Improving my web dev offer
jasonleow • 5 Oct 2023 •
I sent out a tweet a month ago asking for freelance opportunities for work.
But that tweet didn’t work. No offers and opportunities. Maybe it’s Twitter’s low reach - only a small percentage of followers saw that tweet. Admittedly, that tweet wasn’t the best way to get work. It was a bit of spray and pray. Channel-offer fit isn’t the best either as most of my followers are peers, not clients.
Then I re-sent it out again the day before yesterday and this time got a lot more help and ideas!
Consolidating it here to make sense of it:
- Create a landing page with a clearer offer, not just what I can do but what I can help my client get, problems I solve, my stack, rates, availability, along with social proof.
- Go niche. Give specific value. Instead of “frontend dev”, say “MVP in a week”, or “Bring your business online in a day”, or “Convert your site to Tailwind to save development time.”
- Try a productized service instead of “freelance”
- Add visuals of my past work, like a portfolio
- Get work through personal network and friends
- Reach out to people running products and service that I love or inspired by, and offer to work for/with them.
- Use contract agencies/platforms like TopTal, Lemon.io, Gun.io, SupportShephered, Jschimp, or even good old Upwork etc. to find contract opportunities
- Since I can ship fast, build MVPs on my own, try to sell them on Microacquire or interest other startups on it
Anything else I can do to pivot or re-design my offer?
Comments
@drodol Oh not charging for web dev but for monthly support/maintenance is smart. I used to do web design for small medium businesses, but no longer and lost my network around that. Still trying to get started again, asking friends and fam
Every little bit counts Jason!
@jasonleow a couple of years ago during COVID times, through word-of-mouth, I got connected with a client (restaurant) that needed an e-commerce shop setup. Long story short, they had bought some homeware bought before COVID hit and were planning to sell it in person in their restaurant, but were then left with just takeaway and no way of selling that inventory. I helped them setup a Shopify store, and proposed them to pay me a retainer for a very low-level scope of support (i.e. if they needed a change in inventory, price adjustments, so on).
Maybe you could also offer something like this? I charged them 150USD per month, so with 10 clients, you can do the math.
I was inspired by a guy I saw on reddit who was building and hosting simple websites (you could them “calling card” websites) for businesses. Not charging them anything upfront for development, but charging them a monthly fee of 100-150 USD. JAMstack. Anyway, just an idea. I’ll try to find the post and share it if you are interested. I remember the guy shared a lot of useful info then.