Yeah, I’ll set a max number per month (budget) and then work out how that’s scheduled per week. I found sometimes it’s easier and more productive to block out dedicated weeks for a client than to jump from one to another each week. For example: Client A for the first week, Client B for the second week, Client C for the third and forth weeks of a month.

Worth reading

Seriously. Thanks for putting this together week after week. I’ve really appreciated it.

That’s exactly what I do. Reduce the scope and the value they will get from the project so their investment is less money. Depending on how you reduce the scope, you can sometimes do another round later once there is trust and you’ve demonstrated your value.

I have found that a lot of my clients are resistant to Agile process at first, but quickly start to see the benefits, and often begin to apply it to other parts of their business. Once they know exactly what the work is, in the priority order, and defined to a reasonable scope and time, they breathe a sigh of relief, and are ready to get down to business. Just getting things organized in that way is often a huge win, and sets the stage for the rest of the practices that I use (iteration planning/retrospectives, TDD, CI, demo/sign-off, frequent deploys, etc).

Thanks for sharing!
I’m also interested in some of your go-to gems and libraries

if I heard correctly Jeff’s second pick was ZURB Foundation (http://foundation.zurb.com/), not Twitter Bootstrap, he was just comparing to it.

Thank you all for the podcast, it’s really interesting.

I would have enjoyed more discussion about the types of tasks you tend to use subcontractors for, and just a little more in depth on the nature of the arrangement. (eg. how detailed are the requirements you give them, do you go over test cases, etc.)

I’m at that point where I have more work than I can handle, but I’m also not sure about how to find good subcontractors, and manage them. (especially knowing that it will initially decrease my velocity to bring them on board)

I think its important to think about the long-term relationship and keep a reasonable balance of what you charge for. Eric mentioned how he might not charge for extra effort required to learn a new library/gem (that goes beyond what you considered reasonable).

In general I think its ok to value your time and charge if the client is ‘wasting’ it via a missed meeting, or similar delays that they cause, but to be reasonable about it, and give them a break sometimes.
It dawned on me once when I committed some code that made the app fail, and 15 people couldn’t complete their task. If we took the “I charge when you waste my time and prevent me from doing other work” as a two-way street, you could imagine getting an invoice for any time you release a bug or regression that blocks users. (downtime * number of users * hourly rate = OUCH!)

I don’t but I know some places do (called activity rates). The way I see it, my customer is getting all of my knowledge each hour so my rate shouldn’t change. I’m also really upfront about my skills and limitations so they know I can produce better results per hour with Rails development than graphic design.

I don’t hire enough subcontractors to have much of an opinion about billing their time. Jeff, Evan, and Chuck have more experience there.

Had a question: Would you bill at different rates for meetings/phone calls/managing subcontractors than you do for development? If so, what are the relative rates for such services?

Thanks and keep up the good work.

I think its common for people to ‘graduate’ out of Heroku, either due to architecture contraints or cost, and that gets into some interesting areas of architecting modern rails apps (full text search, large db/mongo instance, non http protocols, etc).

Look forward to hearing more about your gems, architecture and tools of choice.

I’m interested in trying prismatic, if you still have that invite available.

Does that mean I can claim the invite ?

I know the test tools you were talking about in this episode were very specialized to rails or VM deployments, but I’ve found that the service that Ortask gives for test optimization and management to be very useful in my work, especially for integration- and system-level testing.

THanks!
MG

1. Self-owned products can create equity for a freelancer. I think its hard to compare your normal hourly rate to the time you spend on your own products because it’s time spent on an asset you own — as opposed to just collecting money for hours worked on a client project.
2. Building your own products can reduce (and possibly eliminate) your dependence on client contracts … leaving you with more freedom to work when and where you want.

I personally don’t think about the hourly rate of the time I spend working on my products … because there really isn’t a 1 to 1 correlation between hours worked and dollars earned with one’s own products.

Thanks for the podcast — I’m really enjoying it.

http://www.moleskine.com/about_us/news/moleskine_pronounciation.php

tried streaming and download.

* Stylate – http://stylate.com
* Bootstrapping Design – http://bootstrappingdesign.com

You mention the deposit being held in escrow. Is there an escrow service that you use? or can recommend?

I believe he mentioned that it’s in his contract just to avoid ambiguity with what he’s creating. (You can’t have a contract that stipulates that you’re closing the source and then use GPL licensed software.)

Great podcast! I’m eagerly awaiting the next one…

I have a question for Eric: he mentioned his use of the GPL license for his source code… what version, though?

Not so good for VoIP though I imagine,

Regarding air quality: I built myself a DIY air purifier for ~$30 and it works great. The previous tenants of my apartment owned cats, which I’m allergic to. Despite steam cleaning, I was still pretty miserable from cat dander floating around.

The DIY purifier is basically a box fan with a furnace filter duct-taped on top. I was dubious until I saw the following video by U Michigan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH5APw_SLUU

So basically, if anyone needs a cheap air purifier that works pretty well for $30, I highly recommend the DIY route.

