The Freelancers' Show

Panel Jared Richards (twitter [email protected] 801-438-2040) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Evan Light (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion
01:21 - Attorney Jared Richards Introduction Bennett-Tueller Johnson & Deere of Salt Lake City, UT @UTStartupLawyer 03:37 - Things you should have in a contract Who owns what Work for hire/licensing 10:40 - Prospective Liability and Disclaimers of Liability 13:07 - Risk Management Tools Warranty and protection against data loss
Limitations on liability 16:25 - Copyright & Patent Infringement 19:57 - Getting paid for your work Cash up front On-going retainers Escrows Credit card authorization forms Interest penalties Collection costs 29:18 - Acceptance and Rejection Procedures 36:25 - Is a Statement of Work necessary? 40:20 - Subcontracting 42:25 - Client turnaround and response time provisions 43:24 - Purchasing of services/expenses 46:21 - Using client contracts instead of your own Jurisdiction Indemnificaton Liquidated Damages Provision 52:20 - Conflicts of interest 58:56 - Arbitration, Mediation & Litigation 01:05:05 - Subcontractor Agreements Insurance Regular reporting Picks Growing Developers - Curated Conversation About Building Developer Talent (Evan) Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment by George Burr Leonard (Evan) Exercise (Evan) Take Time Off Work (Eric) Breathe (Eric) Fire Up Ember.js | PeepCode (Chuck) Meet Chef (Part 2 of 2) | PeepCode (Chuck) Google Advanced Search (Jared) Next Week
Better Prospecting for Freelancers with Steve Kloyda
Transcript
JARED: I prefer keep away from the attorney jokes. They get told behind my back, I don't really get to hear them in person. [Are you a busy Ruby developer who wants to take their freelance business to the next level? Interested in working smarter not harder? Then check out the upcoming book “Next Level Freelancing - Developer Edition Practical Steps to Work Less, Travel and Make More Money”. It includes interviews and case studies with successful freelancers, who have made a killing by expanding their consultancy, develop passive income through informational products, build successful SaaS products, and become rockstar consultants making a minimum of $200/hour. There are all kinds of practical steps on getting started and if you sign up now, you’ll get 50% off when it’s released. You can find it at nextlevelfreelancing.com] [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to The Ruby Freelancers Show, Episode 49. This week we're going to be talking to Jared Richards, he's an attorney, about contracts. Before we get started, let's introduce the panel. This week on our panel, we have Eric Davis. ERIC: Hello! CHUCK: Evan Light. EVAN: I'm back! CHUCK: I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv. This week we have a special guest, as I said before, Jared Richards. JARED: Hey everyone! CHUCK: Jared, you want to introduce yourself really quickly so people can know who you are and how to find you? JARED: Yeah absolutely. Jared Richards, I'm with the law firm in Salt Lake City, Utah called Bennett-Tueller Johnson and Deere, more casually known as BTJD. We have a large corporate practice and a lot of our group focuses on startups, more specifically technology startups. So we handle wide array of things from IP protection, contracts, venture capital, and sales of businesses. That's where we spend all our time, and thanks for having me on the show. You can find me on Twitter @UTStartupLawyer. CHUCK: Yeah. So I met Jared a year or so ago...nah! I think it was longer than that. Anyway -- JARED: Yeah I think it's been a couple of years, yeah. CHUCK: Yeah, it was at launch up,

Panel Jonathan Shank (twitter Your First Virtual Assistant) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion
01:03 - Jonathan Shank Introduction Your First Virtual Assistant 02:13 - Odesk Witmart 03:45 - Types of jobs you can outsource Translation Research Transcription 08:35 - Picking the right people 11:18 - Figuring out what to outsource 13:39 - Hiring domestic vs overseas workers 16:52 - Sampling groups vs hiring regulars 21:05 - Improving delegation skills 23:27 - Mistakes people make when getting started outsourcing Be Specific 26:11 - Letting strangers into your business Training 31:19 - Fiverr Crowdsourcing 99 Designs 34:29 - U.S.-based VA firms 36:38 - Outsourcing technical things Picks Bidsketch: Freelance Marketing 101: Creating a “Magnetic” Freelance Business (Eric) Presto 04213 Electronic Timer (Chuck) David J. Soler (Chuck) Work the System (Jonathan) Next Week
Contracts with Attorney Jared Richards
Transcript
CHUCK: Yeah it's all fun and games until you put a nail through your foot. [Are you a busy Ruby developer who wants to take their freelance business to the next level? Interested in working smarter not harder? Then check out the upcoming book “Next Level Freelancing - Developer Edition Practical Steps to Work Less, Travel and Make More Money”. It includes interviews and case studies with successful freelancers, who have made a killing by expanding their consultancy, develop passive income through informational products, build successful SaaS products, and become rockstar consultants making a minimum of $200/hour. There are all kinds of practical steps on getting started and if you sign up now, you’ll get 50% off when it’s released. You can find it at nextlevelfreelancing.com] [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 48 of the Ruby Freelancer Show! This week on our panel, we have Eric Davis. ERIC: Hello! CHUCK: