project!