 A lot of people have been asking me questions about freelancing, and while I do have experience on that front, it was never my primary source of income, which means I don't really feel super qualified to throw advice out on that. So instead of throwing out my own maybe not the best advice in the world, I thought, why not get advice from people who actually know what they're really doing with it and do have a lot of experience with it? So this video is the first in a series where I'm going to be interviewing freelance developers. For this video, I sat down with Nile who just kept on dropping nuggets of gold. If you don't already know Nile, he's on YouTube making videos on Kodyu Community where he dives into Davoscript React, and most recently he's been live streaming as he rebuilds his own business site using Next.js. I've linked to his channel down below as well as his Twitter and the Kodyu Community Discord and really strongly suggest you go and check them all out. Now just before we dive into the interview, this video is being brought to you by the Freelancing Bundle at StudyWebDevelopment.com. If you use the coupon code Kev25, you will get 25% off your purchase, but I'm going to talk more about this at the end. Before now, let's go and dive into the interview with Nile. Before we get into the Freelancing, just a little bit, you know, what can you tell us about you? So obviously you're Nile, but you're in Ireland based on your accent, I'm guessing. But other than that, just, you know, what are you up to these days? And yeah, we'll start with that. What are you up to these days? Yeah. So as Kevin said, my name is Nile. I know a lot of people outside of Ireland struggle with my name from the when they see the spelling of it, for sure. So it's Nile Amir and I am working as a CTO of a company here called Spark. But that is a very new thing. In fact, if you're looking for the day that we're streaming, it is the day that's been announced on LinkedIn and all those things. And it is something that I have a position I got from leveraging my Freelancing career. So it's definitely a natural job where I got to now, where I got to now. I'm really excited to have him now as well. That's awesome. And so obviously it's a really big change for you and a bit of a different direction that you're moving into. But to rewind a little bit, you are a developer and we're doing Freelancing developing. So before talking about Freelancing still, like what what brought you to being a developer in the first place? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I probably should have started with that. My expertise is JavaScript. So that is what I do most days. I still write JavaScript nearly every day. So I'm a big fan of that. What got me started? I think I'll tell you a small story about how I got into it. And that was my rock career failed. I have a guitar here. I somewhere in the background, you'll see it. But I originally planned on being a rock star. And then I realized I didn't like loud noise or crowds. So that wasn't going to work out for me. So I took the next natural leap and I went into selling fine wines. So my job before I became a web developer was selling fine wines and whiskey and craft beers. So I work for one of the biggest fine wine shops here in Dublin. Due to some health issues, I was unable to really walk anymore or a struggling to walk. So I literally went on to Google and Google best job without a degree. And started teaching myself how to code between customers. And in fact, a lot of my first customers to my freelancing career were customers of my Intruder Wine Shop, who I knew and had relationships with, who I knew had businesses. So it was directly as a result of where I was working that I became a freelancer, I guess. That's really awesome. And I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who took a really strange path to get to where we are now. I have a degree in urban planning and a degree in film. So it's been a bit of a weird path for me along the way. So, yeah, I was going to jump into your education, all of that. But it looks like we sort of got there on. So you're self-taught, not, you know, no degree. I like that you actually look that up. And you said like, you know, that was your searches. How can I get a job without a degree? So that's pretty interesting. Yeah. Now, the caveat there was I did do one year in computer science when I was 18. And I preferred parking in college than I did doing anything. So I never even thought of a career really in it until much later. It was years later before I decided that I would give it another shot. I knew nothing other than like I genuinely thought websites were made out of tables with HTML and CSS and nothing else. So I was in for a big shock when I finally decided to learn this stuff properly. And let me just run down your answer to a bunch of the stuff I was going to ask already. And I'm not the best interviewer in the world, obviously. So actually, you said when you when you first got started, a lot of your the first clients you're picking up were, you know, like how I guess how did you make that jump from realizing like knowing these people to actually landing them as your first clients? Like, how does that actually happen? Because I think a lot of people are in that situation where they know people. They know people that could probably use a website, but they don't know how to reach out to them to convince them to hire them, especially if they don't really have experience and they're learning on the side or something like that. Yeah, the very simple, straightforward way, which might sound a bit too easy is just tell them that you do these things now. Tell them that you're available. Say, hey, by the way, just in case you do need a new website, I do this now. If you need something, please think of me. I'll do a good job and you can trust me because I'm here. I'm going to have to see you again, especially with people that you know. So like it's never going to be where you are going to make most of your money. I think I sold my first couple of websites for like 500 bucks a piece. And the thing is about that was I negotiated that over beers as well with these people because I ran a beer club, which we would do a beer tasting of 10 different beers. So by the end of the night, it was a really easy way to get agreement to my two from people to build a website. But like those relationships, those relationships, like people got told about this from seeing me in the shop and talking to me and seeing me always kind of on the computer in the shop. And there were a lot of people who were curious to what I was doing. And I told them, I said, I'm building websites. And a lot of people after you tell them that will go, oh, I work for myself or whatever else, would you be able to help me? So a lot of the times just putting yourself out there and letting people know you do these things is enough. It's definitely enough to get your first couple. It gets harder as it goes on because that small, direct