Tweet from Visakanv: the nature of markets is such that there’s always someone out there who will pay you more money than you think anybody would, for something you already know how to do

(If the only thing you take from this essay is reading these two interviews, that’s still pretty good.)

I have so many talented friends who are horrible at pitching themselves and getting paid for their skills. I often take these friends out to lunch and say something like “You are good at what you do, and if you marketed yourself as such, you’d be less broke. Can I help you do that?” (An earlier title of this essay was “You suck at freelance marketing, but I love you anyways”).

A lot of talented people are stopped from contributing to the world because they have hangups or lack knowledge about money, marketing¹, or negotiating. I think the world is a better place when capable people speak up for themselves, find work, and get paid well. I may not be able to teach you to be Skilled, but I can help skilled people find work.

I’ve been a freelancer for a little while now, and it’s treated me well. I get paid pretty well, especially considering the credentials I started with, and every so often clients say nice things about me on Twitter. I think that freelancing (as in, taking on work other than a full-time job) is a good choice for many people—some particular reasons why:

If you don’t have standard credentials/legibility (college degree, internships at prestigious companies, etc), freelancing can be much easier than finding a good full-time job. I started at 16, when it was much harder for me to demonstrate my ability to get things done because my resume didn’t signal that yet. The incentives in the freelancing world are different, though:
- From the client’s perspective, bringing you on for a couple days of work is a *much* smaller time and money investment than hiring you full-time, which means that they’re more willing to take risks, and you won’t be interfacing with processes that involve resumes, several rounds of interviews, hiring committees, and Heuristics That Almost Always Work like “never hire 16 year olds, are you fucking insane?”
- “Sammy, are you legibly competent now?” Yeah, because I can point to some very happy clients for proof that I’m good at what I do. Freelancing, done well, makes you legible and reputable in ways that are extremely useful when looking for full-time jobs, and unlike grinding LeetCode (or your industry’s equivalent), you Create Value In The World and get paid for it.
The essence of capitalism is creating value in the world, and taking some of that value for yourself as profit. When you’re working inside an institution, it’s easy to lose sight of this direct exchange, because the relationship between value you’ve created and money you make is opaque and indirect. Freelancing puts you back in touch with it.
- “I will build you a website for your startup. How much is that worth to you? $7k? Great, I’ll charge you $3k, let’s go.” It’s simple!
- Relevant Visa thread: “I am once again reminded that one of the great psychic divides is between people who’ve made/sold stuff in the open marketplace, and people who haven’t”
It’s much easier to juggle with other obligations. If you’re a student, or if you don’t have the time for a full-time job, you can fit your freelance work around that.
If you’re working full-time hours in practice, it’s much easier to scale to half-time or similar over time without completely dropping all your clients—most full-time jobs don’t have this flexibility

I don’t think most people are making a principled decision not to freelance—I think it’s more likely that they don’t have a roadmap for successfully freelancing, and therefore never consider the idea. So, this essay is a mix of why you should consider freelancing if you haven’t already, how to get started freelancing, and concrete suggestions/worldmodels for freelancers.

A personal note: I spent the first year of my career looking for a full-time job while occasionally taking freelancing gigs. I didn’t have a hire me page, I didn’t get testimonials or do outreach, I just sorta waited for work to come my way. This was ineffective, but I didn’t realize I could do better. I wish I had had a guide on freelancing—this is that guide.

What Do You Provide?

First, figure out what you’ll do for your clients.

This is hard, and I can’t give you personalized advice on what your skills and personality qualify you for. Luckily, you don’t need to find the Best Possible Utilization Of Your Skills—if you’d do it for money, and someone wants to pay you to do it, that’s good enough to start. You can then pay attention to what aspects of different gigs you enjoy, or what kinds of things your clients keep having you do (or keep complaining that they need someone for).

