What I learned building websites as a freelancer
A thing I did to try and satisfy my entrepreneurial itch.
My Beginnings
When I began my career, this was India 2012, internet had finally reached the farthest corners of the town I was living in. I had just started working as a Quality Assurance tester for a small company in the town. The company developed products for Flea Markets in the US. With no prior coding education or experience, the best I could do was test a products that were being built. I’ve always had an itch to build products since I was a child so I felt the best move for me was to learn to code. Touch screen phones were becoming a thing and responsive designs were being talked about in the tech world. It became evident to me that we need to get the local legacy businesses online and quick.
The Learning Phase
I learned coding in evening private classroom sessions with 10 other people. I started with C# .Net since I wanted to build websites. I then changed my job role from QA to Developer at my job so I can get some real world experience. I learned quite a lot working on projects than I did just reading about C# or .Net. I also took up some front end technologies like javascript and jQuery.
My First Freelance Project
By 2014 I was able to build a website on my own. I started looking at business, specifically teaching institutes that didn’t have websites. This was the time when modern website builders like Squarespace or Webflow didn’t really exist. Websites were built the old fashioned way. Up until this point, I always thought coding was the hardest part. I realized quickly that finding a customer was even harder. I did not give up though. I make cold calls, I talked to friends and their friends, I created my own website to advertise. I even used facebook ads. But none of them worked. I then went to a local business myself and waited till the owner had a few minutes to talk. Then I did the hardest thing I had ever done in my life - talking to a complete stranger and trying to sell him something. He politely said he wasn’t interested and so I moved on. I tried a few more businesses and finally I got my first project. It was a computer training institute and the owner delegated his son (who was the same age as me) to work with me and coming up with the website design and requirements. The budget was *very* tight but I didn’t mind. I needed this project and did everything I could to make this work even if it meant I was losing money and time on it. I was paid half upfront and the rest later when it was done. Success.
A Few More Deals
I got a few of more projects after this. Not all of them were as smooth as the first one, though. There were times when the customer lost interest in the project and I walked away mid development. Sometimes the customer would get too pushy with unrealistic timelines. In the end, I learnt a lot more about business than I would have ever learnt reading books.
What I Learned
The customer has no idea what they really want. Its up to you to learn about their business and figure out what they need. As I got more projects, I started spending more time with the customer learning about their business instead of getting straight into designing the website.
The customer is not always right In the initial days I spent a lot of time just agreeing to what the customer thought they wanted from me by just being too scared of losing the business. It was important to set boundaries and expectations so we don’t disappoint each other in the long run.
Value trust and accountability Word of mouth was the number one reason I got more projects. I had to make sure I went through with my promises as much as I possibly could. I learnt that it is VERY important to communicate with the customer as often as you can to keep them up to date with the progress. It was also important to let them know of any hickups in the projects ASAP instead of spending time trying to solve it.
After just over a year of freelancing, in 2014 I decided to move to a bigger city where I joined a more reputed company and worked on a lot more complex and challenging projects. I then went on to work for some of the biggest names in the tech industry like VMware working on some of the complex problems and managing some big projects. I then moved to Canada and currently work for Workday where I learnt a lot, understood the western market a lot more and continue to look for new and exciting opportunities.
Find me on X at @akshay_a_r
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