I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv. And we have a special guest, Jonathan Shank. JONATHAN: Hello! CHUCK: So Jonathan, do you want to introduce yourself really quickly? JONATHAN: Sure! My name is Jonathan Shank, I've been working with Virtual Assistance for a couple of years, which I guess the reason that I'm up (here). I represent [inaudible], by that kindly to be on your podcast. I guess I started a couple of years ago as working on my own business on the side and I found that when the whole world of virtual assistant is open to me, I realized there's so many people out there that can help me with my business that it really was something that really helped me out quite a lot. So as a result, I've been working with them for a couple of years, and I've had so much success personally that I kind of decided that I just want to share that with others. So I started the website "yourfirstvirtualassistant.com", and a podcast, and there is other thing. Basically, (I'm) just trying (to) show people just from square one how easy it is to take a lot and find your first virtual assistant. So that's kind of how it started. Now whenever I have a chance, I kind of spread the news of how you can use them on various businesses. CHUCK: I went to your talk at New Media Expo and it seem like you were mostly talking about oDesk. Is that the way you usually go? Or are there other avenues you take to find people? JONATHAN: Yeah. I would say that the vast majority of what I use has been oDesk. I've tried a lot of the other sites as well, and for me, how I work it seems to be the best, at least as really conducive to how I like to do things. For instance, if you have a fixed-price job, it's very easy to quickly have a small [inaudible] avenue to get a lot of people that do inexpensive work. You go to some of the other sites,

Panel Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Jim Gay (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion
03:45 - Long-Term Contracts 07:14 - Marketing while under contract 10:01 - Working on other projects while working full-time 16:10 - Energy 17:01 - Money Emergency funds 21:41 - Lone developer vs team projects 28:05 - Full-time contract pros and cons Renewing Flexibility Meetings Routine 40:50 - Finding full-time contracts
Picks ruby-orgs (Jim) dtao / safe_yaml (Jim) Freebook Sifter (Eric) Discomfort Zone: How to Master the Universe (Eric) Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver of the 10th Doctor (Chuck) Contactually (Chuck) Dropbox App (Chuck) Next Week
Outsourcing and Odesk with Jonathan Shank
Transcript
CHUCK: I'll get ideas from my ideas. There's an idea.  [Are you a busy Ruby developer who wants to take their freelance business to the next level? Interested in working smarter not harder? Then check out the upcoming book “Next Level Freelancing - Developer Edition Practical Steps to Work Less, Travel and Make More Money”. It includes interviews and case studies with successful freelancers, who have made a killing by expanding their consultancy, develop passive income through informational products, build successful SaaS products, and become rockstar consultants making a minimum of $200/hour. There are all kinds of practical steps on getting started and if you sign up now, you’ll get 50% off when it’s released. You can find it at nextlevelfreelancing.com] [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 47 of the Ruby Freelancers Show! This week on our panel, we have Eric Davis. ERIC: Hello! CHUCK: We also have Jim Gay. JIM: Hello from Arlington, Virginia's greatest suburb, Washington, DC! CHUCK: Awesome! I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv. And real quick, I want to mention this to a few people. I get request from people who listen to all of the shows that I do, so some of you will be interested, some of you won't. That's fine. If you're not interested, I apologize. You can't help by getting the word out, but I'm going to be teaching a Ruby on Rails course starting in March. And I'd love to get people to sign up, if they want to learn Ruby on Rails. I think the approach that I'm taking is a little bit different from what a lot of other people do, and that it's a course over 8 weeks. I encourage you to build an application and then we get it deployed to a server or to Heroku or both and just help you figure it out, help you find what road blocks you're going to run into as you build whatever application it is and kind of get you all the way through the process in 8 weeks. I don't think you can get that from a book, from videos, or from a 2 or 3 day in-person course class. So if you're interested, go to railsrampup.com and sign up! And I just appreciate you listening. If you're not interested, then I would appreciate it if you just tweet that out and let people know that it's available. ERIC: Awesome! Yeah I think that would be great. Like I know a lot of people who come to local meet-up groups and say "Oh, I'm trying to learn" and they spend some time hacking away from reading tutorials and cobbling stuffs together from the internet. But a long course like that could really help people kind of get over the hump and understand. CHUCK: Yeah that's what I found. I've had a few people actually come to me and say "I read this book, (or) I took this class, and now I'm trying to build my app, and I'm running into these issues." And so that's what this is kind of designed to work around. ERIC: Cool! CHUCK: Alright! Well let's get into today's topic. We're going to be talking about full-time clients or full-time projects, I guess. Either way. JIM: Neither projects where you're what?