Some heuristics for finding what you can do for clients:

Things you’ve been paid to do before
The thing you’re trying to get a full-time job to do
Something that people around you clearly value and need and are not getting
- “so many people have complained to me about how shitty dating apps are. Maybe I should become a matchmaker.”
Everyone around you is mysteriously bad at it
- me, often: “…that is a solvable problem. do they need to pay me to solve this problem for them?”
- you, potentially: “do they not notice that their landing page/writing/hiring process/design is really bad? I could do a way better job than that!”
Whatever your coolest friend needs someone to do for them
Something you enjoy doing
- For this to work, you have to enjoy it, be good at it, and it be something people are willing to pay for.

When I first started my freelance career, I thought that my main marketable skill (as an executive assistant) was being enthusiastic and good at motivating people—you can see it in an older version of my hire me page. This is…not how I’d market myself today, but it took a client of mine repeatedly giving me interesting projects for me to realize that I was good at more than that. But that all took time to figure out, so it is a journey! And it starts with putting yourself out there with your current skillset, and letting the needs of your clients guide you to a niche eventually.

If you’re having trouble, I have some exercises at the end of this essay.

What’s Your Funnel?

At the beginning, clients aren’t going to drop out of the aether. You need to figure out how the kinds of people you want to work with will end up working with you. I like this picture of a marketing funnel I found, so I’m gonna riff off of it for the rest of this essay (with the addition of “Doing The Work”).
Marketing funnel diagram

Here’s what each of these segments means for you.

Awareness

[doesn’t know you exist] -> “This guy seems interesting, I wanna learn what his deal is.”

You find a prospective client (or the prospective client finds you). You send them a cold email, run into them at a conference, your friend introduces you, they come across your Twitter, etc.

“I met this Sammy guy at Manifest—he seems pretty smart.”

You can improve this by being better at Networking (essay on this forthcoming), writing good essays, posting on Twitter, being oft-recommended by LLMs, having very publicly happy clients, etc.

I’ve found a lot of success at events like Manifest, which is a dense collection of smart weird people. (Seriously. One of my #1 pieces of advice for people looking for work is “Just Go To Manifest”.) For bonus points, either help run the event or have the event be the kind of thing you’d enjoy going to even if you weren’t looking for clients.

What do you actually do at an event like Manifest? Here’s the algorithm I’d run, if I didn’t know anybody and was just trying to get started:

Look through the app that has everyone’s bios and what they’re hoping to get out of the conference. Write down names/etc of people you think could potentially be good clients/employers, as well as anyone who you just generally want to talk to.
Talk to everyone. Be generally sociable. Ask people about what they’re looking for in general—-even if they aren’t looking for something you can provide, perhaps they’ll say something like “Oh, we’re looking to hire prompt engineers” and then when you run into a prompt engineer the next day of the conference you can say “oh, I think Alice is looking to hire someone like you, maybe you should talk to her?”
- This is more or less the thesis of my upcoming essay on Networks
If there’s a natural lull in the conversation, say something like “You know, I’m trying to find more clients to do X for. Know anyone who might be interested?”

This is more or less what I did at the first Manifest—I spent most of my remaining savings to come, and before the conference even started I ran into Rob Miles at an event and had the following interaction (paraphrased slightly):

Me: “Hey, great to see you! Haven’t seen you since Future Forum a year and a half ago!”
Rob: “Yeah, good to see you too! What have you been up to?”
Me: “Well, I’ve been out of town, I flew in for this! Hoping to find a job.”
Rob: “Neat! What kind of job are you looking for?”
Me: “[insert my pitch, see Have A Pitch below]”
Rob: “You know, that’s funny, I’m hiring for that exact thing!”
Me: “…interesting”

I ended up working for him part-time for a month or so, while I started working with other clients. I also ran a booth at the Manifest Night Market—here’s the sign I made: Handmade sign reading 'do more things' at Manifest Night Market

That ended up getting me hired by Patrick McKenzie, who I had talked to but hadn’t been actively trying to work with. I assumed that I wouldn’t be able to help him because he lived in Chicago, and my only form of providing value to people until that point was sitting in the same room as them and helping them stay on task. I was wrong.