people who just really want to help you out as well is gone very fast. And you probably will feel bad charging them a lot of money. And it's not really a great career. Right. Yeah. That makes sense. I think that's I think definitely it can be hard sometimes just to say that to people just, you know, like, oh, this is what I do. And if, you know, you need a website, I could help you out. You know, it's something super simple. But I think a lot of people have trouble with that. And I think if you want to be a successful freelancer, it is definitely something you have to overcome, though, along the way. Yeah, I think that's important for not just freelancing for careers in general is if you're looking for a promotion, if you're looking for anything, you have to tell people you're looking for it. A lot of people forget that. And it's only over the last couple of years. I've noticed that I'm one of the few people who tell say exactly what I'm thinking or tell people directly what I'm after. So the mystery is gone. So and I'm but I'm also expecting lots of no's. I think a lot of people get hurt by the nose and take it personally. When if you put it out there with no ambition to get work directly from this person, then it doesn't hurt as much to get those no's. And every yes is a bonus. When you're expecting it all, that's an awesome way to think about it. And speaking of like sort of going from just those, you know, your friends and people, your acquaintances and all of that and the little tiny jobs for you, was it you said it got that's where it gets harder is sort of as you get through all of that. Is that you sort of for you, was it more of a slow progression of slowly finding more clients and building up from there? Or was it more of you just at one point got lucky, landed a really big break, maybe something in between? So I was really fortunate in my career, to be honest, somebody I'm working with right now, reached out to me. So actually, I'll take a small step back. I started freelancing and getting jobs because I couldn't get a permanent job. This is the exact reason I started because I had no experience and I was self thought and every company wanted somebody with experience. So what was the thing I had to do? I had to get experience and nobody would hire me to get experience. So I had to make my own experience. So that's the whole start of my career, I guess. From there, I got a job working with a large company called Amdox, they're an Israeli company that work with telecoms companies globally. I was part of their firefighting squad where we were sent to literally on my second week I was flown from Dublin to Australia, Sydney in Australia to fix merge conflicts between 100 developers. So in that job, it was baptism by fire. I felt like I bluffed my way into the job and I was being sent all these places to fix things. And as a result, I got good at what I was doing very fast because I had to. There was no choice. It was sink or swim. And about nine months into that job after working for about six, seven different companies, I got a call of a friend of mine now who said, hey, are you interested in still doing your own thing? I have a contract that might suit you. And he said it was for this. They're looking for the senior team on this thing. And as a result, I just went for it. I said, let's find out what a senior developer needs to know to get a contract like this. And I went and I met the crowd. It was Bank of America, actually, that we're looking for a contractor. And I went and I met them. And I got that job. And since then, I had effectively just been set up my own business, started taking some contracts but then started taking in clients on the side as well and building it out from there. Yeah, so it was definitely a chance. I wasn't expecting, especially in less than a year of being permanently employed to jump back into working for myself. Awesome. That's really cool. And it's interesting, as you said, I think just going back a little bit when you said you sort of bluffed your way, you felt like you bluffed your way into that job that you had. I think a lot of people, I think maybe that's one of the reasons people don't even reach out in the first place is because they don't know if they have enough skills or they don't feel like they have enough skills or whatever it is, you know, the whole imposter syndrome thing. And I think, I think at one point, like you just need to sort of get your way into anything you can. And everything is just learning, even if you have your computer science degree and you've, you know, you're educated to wherever, like you're not learning anything until you're on the job. And that's where the real education comes. I think in most fields. And then obviously that obviously helps you out in all that short-term learning helps you out once you start doing things on your own. Yeah, absolutely. Like there was no way I was ready for what I got. And as you said, it experiences everything. You are not ready from school or teaching yourself these things until you get into a business that has a very particular way of working. And then you realize a lot of the nonsense you're taught is and a lot of the nonsense you taught was not important. Yeah. So shifting a little bit, once you were, so you went back into your freelancing and you were doing that, you had that one contract that you got. Was that your primary thing where you, at that point where you starting to look for, you know, you have that, but were you relying that as your sole income or did you find other projects on the side from there? Yeah, I was finding projects on the side. I leveraged that to get other projects and it gave me a lot of confidence. In fact, I'd say I got too confident in a sense and I'm sure we'll get into a horror stories after. But once I had that confidence, I started asking people for projects on the side and being more confident in the rate I was asking for because I was making a lot of money via Bank of America. They're a bank, so you can usually expect to be paid very well. So then that set my own side projects or whatever I was taking on a side, it gave it a very, a much higher rate than a normal, say a web design job would. So it definitely made me pivot and look after small startups that need to kind of enterprise solutions or like real software rather than just a website. And that really helped me put a premium price on things as well. Nice, you said it maybe made you too confident, but I think being too confident in pricing is never a bad thing. I think that's somewhere people usually, it's the other way around. So that's definitely a good thing to have early on is to charge what you're worth. Yeah. So when you were, obviously, if you had your big contract plus you're doing other work on the side, just sort of like day to day, I think at one point, like a lot of people I think that aren't freelancers, they sort of look at the world of freelancing as this sort of this amazing thing, you're your own boss, you get to do your own