Panel Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Evan Light (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion
01:28 - Working From Home Distractions Environment 07:35 - Pros of Working From Home Animals Purr Programming 2.0: Lance Gleason Schedule/Flexibility
Naps
Deliveries/Home Repairs
Commute 11:57 - Focus & Productivity Renting an Office 14:22 - Cons of Working From Home Office Neighbors/Noise Pollution Furnishing an Office Cabin Fever 22:37 - Working in an Office Social Outlet Others’ Opinions 25:31 - Overcoming Distractions Family Comes First Making up Time 29:54 - Staying on Task Shifting your Work Set Hours Pomodoring Setting Boundaries 37:35 - Fixed Number of Hours xkcd: Ballmer Peak Picks Hydrofarm Thirsty Light (Chuck) Powermat Power Dual 1200 Rechargeable Backup Battery (Chuck) PVC Pipe in Plants (Eric) iPad Mini (Evan) Transcript
ERIC: Replace Chuck with a recording robot. [Are you a busy Ruby developer who wants to take their freelancing business to the next level? Interested in working smarter not harder? Then check out the upcoming book “Next Level Freelancing - Developer Edition Practical Steps to Work Less, Travel and Make More Money”. It includes interviews and case studies with successful freelancers, who have made a killing by expanding their consultancy, develop passive income through informational products, build successful SaaS products, and become rockstar consultants making a minimum of $200/hour. There are all kinds of practical steps on getting started and if you sign up now, you’ll get 50% off when it’s released. You can find it at nextlevelfreelancing.com] [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 46 of the Ruby Freelancer Show! This week on our panel, we have Eric Davis. ERIC: Hello! CHUCK: Evan Light. EVAN: Hi! CHUCK: And I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv. This week we're going to be talking about Working Locations. I've had a few people talk to me in the past, when I tell them that I'm a freelancer and that I work from home, they just look at me like "How do you do that? How do you deal with all the distractions? I mean, I'd just go and e-pop corner in front of the TV all day or something”. And so I thought we could talk about the work locations, some of the pros and cons, and how you deal with distractions and things like that. So, I tend to work from. I know that Eric, you usually work from home as well, right? ERIC: Yeah. Like maybe one or two days set up a year, I might not work from home. But I'm here; this is where I'm at. CHUCK: Yeah. And Evan, you used to work from home, didn't you? EVAN: I did until about 2 months ago, and then I rented an office. CHUCK: Alright. Did you just go with like an executive suite type thing or -- EVAN: Well, yeah. I went on craze list. Well I looked around a lot, but ultimately I went on craze list and found a small -- a local realtor who is leasing by the room and just basically got a room that I came equipped with a desk and internet and power and what not. Grabbed my Aeron chair and there it was, and computer was good to go. CHUCK: Yeah that's what they have out here, I don't know if it's just the term out here, but they call them executive suites. Basically, you're renting like a room and then you get access to the conference room when you need it, and the building furnishes power, that kind of stuff. EVAN: I don't think we have a term for it out here because that would imply that we have enough civilization to come up with terms like that. CHUCK: [laughs] Yeah. Adobe built a huge building that's right outbuy where most of those suites are out here. So, I'm kind of curious as to what your experiences been working from home you guys.