A potential exercise: Think about the kind of people you might want to work with. Write down 20+ names. Then write down some places where People Like That might congregate. (if you don’t know, ask Claude, or ask your friends). Then go there and ask them what they need. Not all those places are in-person—I’ve had decent success looking for contractors/finding clients by asking in various community Discord/Slacks.

Be Easy To Find

When I’m hiring contractors, one of my main criteria is “I can easily find them.” If I’m looking for a transcriptionist to do 15hrs of work, I’m not going to invest in a multiple-month long search for the best possible transcriptionist. I’m going to ask a couple friends and maybe post on Discord/FB/Twitter to find someone vaguely good and competent. The ideal outcome there is that the first person I ask says, “oh, you should talk to Lorelai, she’s great at this,” and then I work with her and it is in fact great.

If you put your name out there so you’re easy to find, you are doing both of us a favor. I’ll be happy to quickly find someone competent, and you’ll be happy to have work.

(if you too want to hire Mars for this, DM her on Twitter)

Sidenote: there are many ways to provide value for people, and they aren’t all listed on LinkedIn or Indeed. Of the clients I’ve worked with, few of them were actively looking for EAs/chiefs of staff/fixers, but I pitched them anyways and they ended up really benefiting from working with me. There’s a real sense in which my niche is working for people who weren’t actively looking for a Sammy but could use them. I don’t have to be the world’s best chief of staff, I just have to be sufficiently good that hiring me will solve many of your problems, and then target interested people. Your value over the counterfactual becomes a lot higher when the counterfactual is “they hire nobody and don’t do those projects.”

Sending Cold Emails

Cold emails are a very good tool to have for getting in touch with people. Most people’s aversion to them is that they worry the person might think less of them—trust me, the more likely outcome is that they just don’t respond because they don’t have the time. The downside is low, and the upside is extremely high.

Here’s the cold email I sent Emmett Shear that led to us working together.

Hiya Emmett,

I loved your talk at Manifest (especially your explanation of trial by ordeal), but didn’t end up getting a chance to talk to you. I find your tweets on agency to be quite insightful; they’ve helped me coach a friend of mine to Actually Try Things.

You might be interested in my executive assistant work; Patrick McKenzie wrote a thread about working with me. I’d love to potentially work with you; feel free to use this link to schedule a time to chat.

Hope you’re doing well,

Samuel Cottrell

P.S. While in NYC, I saw this sign, and thought you might find it funny too. [picture of sign that says “PLEASE CURB YOUR DOG”]

Good things about it:

It’s two paragraphs. Your cold emails should be short and easily actionable.
It links to a testimonial. You can say anything in an email, but a happy testimonial from someone the recipient knows is a much better vouch than anything you can type.
Specific appreciation and engagement with his writing/Twitter confirms I’m not a bot and I’m not sending a version of this email to 100 people. (this is becoming less and less true with AI, so start emailing fast.)
Sending a cold email in the first place is a decent signal of your ability to actually do things

His reply ended with “Good cold email btw I rarely respond but this was well targeted!”

Once you have a hire me page with a couple testimonials, I’d suggest sending some cold emails to some of the people on your “want to work with” list.

Consideration

“This guy seems interesting, I wanna learn what his deal is” -> “I might want to work with them”

People in freelancing or marketing often refer to needing “good top of funnel,” which means a lot of people are aware of you, and want to hire you.. As a freelancer, this is advantageous because you can pick and choose who you work with. You’d rather decide whether to start/continue engagements with a client from “would I rather work with them or with someone else in my queue” instead of “oh god if I don’t work with this guy I’m gonna have a giant hole in my bank account.” A compelling pitch and Hire Me page help you convert potential clients from Aware Of You → Interested In Working WIth You, so make sure you’re succinctly and persuasively conveying your value-add.