thing. But I'm sort of curious when it comes to the managing of your own business, like how that would go from like, how much time do you actually spend doing development work versus managing your emails, doing marketing, your accounting, like all of the stuff that people never really think about that aren't active freelancers. Oh. Yeah. So I think one of the biggest lies I ever told myself was working for myself would mean I'd work less hours. So I probably worked double the hours than the normal person, but I enjoy what I do. So it never felt like work. And I often tell people, if you really enjoy what you do, it's not really working. It's like I can outwork most people because it's played to me. And we can play all day. It doesn't feel like it's a struggle or I'm suffering to do what I do. So that really pushed me forward as well for my, I suppose, getting things done. For how much time I actually spend coding, it's probably about half my time at best because especially as it got a little bit later on into slightly bigger projects and things, I would have to get freelancers and other people to help me. It went from being a solo job to multiple people for the bigger projects. And to do that, you have to spend a lot of time finding right people, looking after those people and then looking after the businesses to make sure you have requirements right to build the thing out. So like a project might take 12 weeks for me to deliver, which is usually as long as I will take for a delivery, but it's a lot of work to plan for a 12-week process. Awesome. And actually, I'm kind of curious on that front of the like looking when, like how do you know when you actually need to start looking to hire other people? Like what, at what point does that, you sit there and go, okay, I can't do this on my own? Was it just the scope of some of the projects you were deciding to take on and you sort of knew before you took the project or were you already working on the project and you decided at that point, I can't do this much work on my own? So I learned very quickly from underestimating projects that my process was broken. And I ended up working two times or three times as much as I thought I would have to complete something. And what I decided to do for myself was my very initial meeting is always a discovery phase. So I spent some time and I sell this as a service with a lot of people is getting the groundwork in place, making sure that the plan is in place. And once we have a plan, it's very easy to say, yes, I can do this or no, I can't. And I sell it as a service. So it's somebody's comfortable to say, hey, let's test this relationship first with some discovery work. Let's spend two days together. Let's dive down and I'll give you all the requirements. So at least if you go somewhere else, you'll be able to get a much more accurate quote and you'll be much faster to get started. So there is a way to sell a discovery phase, but I think for anything that's not just a simple marketing website, it's necessary or else you're gonna end up underestimating so many things or forgetting certain things or your customer is gonna forget things. And the idea that you want or that transactional thing is very bad, I guess when you're working this, especially if you're solo or working nearly solo, because if you burn your bridges or if you don't make people happy, especially here in Ireland, we have a very small market. Word gets around fast, so your word is your reputation. So you have to keep that reputation high. So you nearly have to over deliver to make sure that the clients keep coming in. So I need to do that at the discovery phase. So I think that you sort of hinted a few times now at underestimating, I guess, maybe more so earlier on than as you're going through. Does that lead a little bit into maybe one of the sort of some bad disasters or something along the way that happened or? Yeah, my very first contract that I got, which I felt like I was printing money, I got a six-month contract there. I went from, I'm always very transparent with money with people as well. I went from earning about 40K a year to 100K a year or 110K, I think it worked out in Euro a year in less than a year. So I obviously thought it was unlimited and on tap. So at the end of that contract, they offered me 112 months. So I did the same thing every reasonable person does. I went out and bought a sports car. And then I got a call two days after I bought that sports car to say my contract was canceled. Oh, geez. So the other thing is by having clients on the side, you're not totally ruined, but I did way overextend. And those kind of little lessons taught me just that for financially to be a little bit more careful and more responsible. I'm still pretty irresponsible with the toys I buy, but I don't ever put myself into a position like I did where I took out a loan for a car because I thought money would never end. So that was one big learning experience. And then I have had the case of working with a customer thinking it would take two weeks to build out something, charging for the two weeks and then actually taking two months. And it was my own fault because I didn't ask the right question. So as soon as they sent over the spec, I just assumed, I said, oh, a website, it's a couple of weeks. I didn't realize all the complexity was, can't think of it, it wasn't WordPress. What was the name of the? Drupal? Drupal, for Drupal. That was the exact one. And I had no idea what Drupal was. And I just assumed I could do it because I knew some HTML and CSS. And because I didn't ask questions, I was just like, yeah, put my hand up. And they were excited because my price was so low. I was like, this is excellent. I'm gonna keep getting business, but how excited they are. And I had to go back to the customer and just say after two months of not delivering, I had to say I can't do this. So I didn't even get the two weeks pay that I hoped to get after two months because I just overextended. And that goes back to why you have to be very careful to do the questioning early on, find out what is expected before you ever sign a contract, get those jobs to be done in a list so everyone knows what's completed or completable. I guess that actually leads to, sort of answers the question a little bit, I guess, but I had someone in the community ask a question about that when it comes to the scope of a project. And in that, in your case, you just, you've never even, in that specific case, you didn't, you couldn't deliver. So, you know, that sort of sucks. But has there ever been like, say even you go through the discovery phase, you sort of have everything mapped out. And then as the project keeps going, the, you know, cause I think one of the issues with discovery sometimes too is the client, if they don't know enough about it, there's holes in what ends up actually being required. So like, if you do discovery, you sort of have everything mapped out, you give your quote or whatever, you get accepted for the job. And then as the