Panel Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion
01:41 - Employment History 06:58 - Perks of Being a Freelancer Variety of Job Areas Choose Your Work Flexibility & Freedom 15:22 - Paycheck Security Unemployment Contractors Vs Employees 20:54 - Coast-Along Employees 21:50 - Health Benefits 23:34 - Marketing & Selling Providing Value to a Company 27:27 - Business Skills 29:37 - Self-Direction & Motivation 32:48 - Loans 34:51 - Going Back to Work (after freelancing)
Picks Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself by Daniel H. Pink (Eric) Powermat Home & Office Mat (Chuck) Une Bobine (Chuck) Transcript
ERIC: Hold on, I got to shut my door. My dog opened it and I don't want the cats to come fly in here. [Are you a busy Ruby developer who wants to take their freelance business to the next level? Interested in working smarter not harder? Then check out the upcoming book “Next Level Freelancing - Developer Edition Practical Steps to Work Less, Travel and Make More Money”. It includes interviews and case studies with successful freelancers, who have made a killing by expanding their consultancy, develop passive income through informational products, build successful SaaS products, and become rockstar consultants making a minimum of $200/hour. There are all kinds of practical steps on getting started and if you sign up now, you’ll get 50% off when it’s released. You can find it at nextlevelfreelancing.com] [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 45 of the Ruby Freelancer Show! This week on our panel, we have Eric Davis. ERIC: I had tea to drink! CHUCK: And I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv. This week we're going to be talking about the Risks of Freelancing versus Fulltime Development. The general idea is that -- I get a lot of people that we talk to and basically the idea is this that they're like "well, I would go freelance because it looks like you'll get a lot of perks, but I just can't stand the risk". To me it just doesn't feel as risky. So we're going to talk about that; talk about some of the what's and why's and maybe why freelancing is or isn't as risky as being a fulltime employee and some of the other things that related to that. I'm a little curious Eric, what is your kind of your employment history? ERIC: I worked when I was in high school, just normal high school type jobs. Went to college, did some college jobs like delivered pizza, that sort of thing. And then right after college, went to work for a software company and actually got started there in technical support, then went to testing, and then went to software development. So I was like going through and by the end of it, I was doing desktop software development, wasn't in a mobile at the time. I did all the web development, manage all their servers, manage their network, and so I like had my hand in a lot of pies by there. Then after that, we moved and I started my own company. CHUCK: Wow! After college you worked for one company and then went freelance? ERIC: Yeah, pretty much. In college, I'd say freshman year or maybe sophomore year-ish, I got heavy into like reading about entrepreneurship and all that. I've actually started 2 or 3 businesses. I didn't know what I was doing and basically, looking back at it now, it was stupid for me to do those. But I learned enough at that time and figured out that I like running my own business. And so basically most of the jobs that I had were just stop gaps to pay the bills and to learn more and tell I was actually felt confident enough that I could actually run my own company. CHUCK: Yeah that makes sense. So my work history is somewhat similar. I worked in high school, too, I worked at grocery stores as baggers and checkers, and whatever.

