
In my previous post I mentioned that I had started my freelance career as a senior full stack software engineer. The first problem I faced was clients – it's a pretty tough job to find them. I will show you my trial and error approach to getting a first paid contract. It’ll start from paid ads on social networks, going through content marketing and surprisingly ending on free promotional channels. At each step I will share with you my thoughts, tips and samples. The whole journey from zero to one client took me three weeks.
At the start of the journey I had a portfolio site, several photos for ads, and a lot of optimism. I need to mention that I decided to avoid freelance marketplaces such as UpWork and Freelance.com as their rates are too low. I also avoided TopTal and Turing.com as I don’t want to spend my free time on their several-stage interviews (I've played this game with Google once, and don’t want to do it again).