project goes, it grows in scope. Like how would you deal with that type of situation? Yeah. So I also work in a sense of saying, here's what we can achieve in this amount of time. And I always tell people if they come with change that something else is going to have to be dropped to manage that change. And that's the, that always helps with scope creep because everyone thinks that, everyone always has one more idea. But once you tell people they have to pick between their ideas, it usually helps. Or having a formal thing in place, which I do as well, that they can ask formally for a change and they know it's going to take more time. Now we do try to be very flexible with people. I try to be flexible with people all the time where possible, like maybe with fonts or some colors or a few tweaks here and there. But if it's fully fledged features or pivots, then it's just not possible. And that's, that's again, we're looking back to making sure you set expectations early and getting that checklist before you even signed the contract of what is going to be delivered in the final version. Circling back a little bit to when you, you had your first big contract, you're finding smaller ones on the side as well. And luckily, as you said, it's good you had those because when that the big contract disappeared, at least you weren't left with zero because I think that would be everybody's nightmare. But in it, like when it was, I guess I'll start like, did you have like, I know early on you were saying you sort of had a bit of a specific niche or something like that, but did you have like, were you targeting companies in a very specific niche or were you more just willing to take whatever you could find? So I went under the kind of UI UX expertise. So building out the front ends of applications was where I focused because it was something I enjoyed doing and a natural progression from the design and development side of things. It was a very visual thing. It was very easy to market. It's very hard to market freelancing as a backend dev, say, because it's how do you sell that? And I think you need to have something flashy to make it easier. So I made myself known as kind of the react person or like I've been using react since version zero. So I picked that up. I seen a lot of jobs asking for it early on and I decided that that's a good niche to have. So I was always being asked into projects and also getting projects in as well because I did want to grow my freelancing as well as learn from the enterprise customers as well, how to build bigger, better, more complex projects so that I could then in turn take those and build them on my own. And when it came then I guess to like building your own brand, that's the idea of like, you wanted something flashy that you have your nice website, people can sort of find you on that as well. And just in terms of that, like having your own branding, having your like a portfolio that people can find online as a front end, like how important do you think all of that is? Early days, super important. My whole career has been based on my referrals I think at this stage. And what I do, which is probably gonna lead into like, how would I do this? How do I generate leads? Is I never got much traffic to my websites. I got, I think one email from my website ever. So it just wasn't, it wasn't useful at all. But I did get a lot of referrals from was going to business meetups and helping people with questions and answers. And that's how I, that was much more important than any portfolio for me personally. It was being in position that you were able to talk to businesses directly. It's so hard to beat Google on SEO and everything else. That's a whole other job. So I think the better approach for me personally was always going, being present where the businesses wore so that they would look for me or ask me a question. I could teach them something. And then in a couple of months, it might leave me a couple, it might be a couple of years but they'll go, I remember that person was really helpful. I'd love to work with them. So it is a lot of investing your time that eventually comes back. And for me personally, my portfolio never could be shown that well until I had an NDA signed because I did it for a lot of clients who I couldn't show to work publicly. So I really needed to have that relationship ready so that somebody was comfortable getting the NDA signed and then I could show them the inside of all the things I've built. Yeah, that's really interesting. And that's something I think people always think about. When you finally do get those, the clients that you've always wanted that it comes with the NDA that you can't show the work that you've done, as proud as you are getting them as much as you wanna show it off. Yeah. And actually, so I mean that answers a whole bunch of the questions that I had just about. And I think that's such an important thing that you bring up is so much of it comes down to having personal relationships and not just being some person that's online and hoping that people find you. As you said, like trying to juice, you know, Google and you know, you'd waste so much time trying to get into the results of something meaningful and maybe get results. Whereas if you're actually making connections with people, I think that's where for freelancing anyway, that's where it's at. And even if you're in with the job world, I think making personal connections is really important as well. Yeah. Well, I think I built a brand as well. I think it's important to do both. So I think it's important to build a brand so you're trustworthy and you're not just a guy that builds websites because if you're going to try and get any, like if you're going to charge some money for this, you need to have the insurance, you need to have a name behind you, you need to be able to give out contracts, you need to have that professional outfit. And by having a brand, you're also able to outsource some of the work. You don't become a bottleneck. Sometimes there's low hanging fruit and you can take in work and outsource it a little bit as well, which helps pay the bills and continue things running. So I think by not basing your entire freelancing career on your own persona is going to help you and in fact, that's where Kodu came from. It was my own business, Kodu Software Solutions. And then I just decided that I would turn it into Kodu Community because I was meeting so many devs in Dublin here and I just wanted to show or do better meetups and things. So that was never a marketing avenue for me. And in fact, I think it confused a lot of people because if they searched for Kodu, they'd usually stumble upon the community aspect rather than my business. So I ended up shooting myself on the foot on that one. And actually on that, like when it comes to, I guess, you know, the difference between landing like that day to day, you know, the acquaintance or somebody you know or someone you run into and sort of the bigger corporate accounts that you were talking about, I guess that's really where having the brand and having all of that come is a big thing because obviously you need that presence if a bigger account is you're gonna land that bigger account along the way. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's something people need to and should aim for is getting the experience so that you can charge more yourself because I feel like a lot of people kind of stunt their own growth by not reaching a little bit into the realm of discomfort. They kind of stick to what they know. I'm a big fan of always biting off slightly more than I can chew and then running with it. Speaking of the realm of discomfort, pricing is always I think one of the questions I get asked the most and I think it's, for me anyway, it's something that's super hard to figure out even for myself. So when it comes to pricing, I think before I let you run with it, just I've seen so many different approaches to pricing. You have, you know, just come up with an hourly rate, estimate the size of the project, run with that. There's the whole value-based pricing. There's other things that are project-based pricing and everything in between. So just curious when it comes, I guess your general philosophy towards it and maybe how you got to that point. Yeah, so I use a combination of things. So we have the value-based pricing, which is huge for me because sometimes I know this is going to bring in a lot of money for a customer and that comes in with the discovery phase. You can figure out very quickly go, oh, this is going to be worth a lot to them. And so I think value-based pricing is one of the better things to do because it keeps you hungry and it keeps you looking for better customers as well. The easiest way to do it is having your day rate because it becomes a black and white yes or no in the sense of it's just a high contrast. Have you hit the threshold to pay me for my daily rate? And if you have a daily rate, at least you can say, this project will take two weeks. Here's my daily rate. Are you comfortable with that? And if there's changes, it's going to cost you another X because it's going to be another couple of days. It's very easy to change things on the fly that way once people know your rate. For me and the pricing side of things, it's something I can't remember what book I read it in, but this is something I used for when I used to run my beer club because that was actually a paid event. And I was one of the most expensive beer tasters in Dublin, believe it or not. So people would actually pay to come drink beer on me. So- That's a good job to have. How do I get that gig? Yeah, but in there, because I remember there was one, there might be two now, but at the time there was only one official beer connoisseur in Dublin, Ireland. And he asked me himself. He said, how do you charge that much money? And my answer was very simple. I just picked a number that was slightly uncomfortable and asked for more. So I made sure I was already uncomfortable and then added on a little bit more because there's nothing worse than getting exactly what you wanted. And the reasoning is the excitement wears off very fast. You land a project and the excitement will drop. There is a bit of excitement in the chase to an extent. And as soon as you get into the middle of the project and things start getting tough, it's gonna be hard to keep going. So if you feel like you're winning that whole time or you feel like you've pushed your own expectation of what you are worth, up a little bit, it's gonna be much easier to stay motivated through the process. Yeah, that's awesome. I like that idea that pick something uncomfortable and then go up from there. I haven't heard someone say that before, but I think that's awesome advice. And I think in general, yeah, I like that idea a lot. I guess, so like continuing from there, if you figured out sort of your pricing, depending on the situation you're going, when it comes to ensuring, I guess that you have a consistent income, you were saying before you bite off more than you chew, do you, say you do have a client that comes to you or maybe you're still doing client outreach, but are you looking, sometimes I'm sure that it happens you're looking for right now, but I'm assuming sometimes you're also going like in four months, I'm gonna have an opening, I wanna make sure that that's filled before I get to that or was it more of sort of, it would come and go and ebb and flow and all of that. Sometimes it was, and a lot of time to be honest, it was hot and cold where I had too much work, I had too little work. And when you have too little work, you spend the extra time being in those business groups and helping out a little bit. And that's where you get the extra time to build your own brand or meet people, because when you're head down back to back projects, you don't get the time to go to those meetups and make new connections. So again, that's why it's important to price for when you're out of work as well. Although this might be a good price now, when you're not working for the two weeks that you're getting other deals signed, make sure that's factored into the whole pricing aspect because it is difficult to keep a constant stream in. Now, another thing I've noticed that is very useful to use is going to local design agencies or smaller agencies that don't have, don't do what you do and partner with them and say, hey, I'll send business your way if I hear of people coming in and will you send business my way if you were here of anyone looking for something that I do? And that way you have some referrals coming in as well at the same time. So you can make a lot of strategic alliances from doing things like that as well, which I think a lot of people just forget about doing because they're so fired down on the weeds with just the code that they forget that they can make some friends to support them. Yeah, I think that's really good advice. I know I was working very early on in my career. I worked at a small design agency and every now and then you'd have someone coming in and seeing if they could sort of work with us and that type of thing. So I do think that's a really good way to reach out and sort of have a wider network of potential leads coming in. And I guess in those situations too, if you end up striking it really well with somebody, it could potentially be something that could bring in some recurring work which is always great. I do like that you mentioned like the idea of pricing, you're not pricing to get through those two weeks if it's a two-week project, you're pricing for that to last you for a while because you have to balance things out, you have to know that things are going cold. So I think that's something that people should always remember because I think the last thing you want as a freelancer is that you're taking a job just because you need to take that or you're not eating that week or something. Like that's obviously worst case scenario. So as much as you can build up a buffer to prevent