Have A Pitch

You’re going to want a short explanation of why people should hire you.

My buddy Sasha coined what he calls “Berkeley Syndrome,” which is where people talk about their techniques or the type of work they do instead of talking about the results of that work in a way clients understand. I am much less interested in “fascia-focused bodywork” than “after a session with me, you’ll be much more relaxed and at peace with yourself” or similar. Figure out what kinds of results matter to prospective clients, and then advertise yourself on that.

Ideally you can say your pitch in less than a minute. The last time I really rehearsed mine was in preparation for the first Manifest—it was:

“I help make people more effective by helping them keep track of tasks, scheduling, making sure they’re working on the most important task at each point and by directly taking on smaller-medium sized problems, where they’re normally the only ones who have enough context to get it done and nobody else would do it.”

My current pitch would be something along the lines of:

“I work as a fixer/chief of staff for CEOs and other interesting people, doing obscure/hard to do projects that wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t involved. I solve weird problems. [examples of weird problems I’ve solved, probably including That Foray Into Investigative Journalism]. These days, that involves…more podcast production than you’d think.”

(You know, you can ask your existing/previous clients “How should I market what I do for other people?” or “What made you want to work with me?” They’re your target audience, after all.)

Pro tip: if a prospective client is interested in working with you, spend the 90 seconds to find a time on the calendar that works for both of you and schedule a follow-up meeting. It makes things default-happen vs default-not-happen.

Create A Good Hire Me Page

Some examples:

For the extremely successful version of this, see Abraham Group.

You want your own website, ideally something that directly has your name in the URL, and an email from that domain: think [email protected]. For the website itself, I suggest Squarespace or Ghost—get Claude to help if you run into problems.

Your hire me page typically serves two purposes:

Prospective clients can figure out if you’re a good fit for them
- Once you’re at a certain point in your pitch/hire me page/career, you transition from “here’s why you should hire me” to “let’s see if we’re a good fit for each other.” From the excellent essay How To Sell:
  - The actual “selling” process goes extremely smoothly if you’ve qualified the person correctly. Most pain is caused by people not doing this qualification process correctly, overselling or underselling their product, and then being mystified by the inevitable “no” / being ghosted by their customer.
    Once you’ve qualified somebody as a good fit for you, actually selling to them is remarkably easy and seems to “just happen” effortlessly. This is one of the most surprising things about sales.
A thing you can send to friends, lovers, etc. so that they can understand what you do and better market you to other people. If you want to get clients by word of mouth, it helps to have a Thing that your friends can point to when trying to pitch you to others.
- The required effort for someone to recommend me to their friend is very low. All they have to do is send a text saying “you should consider working with my friend sammy, he’s great, his website is theguyforthis.com”
- Not having a hire me page means that people have to put more effort into describing you and your work when recommending you, which means that fewer recommendations will happen on the margin.

Things your Hire Me page should have:

A brief intro. “Hi, I’m [NAME]. I do X, Y, and Z.”
An explanation of how, exactly, you provide value to people (especially framed as “I solve these problems you have”). You want to explain to people that you’re good at (making them money/saving them time/accomplishing their goals), that you’ve done that before with similar people, and that you’re reliably competent. This can include:
- past work
- descriptions of the kinds of people you work with
- really just look at my Hire Me page and try really hard to understand what each sentence is trying to communicate. They’re all in there for a reason.
Testimonials from people like the clients you want. You want people to know that you aren’t new to this, and that you can provide value to them the same way you provided value to people before.
- (more on this under Testimonials Testimonials Testimonials)
A concrete call to action. You’d think having an email address is enough, but when I linked my Calendly I got substantially more engagement. So, have a Calendly, where people can schedule a 30 minute call to chat with you about what you might be able to do for them.
- Also worth taking the ten minutes to change all the default text to better fit your use cases. Like “initial client meeting” instead of “30 min meeting”
Maybe a picture of you looking competent and trustworthy? I should add that to mine.
Bonus: have a catchy custom domain like “theguyforthis.com”