Panel Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Jim Gay (twitter github blog) Evan Light (twitter github blog) Discussion
01:16 - Keeping Passion for Work Alive Happiness vs Money Maslow’s hierarchy of needs 04:14 - Making it a Craft 08:45 - Client Fit Raising Rates 10:41 - “Safety” and Satisfaction The Ruby Freelancers Show 012 – Getting Starting as a Freelancer 13:41 - Self-Actualization Community Exposure Praise 25:04 - Practice Every Day Mastery by Robert Greene 27:08 - Having Outlets 31:31 - Change & Creating New Habits Balance Tiny Habits w/ Dr. BJ Fogg The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg 38:34 - “Serious Practitioners”
Picks Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer (Jim) Multitenancy with Rails by Ryan Bigg (Jim) Writer’s block and the drip: Seth Godin (Eric) Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment by George Leonard (Evan) Transcript
EVAN: Eric, you there? ERIC: I'm chewing... EVAN: I don't believe I've heard that particular voice before...  [Are you a busy Ruby developer who wants to take their freelance business to the next level? Interested in working smarter not harder? Then check out the upcoming book “Next Level Freelancing - Developer Edition Practical Steps to Work Less, Travel and Make More Money”. It includes interviews and case studies with successful freelancers, who have made a killing by expanding their consultancy, develop passive income through informational products, build successful SaaS products, and become rockstar consultants making a minimum of $200/hour. There are all kinds of practical steps on getting started and if you sign up now, you’ll get 50% off when it’s released. You can find it at nextlevelfreelancing.com] [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net] EVAN: Hello! And welcome to the Ruby Freelancers Podcast! Today, I am hosting -- my name is Evan Light. Normally we have Chuck Wood hosting, and I have here Eric Davis. ERIC: Hi! EVAN: Eric is only somewhat conscious, so we can only ask yes or no questions. ERIC: Yes. EVAN: [laughs] And Jim Gay! JIM: Hello! EVAN: So today we decided we are going to talk about "keeping the passion for the work alive", and the tradeoffs involved in doing work we enjoy versus doing work that pays well. This came from a Skype chat that Jim and I, I guess we're getting into undecide during other Skype chats [inaudible]. And I was explaining that I value doing client work that I enjoy more than earning a buck. And Jim was pushing and pointing that, pushing out pushing back that earning a buck is really gushed or unimportant. JIM: Yeah I think we're both kind of agreeing and disagreeing at the same time. When we were talking earlier before we started recording the show, I was thinking of Maslow's hierarchy of needs which -- if people aren't familiar with that, basically on the lowest level of hierarchy it's like "can you survive?" Are you eating? ERIC: The reap of your head? JIM: Yeah, exactly. That type of thing. And then higher up the scale is like the top self-actualization; being pleased with who you are. And I think as long as you've got enough income coming in that you can pay for your house and feed your family and things like that, then you can start going up the path that's like figuring out "okay do I actually care about the work that I'm doing?" EVAN: But there's also -- Well, yeah, okay so potentially there's (I don't know if this is a matter of potentially -- I really need to complete this sentence though), there's the boundaries where we perceived to those boundaries to be in Maslow's hierarchy. I mean this is something -- Maslow's hierarchy: self to something like consider a lot, but the question of where you perceived those boundaries to be might different from person to person. The physiological,

Panel Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Jim Gay (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion
01:39 - Addressing Team Issues Implementing Change Stand-Up Meetings 04:44 - Stand-Up Meeting Issues 07:37 - Organization Politics Expetise Experience 11:21 - Idea Resistence People Problems Control 18:16 - Problematic Coworkers 20:26 - Team Communication Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Skype Hubot Campfire GoToMeeting
Adobe Connect
Google+ Hangouts tmux 28:10 - Assigning Tickets & Stories 36:22 - Finding Solutions to Problems You Don’t Understand 38:04 - When Change Doesn’t Happen Satisfaction Level 40:01 - Management Issues/Changes 42:43 - Team Planning Planning Poker Estimations 48:17 - Ideas for Integration Leveraging Experience Picks Poor man’s guide to managing Ruby versions (Jim) Extreme Programming Pocket Guide (Eric) Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz (Chuck) Transcript
ERIC: Helloooooooo! [Are you a busy Ruby developer who wants to take their freelance business to the next level? Interested in working smarter not harder? Then check out the upcoming book “Next Level Freelancing - Developer Edition Practical Steps to Work Less, Travel and Make More Money”. It includes interviews and case studies with successful freelancers, who have made a killing by expanding their consultancy, develop passive income through informational products, build successful SaaS products, and become rockstar consultants making a minimum of $200/hour. There are all kinds of practical steps on getting started and if you sign up now, you’ll get 50% off when it’s released. You can find it at nextlevelfreelancing.com] [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 43 of the Ruby Freelancer Show! This week on our panel, we have Eric Davis. ERIC: Hello! CHUCK: We also have Jim Gay. JIM: I'm back! CHUCK: You are back! We missed you! JIM: Thank you. CHUCK: I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv and I've been working hard on railsrampup.com. So if you wanna learn Ruby on Rails, go check it out! Alright, this week we're going to be talking about -- I don't know what the title of the show would be yet, but we're going to be talking about like improving team, processes, communication, etcetera, etcetera. When you're a freelancer on the team and -- we may go into like what you can do when you're new, what you can do when you've been around and earn some street cred, but let's just jump in and talk about some of the stuff. Just to kick it off, I generally like to just come up with something that's relevant from my experience. I'm working on a team right now, and the things that actually been reasonably good over there. And most of the time if I have a concern, or a thought, or an idea, I can just get away with going to the Director over the project and he'll usually talk through it with me and then implement a change if it's good idea. So, I just kind of wanna throw that out there because sometimes the solution is pretty simple. JIM: Yeah! I've definitely done that; making sure that I'm constantly talking to whoever the project manager is. I don't know, I've kind of looked at conversations like around process and comments and say "You know, I've noticed this and I wonder about changing it to that". Just in terms of thinking like "let's try it!" or maybe "we should try it!". Or if you don't wanna try it, fine. I'm sure there will have other things. But I've never felt like even though sometimes I felt really strongly, we really ought to find a better way to communicate or something like that. I never tried to put my foot down like "look, it must be done this way". And sometimes I feel like I want to be the guy who will do that,

Panel Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion
01:18 - Planning For the Year New Media Expo Consumer Electronics Show MountainWest RubyConf Rails Ramp Up 06:57 -...