that from happening is obviously super important. Not always the easiest thing, especially early on, but. No, I totally agree. That's, be getting those leads is the toughest part and that's what everyone's going to struggle with. So the other than partnerships, get into business meetups, as a freelancer, people forget this as well as a freelancer, I think a lot is you are a business. So you have the right to be in those business groups and believe it or not, you might learn a lot from other businesses on how to successfully run your freelancing business. And not only that is as you make a network in those business groups, people will want to give you work. And this comes back to people buy from people they like. This was the same thing was when I was selling wines and things is that nobody cared about, hey, it's red or white wine. They bought this story, they buy the people. So if you tell the people about a bottle of wine that was made by a monk in the mountains, they just want it. And that's why it's a 80 Euro bottle. Is it word 80 Euro bottle? No, but the story is. So that's the whole point. If you can build that personality and brand around what you do and get that network, it's going to be much easier to be confident about what you sell and how you sell it as well. That's, I like that a lot, the story. It's definitely the story that sells, I think on everything in life. On that idea of finding leads and all of that, I know in the chat, there was some questions earlier on and I think I had some from the community as well about online, going online for leads from there's like Freelancer.com. There's some other ones, there's obviously Fiverr. Any opinions on any of those for someone who's looking at starting their freelancing or actively freelancing? So I think unless you're in a country that supports a very low livable income, the likes of Fiverr and Upwork are not sustainable unless you're the best of the best. Like I couldn't use it because it just wouldn't pay my bills. Dublin is an expensive city. So for me, I would have to go into real, and I suppose this even works online because it's something that I've been doing during COVID as well to build businesses going into online business groups and joining local online business groups. There is still, a lot of people still think oh, the only way to get freelancing is by selling freelancing. I think take a step back and stop selling, selling, selling. Instead, spend some time to find businesses and discover what's around you. Because if you have those blinkers on, you just won't see the opportunities. And like I can't advise people on the likes of Fiverr Upwork because I just can't use them. It's just not suitable for me. But that might not be the case for everyone in the chat. If you feel like the prices that are being charged on there are good enough for you to make a wage or be livable and then fire ahead by all means. But for me personally, it's definitely not. Like it's just a race to the bottom for me and what I'm trying to do. Awesome. I question here, sort of circles back to your beginnings coming in from the chat. Just say, because you were saying that at one point you were working full-time and sort of, they're just asking if you're already working full-time, you're an experienced dev doing nine to five. How can you get into freelancing while still working at your full-time job? First off is nobody should ever, ever quit their job unless they're already freelancing. There is, that is a recipe for disaster. I know we all get fed up and we have these dreams. But if you cannot get a job on the side and complete it on the side, you probably won't have the resilience for when times they're tough in business anyway. Because you are going to have to work long hours. You are going to screw some things up and you're going to have to be ready for those long days and long nights to make these things work. It's not a get rich quick scheme. It's probably not even a get rich scheme. So it's definitely just for people who want to have, I say for me personally, it was a better sense of fulfillment because I felt like I was doing it for me and not doing it for a boss. And I think that's important even with my newer positions and that it's, I have to be working for myself or like I have to be reaping the benefits from working so hard. And I feel like I definitely am. But I think that's what people need to be ready for is make sure you have a portfolio built before you ever leave that job. I would say two or three jobs and have a cushion of three months of your bills being paid when you go out to freelance because you might have a project lined up but what happens is immediately you jump in and that project gets canceled or the customer runs out of money. And you might think that'll never happen. I did too and it left me in a tough spot. The worst case scenario can happen and it often will. So be very careful that you don't just dive in and assume that things will be okay. I don't care how good of a salesperson you are, you will still need to make sure you have a little piggy bank to be ready so that you don't just, as you were saying, Kevin, end up taking jobs because you need to survive rather than taking the jobs that you're really gonna enjoy and be fulfilled along the way. Awesome. I think that's some really very sound advice. I see here in a few people in the chat and I had this in the community too. I see Alex and Viraj asking, I think I know your answer already but and it sort of continues from there. You have, if you have that income that you can rely on and all of that or if you're in a situation, I think some people starting up are also in a very, if you're young and you're just getting into it all and you don't have a lot of expenses yet, can also be a nice opportunity if you think you can make it or if you're working just at a regular job and you wanna start freelancing and you can sort of balance that, I think early on in your life it can be a nice opportunity too as long as you can afford to not be getting consistent work. But anyway, back, their question is how do you know you're ready to freelance? And I've been asked this a lot. I think I know what your answer might be but I'm just curious. I think you're ready straight away depending on what you're doing. So if you know what you know, it's hard to know what you don't know, I guess. Yes. The hard part. And that's why I said earlier about always fighting off more than you can chew because you will also need to develop your skills as this goes along. For me, working in big companies and finding out how businesses worked was how I learned how to become a better developer and better as a business really because a lot of people just say and I might be cautious here because I said earlier, my niche was react. I never went to a business and sold react. When people came to me, I sold them a solution. I just happened to have this hammer that I was really good with that could get things done really well and people are really happy with it. So if you have something you think is valuable and that could be just HTML and CSS, maybe your expertise is going to be building emails for people straight out the gate. Maybe that's what you're going to be selling to people. Simple HTML, CSS, emails that work across lots of different email browsers. There's a niche that a lot of people don't even look at but it's something that people need. A lot of big businesses would kill for that kind of expertise because it's a tough job. It's just a different kind of tough. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I think that's sort of what I was thinking too in that you're probably ready and then it's just all from there. I see that HTML, emails, dear Lord, more IP to the freelance. I know, unfortunately, when you're starting you have to often try a lot of different things. Nobody said this was going to be a glorious fast tracked way but if we're talking about somebody that's just fresh off free code camp looking to try and make a few books it's something you can do. Oh, I see James there in the chat. Hi, it was a while ago we mentioned it but welcome. One, a good question actually here from Fad saying when you're just starting up and you don't have any actual work experience yet and you're looking at including things in your portfolio to show to people if it's a personal project or something like that, do you have any or even you're hiring these days and I think right now you're hiring more senior devs but you've hired in the past as well. If somebody was coming that didn't have a ton of experience or even from your own just what type of work would you show if you're just getting started in the game? Yeah, so I'm going to tell you what I did because I could not get any interviews with my personal projects. So I went and registered myself as a sole trader under a different name called WebApes. So I used a company, I didn't use my own name and I just had a section of my projects that I was working on under WebApes and then I had the projects done and the few couple of bits I've done for websites for people, a couple of free websites in there and everything else, it was under a business name suddenly. So it got by the HR person and that's all I needed. I just needed that a little break. So I would say to anyone to kind of fast track it or a job hack is to instead of saying hobby projects or things I'm building is try to flesh it out so it looks like an actual project and put it down as say or in the research and development for your own business and it will at least get you through things because that's the hardest thing. A lot of times you're not getting it if you're not getting interviews because they're not impressed by your CV. So I noticed that and as soon as I changed a title it just went from personal projects to WebApes. And once I changed that interview started stacking up. Yeah, and you have to be careful with the wording of course, like if you're don't, and I'd often say this to people don't put things, videos you followed along. Like if you're following a tutorial with Kevin or following a tutorial even with myself and that's what you built, don't put that on your portfolio because it doesn't really show any value order than that you can copy and paste something. If I, and especially now that I know the likes of yourself Kevin on that I'm very aware of the content that's out there that's being built. And I do get it every so often where people will say, hey, I built this thing. And I'll just instantly know that they copied and pasted this from your own repository or whatever else. And I can't take it. So how could you expect to if that's all they're gonna be doing? And if that's all you're able to do, you probably need to work a little bit harder to do to understand things a bit better. And I know that's scary, but you do have to take off the safety and really drive it for yourself if you're looking for those first jobs. Yeah, definitely. I think, yeah, if you're old, as you said, like when are you able or going back to that question of when are you ready to start? It's, I think at that point we're able to build your own projects without copying and following along with the tutorial. I think it's an important thing. A few other questions and I'll let you go. There was a few things that came up about security and just like website security and stuff about hacking and all of that. I don't remember the name. So sorry for everybody who was asking on that front. And I think we even mentioned earlier about like SEO that's just a completely different game. So like say you are working on a project or you bring something on, there's obviously parts of that that you're super comfortable with and then other parts that aren't your expertise and sort of how do you deal with that side of things? If you're not too, you don't know too much about the security side or the SEO side and that's something the client might be looking for. Yeah, that's where you have to be prepared to factor in bringing somebody else in as well. I often factor in for, even currently, I'll often get a third-party pen tester in to make sure that my project is as good as I think it is. So that's the big thing I would say for me is to be ready and factor this in. Like if you really want to impress somebody, give them their app and then also give them a report showing them the pen testing from an external party. That's a lot more impressive than me saying, yeah, it's good. You know, it's not only my stamp, but you also have this other company stamp and if you have a partnership or even if you want to survive or something like that, you can get some decent people who do this as a job, who will give you a report as a pen test that will help you find the vacancies in your knowledge and then as soon as you do a couple of those pen tests, it becomes very obvious, very fast where you're missing and you usually don't make those mistakes twice because you'll know, oh, I did this wrong the last time. But if it's early days and you're working on some server side stuff, your factor in payments, you're doing things like that, go and get a pen tester. It'll be the best few quid you'll ever spend because you'll be able to rest easy at night knowing that you're not going to get sued tomorrow. Yeah, I think that's one thing and you sort of, we mentioned it earlier when we were talking about hiring, but I think it's something that's important. People think freelancer, they think solo, I'm doing this all on my own. And I think that's sort of something that you need to get out and think like it, if I'm gonna get this bigger client on something that's a bigger project, you need to be hiring and getting help from other people as well. You don't necessarily go into the client and saying like, oh, there's me and then these four other people that I don't even know who they're gonna be at, you're able to do it, you factor that into your costs and then you're able to reach out to extra people to bring in the help when you need it. And just knowing that being