Things your Hire Me page doesn’t need:

Your age
A detailed resume
Your LinkedIn
- Link to your twitter or blog or whatever if it signals intelligence and competence, but unless you strongly expect the work experience or education on it will be helpful, a LinkedIn isn’t necessary
A disclaimer that you don’t really know what you’re doing and oh man people might wanna pay you money and that’s weird

If you want me to help you make a Hire Me page, feel free to schedule a meeting with me here. Don’t feel bad about taking up my time — if I’m too busy to do these, I’ll edit this page.

Conversion

“I might want to work with them” -> [initial meeting] -> “great, we figured out exactly what the initial engagement will be and found a rate we’re both happy with”

This is where you establish what working together well might look like. You have an intro call where you agree what a work trial might look like, or you write up a project proposal, or similar. You can do better at this by being better at listening, having a larger range of projects you can do for clients, being skilled at negotiating, and filtering your Hire Me page and friend recommendations for people who’ll actually be a good fit for you.

Handling First Chats

So, someone’s scheduled a meeting with you on Calendly, and wants to maybe hire you. Good job!!! Your marketing paid off! But your work isn’t done. If you did a good job of preparing, your Calendly has something like this, so you have some context going in.

But people don’t always fill those out, or sometimes they’re unhelpful. Either way, look over their website (if their email is at a custom domain, look at that domain), search their name, ask your mutual friends about them, see what you can find about what they do and think about how you might be able to come in handy.

(Pro tip: do a deep research query on “hello, I’d like to potentially be this person’s chief of staff/whatever you do, here’s my hire me page, what should I know?” Works great for job interviews too.)

When the actual call starts, thank them for scheduling, and then (if necessary) say something along the lines of, “typically people start by talking about what they’re working on generally, and the problems they’d like to solve”. You ideally want an idea of how you might be able to help before the call, but listen to the actual things the client says. They know more about what they want.

Class and Confidence

Signal that you’re a reliable professional. You’ll (probably) pick this up as you go along. Communicate like your clients, when possible.

I get that it’s super tempting to present as “oh man, yeah I guess I could do this kinda work, I haven’t done that exact thing before, but I can try!” Frankly, I still feel like this sometimes. But you’re probably underselling yourself, which hurts both your potential client and your own bank account.

Presenting as more matter of fact but grounded: “Yep, I’ve done similar work to this in the past, though I haven’t done that exact kind of task. I don’t always work perfectly with clients, but hey, that’s why we have work trials. Paid work trials, because my time is valuable, because I’m a competent professional.” will open many many more doors for you, and eventually you’ll start feeling it and won’t have to LARP it. Both framings are true!

Going in with a mindset of “This engagement will happen if it’s mutually beneficial, and I’ll charge a rate commensurate with the value I’m providing” is quite helpful in this. Read Patrick McKenzie on salary negotiation for more on this, it’s also broadly excellent.²

Work Trials

Your clients want to be confident you’ll get the job done. Testimonials from people they respect help, but there’s nothing like having worked with you before. If I’m looking for someone to do 40 hours of editing work for a project of mine, I’d be reluctant to hire somebody I haven’t worked alongside already.

Your way around this is a work trial—a small, precisely-scoped engagement where, if you completely drop the ball, the client doesn’t waste much time/money/energy but you have an opportunity to prove your usefulness.

Try to work with the client to find a smaller version of the broader project, where it’s still a decent chunk of work, but isn’t so much of a commitment that they’re taking on a large risk if you don’t deliver.

