tired of freelancing for other people. how to meet customer directly?

Welcome to freelancers dilemma 101: finding clients without being the chum at the bottom of the pyramid. The only way you can really climb the pyramid is by contacting established web development / programming companies who might be looking for a freelancer also known in the industry as a contractor to undertake any spill over work they might have.

The place I work at is small, but the place I worked at before this took on freelancers when the work just got too much. If I were you I would send out a polite non spammy email to companies in your city or even country (because a freelancer can work from home) and explain that you would be happy helping and undertaking any extra work that they might have for you.

Some people will argue this doesn't work, but if you're polite and don't cram your CV down their throats, it works. Kindly send your CV to them and don't force them to give you work. Just let them know you're keen and looking, stay professional.

This has worked for me getting tonnes of freelance work. It even worked so well recently that I just got a pretty well-known and established band as a client by simply sending a polite email asking them if they had any work they required help with.

Stay mysterious, but not too mysterious. Give them basic information that shows you're qualified and can do the job and then let nature take its cause. If they're interested they'll ask for more, once they ask you know you're pretty much on the home stretch unless all your best work is websites about cats with blinking neon text.

It's hard to be a one-person company. If you are doing enough billable programming work to make a living, you probably don't have enough time left over to do enough sales work to have a pipeline of projects to continue making a living.

Someone once said, if you don't have employees, then you don't have a company, you just have a job. That's very true.

Until you can have others working for you doing the coding work or the selling work, you won't be able to break out of the trap in which you find yourself.

Actually, you have already taken the first step. You have reached out to "your" network. You have posted on this forum, where there are excellent people who can advice and guide you along the way. Yes, you will have to set up a company, get a website, (well, actually, get a marketing/promotional strategy), but that can be done in steps... You must define what is it that you have, and who needs it. Get in front of those people. Slowly, you will create and expand your network. Try to partner up with other companies/individuals that you can get with to do some joint marketing. Opportunities are endless, they are everywhere. Competition is in our head. Good luck!

If this answer comes off as snarky, I apologize in advance. I'm just trying to give a little "tough love".

You ask "Why can't I meet customers directly?" - the answer is in your very next sentence: "My network is not very good as I am not very social."

Meeting customers is hard. Selling is hard. Marketing is hard. These things are especially hard for introverted technical engineering types. That's why sales people exist and why they get paid very, very well - it's not uncommon for a top sales person to make more than the owner of a small company (this has happened to me 2 out of the 10 years we've be in business).

To answer your specific question, there are lots of strategies for meeting customers:

• Cold Calling
• Lead Generating Marketing Campaigns
• Advertising
• Referrals from Your Network

But that's only half the battle. The other half of the battle is having something that the customer wants and being able to convince that customer that you are the best choice. In most cases, a generic "freelancer" isn't really what the customer is looking for. They are looking for a solution to a problem.

There are customers out there who are looking for freelancers, and I think you've already found one or two. These are companies who are able to market and find the end customer, convince the customer to hire them, negotiate prices, understand their problem, conceptualize the solution, manage a team of developers like yourself, support the solution after those developers have moved on to other opportunities, carry insurance and warranties in case the developers have faulty code, etc. While it sometimes doesn't look like it from where you stand today, the 'guy in the middle' is doing a lot of hard work so that all you have to do is code. That's why he got paid more than you did.

If all you are offering is coding/programming, you'll always be on the bottom of the 'getting paid pyramid'.

I was once in your shoes, and the good news is that there is hope. There are ways for you to get a bigger piece of the pie. Here's how I did it.

I started out like you, with a day job working for the man. I started picking up a few side projects for a little extra money, but there was no way I could support being a freelancer full time - I just didn't have the network. At that time, I was a generic Windows developer. It was the early 1990's.

Then I started to specialize. I got assigned to a project at work that involved an emerging technology at the time called "Electronic Document Management". I completed that project and moved on to another like it. Then I leveraged that experience to get a job at a software company that made document management software. A couple of years later, I leveraged that experience to join a consulting firm as a Jr. Partner in charge of their document management projects (by that time, the buzz word had changed to "Enterprise Content Management"). Three years later, I was speaking at industry conferences and had built a good reputation, and I started my own firm. That was 10 years ago.

With each move I made, I earned more money and got a bigger piece of the pie, because my expertise made me more valuable to the level of the pyramid above me. But it didn't happen overnight.

Focus on the "meeting potential customers" aspect first. Yes, you should be protected legally and have a web site, and so on, but all of that is secondary to meeting potential clients.

Also, you have to see if you actually like working with people... Clients can be very hard to adapt to, if the client is a large company, you might have to deal with someone that is very hard to deal with, and so on. I would test the waters first before going in deep and start paying for stuff you might not need.

You can advertise yourself in freelance site like guru.com, elance, etc... You might also show up in places where potential customers will. You have to find this by trial and error: Try chambers of commerce, business meetups, linked in, etc...

You then need to find a balance of niche vs wide breadth... Niche consultants get paid much more than generalists, but it's harder to find customers.

And then there are all sorts of issues that you could tackle, there are many books written on the subject too.

Hopefully I have not discouraged you, but finding clients is the hard part to all of this. In a way, the people getting you the jobs are well-paid for a reason: They are doing the very hard job of approaching a potential client and getting the assignment from the client.

But there is a chance you might try it out and find out you don't like being in touch with clients directly, so experiment with that first. It is definitely a different set of skills that is needed. As a technologist at heart, I myself sometimes wish I did not need to communicate with people and just sit down, write code all day, and get paid without problems... It's been a long time since that last happened :-)