Also, sometimes, it is important to realize that, unlessyo have worked for a wildly successful business, your suggestions may not be as spot on as you think. Be humble. I’ve found this to be a useful lesson for myself.

I am curious how you guys deal with the following scenario:

You have a client, you like the client, you like the idea of the project! But the client wants to go about it the wrong way. In this case, the client wants to implement all these “amazing” features that are going to add no value to the project. No matter how much you explain it to them, they want these features. The good news, you will have work! The bad news, you know its not going to help the project.

Whats your experience?

In my experience, when I work a 40 hour week I typically bill 20-25 hours. If I put in some overtime then I might approach 40 billable hours in one week but that is an extremely high amount (e.g. 80/hours worked). 50% billable time is a good average.

Some clients might be asking for someone “full-time” because they are actually wanting something like a contractor or a temporary employee. In those cases the contractor bills for every hour which is how they get to 40 hours/week.

(One common problem is that these terms are mixed and used in different contexts. I consider consultants/freelancers, contractors/temp-employees, and employees as separate groups).

I have a mutual NDA in my standard contract to help ease client’s minds. I try to avoid one-sided ones as much as I can (e.g. where consultant can’t talk about the client but the client can talk about the consultant).

I like the F#$% You, pay me video from Mike Monteiro, and feel that it does a great job in bolstering one’s confidence as to how to deal with this type of issue, and knowing that it is part of being a professional.
http://vimeo.com/22053820

How to deal with late payment is an interesting thing, with some legal implications, some of which are so complicated that it encourages people to just go with an “early payment discount” instead.

I like that you also touched on the fact that you bill for ‘missed meetings’, or other events where you set aside time for them, and they may not have used it wisely. I’ve had a few issues where clients said they were surprised that I invoiced them for the 4hours of calls and emails over a 2 week period. I don’t bill for ‘chit-chat’ time, which is usually the first 15mins of a call, but I will bill for time spent on a 3 way call, waiting for the 3rd party, or time spent reading/answering emails in a long thread. I would like to hear more about how you set your clients expectations regarding your time. (how quickly should they expect you to respond, what you will and won’t bill for, etc)

I was recently talking to someone about a job and we discussed 20/hrs per week as “part-time”.

Ruby Freelancers topic suggestions

I wonder if you could expand on “money in the bank” by explaining how you collect payments (check?, paypal?, other?).

I love the detailed info you guys are sharing – keep it going!

I wanted to respond to the Harvest vs. Freshbooks debate: I’ve been using Harvest for the last 18 months or so, and chose it after looking at a bunch of other services, including Freshbooks.

Because I live in Israel but work with clients in the US and Europe, I have to track time and income in three different currencies (shekels, dollars, and euros). Harvest isn’t perfect on that front, but at least when I checked into it, was far ahead of the pack when it comes to handling multiple currencies without trying (as some online services did) to convert everything into “your” currency. When I bill someone in dollars, I want it to stay in dollars, and only Harvest did that for me. Unfortunately, Israeli law prevents me from using Harvest’s invoicing services with my local clients, but I can use it with my US clients, and it’s very convenient to do so.

As for Skype, I have been using it very heavily for years, and have noticed serious degradation in the last year or two. But as you guys said, it’s still the best game in town — particularly in that I have a US phone number and unlimited calling to the US, which is very useful when working with clients there who don’t want to call abroad.

Anyway, best of luck with this new and interesting podcast!

Reuven

I’ve built several rails apps but they aren’t open to the public so I can’t show them (or the code), therefore I don’t have much of a profile. I have a github account and I toy around but my professional work is dont ‘at work’ which isn’t visible to anyone.

Can’t wait for episode 2 and beyond.

Please talk about how you define your projects timing and pricing.

p.s. this comment box is a nightmare to use on iOS. It keeps missing key events. Is there some key handler running?

Looking forward to next weeks show.

You mentioned that you’ll talk about finding clients. A lot of people wanting to be freelancers are doing so because the local industry sucks. In my city/country the market for software projects is small, with low budgets, late payments and is already saturated by all kinds of consulants.

So here’s one thing I’d like to hear about … how to get clients from a different country, even a different time-zone?

Also, even though I’m very knowledgable and have a good “pedigree”, people wanting to hire developers from my country expect cheap developers – the last offer I’ve received for remote full-time employment was for $2000 / month, which was insulting. I got them to tripple that amount, but to tell you the truth, I’d rather avoid such harsh negotiations. So how to overcome this expectation?

Also, besides an accountant, do freelancers also need a lawyer? At which point? And how do you select? (I assume selecting good professionals from any field is just as hard as selecting good software developers).

Thanks for sharing your knowledge,

Thanks

I was just talking to @ngauthier about getting some folks together and sharing our freelancing knowledge. I think Rails is so perfect for freelancing and remote work, and I see a lot of different levels that developers can come in at. I’m looking forward to more podcasts and ways to discuss freelancing topics.

Maybe checkout SoundCloud for a nicer player? http://soundcloud.com/101/podcasting-101