When I was mostly doing executive assistant work, my go-to work trial was “let’s do a series of calls where we go through everything in your life and track your commitments, to-dos, schedule, etc. in a giant google doc, and then I check in with you regularly for a month to help make sure you do that.” Not only was this directly helpful to them, but it also gave me important context on their life, which helps me understand where I can be helpful in a larger engagement.

Pricing (Charge More)

*(There’s no such thing as getting paid nothing—you’re always getting paid something, even if it’s not denominated in dollars)

You get paid on how much value you provide. So, if you’d like to get paid more, this leaves you with two options:

Provide more value — do a better job, or do a different job
Find a client for whom your services generate more value

For example: making a local realtor 2x more effective at inbound marketing will be a lot less valuable than making Dell Computer 2x more effective at inbound marketing. If I make Emmett Shear 5% more effective, that generates a lot of value in the world, and I get to invoice him for some of that value. So, it’s good to focus on finding clients who already create a lot of value in the world, and then focus on making them more effective.

In practice this looks like “work with cool rich people.” If there are specific people that you want to work with who can’t afford those rates, charge them what they can afford and cross-subsidize by raising rates for other people. If there’s work you enjoy doing less, charge more for it—the hand of the market will ensure that you have to do it less often and you’ll get paid well when it’s worth it to the client.

Some other pricing heuristics:

Try not having a public rate and instead asking people, “how much is this worth to you?” They will often name a rate much higher than you expected.
If your calendar is full, or you’re booked out for the next couple months, raise your rates. Every time I hear about someone having a high rate and being booked over a year in advance, I immediately think, “wow, their rate still isn’t high enough!”
At one point I had 23 people schedule intro calls with me because of this thread, and after a certain point I just started increasing my rate after each call. It took longer for people to start saying “no” than I expected.

You probably would prefer making more money and working 80% of your maximum capacity over being overbooked at a lower rate..

A final anecdote about Charging More:

Then Hirata turned to me and said, “You know, we are interested in learning what it would take to acquire a motion picture studio. We would like to know what you would charge to help us.”

I had had my answer planned for weeks. “We’ll charge you nothing,” I said, “unless the job we do makes you happy. If you’re not happy, we’d like only our expenses—no fees.” Hirata said, “And if we’re happy?” “If you’re happy?” I looked him in the eye. “We’d like you to hire a Brink’s truck loaded with gold and send it to our office.”

– Michael Ovitz on the time he helped Panasonic buy a film studio (and got paid $135 million for it), Who Is Michael Ovitz

Put It In Writing

Whenever you and a client agree to a rate for an engagement, immediately put it in writing. This is less to stop your client from fucking you over (which happens very rarely), but more because one of you might forget the details of what you agreed to. It is embarrassing how many times I’ve said, “what rate did we agree to again? It was $X, right?” Send the rate for the engagement over email or Signal, and then ask the client to acknowledge it in that channel.

Do The Work (and Run Your Business)

I can’t tell you how to do your work, but I can give you some advice on how to talk to clients during the engagement. If possible, give daily updates on how things are going over text/email–you never want your client wondering, “did they drop the ball and stop working on this?” People flake all the time, so you don’t want to flake or look like you’re flaking.

On a similar note, try to respond to client texts/calls immediately whenever possible, and always by the end of the day. A friend of mine has a system where, if she gets an email and can’t immediately respond, she starts a 4 hour timer and makes sure she responds by the time it hits 0. I’d do closer to 30 min or 1hr if possible. Partially, this is to stop a ten sentence conversation from taking three days because of slow response times. Partially, this is to remind your client that you are Competent and Working On It.

Also – by virtue of becoming a freelancer, you are now a small business with one employee. Lots of advice on running a small business is now applicable to you.

Getting Paid

When you’ve done the work you agreed on, send an invoice to the client over email so they can pay you. It’s standard for invoices to be due 30 days after they’re sent–be prepared to wait that long for clients to pay you, and for you to have to ping them repeatedly for the work you’ve done. While writing this essay, I got paid $4k that was 3 months overdue. That’s far from the worst story I have about this. Stripe Invoicing is great, or just use invoice-generator.com. (h/t E) You might want to ask your clients to pay you biweekly for greater consistency.

