I am a web developer from APAC region and have worked for clients in LATAM/US regions in past.
But I want to scale it now and have at least 3-4 clients on $3k/month retainer where I and some people I hire from my local community would work on building their MVPs, maintaining their codebase and scaling their product.
I would oversee the quality of work and work alongside the people I hire so that I can provide the best possible quality work to my clients.
The only struggle I have right now is to find those clients and close deals with them.
Not many people trust developers from 3rd tier countries, but fortunately I have past experience and portfolio of work to show them so that might help.
But where should I be looking for these potential clients and what should be the optimal way to approach them?
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After spending 9 years as a design and frontend developer, I recently started https://htmlmonks.uk/
My aim is simple: provide frontend and design as a service on weekly/bo-weekly payment. What you guys think? Does it work or do I change my model?
typically i see lots of cold emails and linkedin messages for this kind of service. so i think given the kind of clients you want (early stage startups) - networking in person with startup communities, providing relevant advice and being a source of reliable information might actually work better to getting clients.
I get at least one per week on LinkedIn offering this service. Super saturated.
The in-person advice is solid.
yea thought about networking in person, but not a lot of events happen where i live. my best bet would be to join online communities i guess as i want to work with international clients anyway because pay is higher for the same amount of work
UpWork?
No way
The only struggle to making your money is… making people give you money.
Your problem is that you’re looking at it like “if I only get a few customers this will work”, but you’re trying to enter a market that’s been cold emailed/spammed to absolute death for more than a decade.
No serious, and competent, buyer of your type of services will consider you without anything beyond your email/DM wanting them to pay for your services.
You’re facing a type of sale where the recipients have already seen every version of first sentence/subject line you could ever think of, and they now recognize it as something to delete unseen (if it even gets passed the spam filters).
It’s either a very high volume game (that could get you reported as spam often enough to burn your domain), or you need something more. You need something like personal introductions and recommendations. Or perhaps get yourself a collaboration with an angel investor using your services to quickly make all their projects look more professional.
To scale you ideally want those new projects without the very costly/time consuming process of randomly trying to reach random people that are completely unrelated to any other client or your business/network.
Maybe we are coming from same region. First thing is you need to know or define your difference or unique selling point. It is one of the hardest things for this kind of service. For example, don’t try to target clients need to build consumer apps. By the way, not every time US clients are good. Should think out of the box. I am doing $1M per annual with only me and another guy for that “kind of” service, only 30% of our clients from US.
I am probably also from the same region. Based on my experience, “communication” is critical to building trust with your US clients.
Many APAC developers have excellent technical skills, but the client may have less confidence in them due to their personality or the language barrier. Having at least one native speaker in the initial meeting helps clients be confident that you can fully understand their requirements and communicate smoothly with them.
I have tried both Upwork and Word-of-mouth (personal network).
These have been my best channels.
Cold outreach has not worked for me at all.
As others have said, you’re trying to break into a saturated market. You’re underestimating the hardest part of the business.
I recently launched a nearshore (LatAm) dev shop focused on startups. I’m just expanding my network, writing articles, and trying to provide value in every interaction so people see us as being a cut above the rest. I get emails and LinkedIn messages every day selling me on developers and I delete immediately. Just garbage effort from people trying to sell.
I’d say on the one hand, very crowded space. On the other hand, with more effort and insight and playing the long game, you can stand out over time because 95% of the “competition” doesn’t even try.
Just keep in mind the extraordinary effort required to work on the business, not work in the business doing web dev.
I run a UK based design agency and I can say, without doubt, that the hardest type of developer to find is one who can do tasteful, pixel perfect replication of our designs, using Xd or Figma. No layout, colour, functionality or typographic errors. I pay on average £20-25k p/site to a freelancer who can do this, sometimes stretching into £50k p/site. Sites take roughly 1-2 months to make so that hits your target. No.1 thing to do to be swamped with work, is show good designer teams you can pay attention to all the small details and you’ll earn £100-200k p/year.
You can try https://htmlmonks.uk/ they are best to convert pixel perfect layouts.
I see. But where do you look for these developers? I mean, where should I be hanging in order to be hunted by the likes of you?
Also, do you feel comfortable working with different timezone devs, I mean in APAC region? Any changes you make in budget if you’re hiring devs from APAC type regions?
We work with people all over the world, and we find them through the work they do. Designers don’t just want someone who can code, they want someone who can build what they’ve designed, exactly as it should be. If a site looks great and there’s a made by XYZ tag at the bottom you can trace back who designed/developed it. We let the devs quote the cost and then see how that works within our budget or speak to the clients seek more budget. Some devs are cheaper than others but they are all people with solid portfolios for startups and big brands.
Got it, thanks! yea I guess I am not at that level right now where I can impress people like with my portfolio but I think I am in the process of that right now.
But these are really good insights and I appreciate a lot for giving it away to me.
My future plans are to improve my quality of work and also reach out to accelerators and VCs who can refer me to companies they invest in. I don’t know much about how that relation works, but I really want to know about how to build that kind of relationship with Accelerators and VCs
Even as a developer, my advice is try and get some, even basic working knowledge, of design. Knowing how typography works (kerning, leading, tracking, hierarchy, layouts and grids) is such a major advantage. If you can team up with a designer to handle the code you’ll end up building great sites rather than undesigned, cluttered or overworked sites that 90% of the developer landscape are making. Once you have that knowledge you’ll be more attractive to other agencies who are the people in contact with all the accelerators. I know this because I have done this personally. VCs don’t want to take risks these days, so they hire people with track records who come by recommendation.
I’m confused. You are at a $3k mark (stable income i asume?) and want to grow? How did you find those clients and what is the limiting factor? Isn’t it just a matter of time, as companies naturally grow… You’re looking for a magic triple income button, and that’s not how growing a company works.
Just some background…
I work as a freelance developer. It took me 10+ years to have a stable income. From working part-time as a freelancer to full-time and towards a point where I think my income can be seen as highly stable. I find work with freelance websites (EU / local) to get noticed. It simply took time and experience to find the type of work, and type of clients, I feel comforable with and can provide me with stable long term projects.So now to the point. There are 3 stages I’ve found myself into, over and over again, in this order:
- Panic mode, I need/want more work, where do I find it?
- Multiple short term projects (3 - 12 months contracts) that boost my income and give me time to find more stable income.
- Finding a stable project that help you grow your business (12+ months contracts, or even without a time limit). They are the gems that keep on giving.
Stable projects are hard to find and you run in to them by luck (and it just happens once a year or even two years). There is no secret, just work until you find it. Startups are, due to their unstable nature and future, pretty much always short term. Which is fine (they have a place in this process). There are no sales tricks involved at any point. I’m not a sales person. I have a solid $10K+ income (just by myself). It is covered by 3 seperate projects, that I activily maintain. And sometimes smaller projects until I find the 4th.