Panel Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion
02:33 - Designers Referrals 12:00 - Bookkeepers Accountant recommendations/preference 19:44 - Virtual Assistants
...

Panel Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Evan Light (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code) Discussion
01:28 - What do you do when prospective clients only want to hire you full-time? Employees vs Contractors On-site work 08:35 - How to get clients from a different country or timezone Enforcing contracts Marketing 13:49 - Do people hire you because you’re specifically a “Ruby” freelancer? 21:02 - What types of jobs do you accept and what types do you refuse? Will the project be successful? 30:35 - What types of jobs are you getting from Ruby on Rails? 33:35 - How do you deal with uncertainty or risk when writing a Statement of work? Identify risky areas Be as specific as possible 39:25 - Building LinkedIn recommendations Testemonials 43:32 - Working on a retainer Support Agreements/On Call work Picks Audio-Technica ATR2100-USB Cardioid Dynamic USB/XLR Microphone (Eric) Nexus 7 (Evan) SCOTTEVEST Fleece 7.0 Jacket (Evan) Twitter Bootstrap (Chuck) Downton Abbey (Chuck) Rails Ramp Up (Chuck) Transcript
CHUCK: Yes, I put my microphone right on my face. So you get all of the good noises that come out of my mouth. [Are you a busy Ruby developer who wants to take their freelance business to the next level? Interested in working smarter not harder? Then check out the upcoming book “Next Level Freelancing - Developer Edition Practical Steps to Work Less, Travel and Make More Money”. It includes interviews and case studies with successful freelancers, who have made a killing by expanding their consultancy, develop passive income through informational products, build successful SaaS products, and become rockstar consultants making a minimum of $200/hour. There are all kinds of practical steps on getting started and if you sign up now, you’ll get 50% off when it’s released. You can find it at nextlevelfreelancing.com] [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 40 of the Ruby Freelancers Show! This week on our panel, we have Eric Davis. ERIC: Hello! CHUCK: We also have Evan Light. EVAN: Hello CHUCK: And I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv. This week we're going to kind of work through some of the questions that have been put on our user voice panel. There are a handful of them that we don't think necessarily merit a full show. Meaning that, we don't know if we could talk about them for a full hour so we'll just ask some of the questions and then work our way through them. So the first question that I see that I want to go over is "what do you do when prospects only want you as a full time employee?" And there's a bit more to this, Bryan Ray put it up and it says "I'm pretty new to freelancing. I moonlight in pretty much all of my prospects in the past couple of months, seemed interested after a couple of conversations, but eventually they are only looking for full time employees right now. Either full time or 30-40 hours a contract work, which at that point you're basically an employee working for one client's stricter hours indefinite work as opposed to distinct projects, etc. I'm pretty sure it's due to the fact that I can't dedicate many hours per week right now. Do you guys run into this problem? Or did you when you first started out?" EVAN: For me, I tend to work for one big client to one smaller client at a time so I'm not quite fulltime with a client, but I tend to dedicate a lot of time to one client, but not fulltime. And I've gotten some people who want me to work fulltime and I generally try to avoid those period. If they said that's what they want, usually they're inflexible on it, then I just move on find someone else. At least that's been my experience. ERIC: It's been a bit different. I did, I think it was 2 up to maybe 4 or 5 clients at a time for a while there.