Are the streets of San Francisco paved with exciting projects, paying excellent rates? Is it full of perfect customers with realistic expectations? Freelance Advisor founder and serial entrepreneur Darren Fell took a trip to the epicentre of Internet start-ups in the hope of finding out what we can learn from our colleagues on the west coast…
A fresh, exciting world of freelancing in San Francisco?
Clearly the first job was to find some freelancers and after setting up base in Down Town San Francisco I hit one Starbucks after another only to find lots of people checking Google maps or instant messaging their mates but alas no freelancers hard at work.
Some online research revealed key café spots to hang out in, most notable being the Ritual Coffee Roasters well know as a hunting ground for hungry Venture Capitalists (VC) – according to a recent article in the New York Times, this café didn’t contain freelancers simply checking their email, many were hard at work, with programmers coding away.
When I arrived at Ritual, I sat alongside a chap called Mars and uncovered that although he had just joined a new start-up as a full-time programmer, his 10 years experience as a freelancer in Austin, Texas, had taught him some very useful tricks; changing your work environment is good for your creativity!
Freelance nirvana or same old story?
Similar to us in the UK Mars experienced all the same issues you would expect:
- Customers not willing to pay top rate, even for a very experienced programmer
- Expectation was a Google or Yahoo quality application without a large programming team!
- Without Incorporating (US version of a Limited Company) the tax at 33% killed any profit
- Getting a Certified Professional Accountant (CPA) could be avoided using online Tax applications that automated posting direct to the IRS (US version of Inland Revenue)
Projects Galore
It must be said that there was a real exciting vibe about every freelancer friendly café I dropped into and there was clearly a multitude of exciting projects available if you was good.
Mainly on the Internet based side, projects were wide, varied and above all grand in their scale and complexity, all using the latest technologies. From the ones I got a straight answer for, projects included:
- Analysis tool to understand instances of use of a brand name and its context. This was primarily for marketing and PR professionals to enable them to react if their brand wasn’t receiving positive sentiments across the various blogs.
- ViddYou, a High Definition video recording site (co-founded by Ryan Bailey). This was designed to enable you to capture a series of personal video’s. An example offered was a daily recording of a man’s young child growing up.
San Fran or good old Blighty?
In all, as you may expect, San Francisco proved to be a truly exciting place, literally bristling with the latest and coolest Internet projects. The rates in general seemed to be good and if you were really skilled it was highly likely you’d be asked to name your price to go full-time. As an example Mars picked a top price out the air that finally lured him from freelancing, ‘I really had to make sure I was getting the best price to move up here from Austin’.
So there you have it, the same issues as we suffer and unless you have built up a good network of customers/contacts, a similar issue getting work in, albeit there seems to be stacks and stacks more work to go around.