freelance doesn't mean being alone on every project that you're doing. Yeah. And being able to offer that as a solution, say to people, hey, look, I will do this thing, but to guarantee security, we also need to do this thing at the end of it. And as long as you're completely transparent and say, hey, we need to do these things, then most people, as long as you're not like looking at the bottom row of code, like if you're not like doing this really cheap, you need to then just ask and say, hey, we also need to add patent testing to this. And that's why there's an extra say, a thousand books at the end of this thing or there's an extra 500 books. And like if it's somebody's business, they should be comfortable spending that because you can tell them that they could be liable for leaks. And it's, if anything all it does is adds a bit of reliability to your service and your reputation because you're not only saying, yeah, I know everything, you're being at least modest enough to say, I'm actually getting somebody else to check my work afterwards. Oh, that's actually one last question because it's a nice one from Brent saying that when you are meeting potential sort of, I guess in that just, well, when you're meeting potential new clients and things like that, just, oh no, sorry, he's asking specifically for discovery, what types of questions to ask. So I guess that might depend a bit more on the project itself. Yeah, for discovery and even on quiz, I actually bring a folder with some printouts of like a webpage and a printout of a phone and things. And I sketch with a pencil with the client, what they're expecting. So I do a lot of that and I'll take notes with them to make sure there's not any ambiguity because when you say a hamburger menu or a burger menu to a customer, they probably don't know what you're talking about. So if you say there's gonna be a slide out menu, they might be thinking of something else based on an app that they use last. But you have to make sure that you're speaking jargon-free and you need to make sure that it's completely transparent. So that's why I always sketch while I'm sitting with somebody, we draw pictures, we'll, I'll get them to draw pictures on things, just get their ideas out, ask them problem questions as we go through the flows. It's, there's no straight, easy way. I do of course have a checklist of things I need to ask, you know, for like NDAs versus expected budget and things like that just to make sure that we're not wasting everyone's time. Like if I'm about to do a discovery session with somebody and they, for me personally, and they say it's going to be less than 30,000, it's probably something I'll refer to somebody else. And that's just because that's how I price myself. So I haven't knowing that and telling people very honest, being very honest in the early stages, say, hey, I'll help you do this. I'll refer you to some really good people. Often even in that, that will help you upsell because sometimes after that call, they'll get more comfort in spending more money as well. So yeah, getting a checklist is number one. And then for the discovery session, sitting down and getting creative, have some fun, enjoy it. This is the best chance to really show what they get for having you as a person, rather than any other person. And I think that's what I try to do more and anything is I always try to make sure there's at least some laughing and joking involved in the process. Because I have, and this is why I have so little horror stories as well. My big advice to everyone when you're looking for customers later on, you maybe can't be so picky early in your career, is would you have a beer with this person? And if not, just don't take the work because it could be a very long relationship you're about to start and you could be responsible for a lot of their work. So make sure that you like each other. Testing the water with the discovery is like a first date and at least you'll get on, if you get on very well, it'll probably be a great relationship because they'll respect your time and your respect theirs. If you have any last minute things that maybe I didn't ask or anything that you had in mind before we go? No, if people have any more questions or things, they can reach out to me on Twitter. My DMs are usually open there. So that's Nile, Joel, Matt. I'll put it in the chat now. I'm sure when this video, yeah, when the video goes up, I'm sure I'll give you my Twitter and the link to the channel. I think that's the best way. It's often just, it's just getting started is the hardest thing and it'll pick up, but it's just figuring out how you work well. It's not the same for everyone. Everyone will have a very different journey. What worked for me might not work for somebody else and that's just based on my situation, my location and the network I already had around me. So all I can say is best of luck to everyone if they're jumping into it. And if I can help you, please don't be a stranger. Just say hello. We have a whole Discord as well, Codoo community that there's a few people that are freelancing in there as well often talking about it. So it's something you can jump in there and ask questions as well. Awesome. So I just want to say, thank you so much for your time. I took a lot more of it than I was planning on. So I apologize for that, but I'm glad you're able to stick around for this long. And there we go. So much awesome information and advice and also just such an awesome guy. Again, I've linked to his Twitter and Discord in the description as well as his YouTube channel. So make sure that you go and give Nile a subscription, follow him, check out what he's doing there, some really awesome stuff. I try and hang out on his live streams when I can and I always, always enjoy it. Now, as I said, from the top of this video, this series of videos where I interview freelancers is being brought to you by studywebdevelopment.com's freelancing bundle. It's a ton of fantastic resources for developers and designers covering the fundamentals of freelancing, things like creating income streams, writing proposals, pricing, finding leads, finding clients and much, much more. As Nile mentioned, discovery is super important and the bundle includes a questionnaire to help with discovery as well as proposal and invoicing templates, website templates to help get you started and work faster as well as lifetime updates. If you're interested in the bundle, the link to it is just down below and don't forget to use the coupon code kev25 at checkout for 25% off. A big thank you to studywebdevelopment.com for helping support my channel and bringing us this series and even bigger thank you for watching this video. I really do hope that you enjoyed it. A massive thank you to my patrons for their support each and every single month with a special shout out to Zach for being my enabler of awesome. Once again, thank you so much for watching and until next time, don't forget to make your corner the internet just a little bit more awesome.