Keep a spreadsheet of every time you get paid and how much was reimbursement—you’ll need it come tax season. You’ll probably need to save 20-30% for taxes, though this varies by income level and deductions. Because you’re not an employee, freelancers must handle their own tax payments. Use a tax calculator like this one to get a better idea of how much to set aside.

Also—when possible, prefer your clients buying things to you buying things on their behalf and seeking reimbursement after the fact. Have the slightly awkward conversation of “hey, I prefer to directly expense things to clients instead of getting reimbursed, is there a credit card of yours I could use for this?” Don’t be like Past Sammy, who borrowed money from his dad to pay for a work trip because he didn’t have enough money in his account to pay for both the flight and the hotel.

(Sophisticated clients prefer it this way, too. It simplifies their bookkeeping and records and removes management friction from their relationship with you. They are not bringing you on because they need a cheap capital source. h/t Patrick McKenzie)

Budgeting can be a pain in the ass—you’ll want a spreadsheet tracking your current cash, invoices you’ve sent but haven’t been paid for, work you’ve done but haven’t invoiced for, tax obligations, etc—that spreadsheet will typically have pretty different results than the simple look at “how much money is currently in the account?

Loyalty and Advocacy

“Great, thanks for your good work on this!” -> “You should work with [me, again, on another project]/[my friend who needs a contractor]”

If you do a good job, your clients like you so much that they actively help you find more people to work with. Sometimes this is a testimonial, sometimes it’s a tweet thread with 200k views about how great it is to work with you.

If you’re good at your job, it’s incentive-compatible for your clients to recommend you to other people! See also a future essay of mine on networks.

A majority of my clients these days come from word of mouth. I’ll get texts like this one:

You can encourage this by Doing A Good Job, asking for testimonials (so your happy clients vouch for you whenever people look at your website), being secure in a niche so your friends/clients can better market you, and occasionally asking “do you know anyone else who’d be a good client?”

Testimonials Testimonials Testimonials

The testimonials on my hire me page are better marketing than I ever could have written for myself.

You should basically always ask your clients for a testimonial after completing an engagement, especially if they’re interested in working with you again. In theory, it’s rude to ask for a testimonial if you fucked up the engagement—in practice, new freelancers tend to assume they did a worse job than they actually did, and as such should let the client be the one to say no to the testimonial.

Typically when I ask for a testimonial, I get a response of “sure, here’s [incredibly nice testimonial that I wouldn’t have ever written for myself]” or “sure, can you write one for me and have me check it to make sure I support it?” Both of those are good outcomes, and I still don’t ask for testimonials as often as I should. Don’t make my mistakes—make new, interesting mistakes that inspire the next version of this essay.

Testimonials can also be interactive social proof—if your prospective client knows the guy who wrote you that testimonial, they’ll probably shoot them a text along the lines of “hey, what was it like working with Sammy? I saw you gave him a testimonial”. If your client was happy with you, having them directly vouch for you is a very effective way to get clients.

Wanna know how this tweet thread came to be? I was on the phone with Patrick, asked him for a testimonial and to tweet my hire me page, he said “sure!” and started writing the testimonial+tweet in a shared google doc. I saw it and said “hmm, maybe if you framed it as ‘here’s what I learned working with an EA’ that’d be More Useful Content and also better advertising?” Patrick said “sure” and then wrote the above thread. You are responsible for advocating for yourself. If you want good outcomes, you need to ask for them.

You Want A Niche

My work typically falls into two types of jobs:

“I’ve never done this before, but I’ll figure it out!”
“This is the fifth time I’ve done this particular thing, I know what I’m doing.”

I highly recommend having something that you can basically just copy-paste between engagements—some examples of good niches:

Podcast production for tech clients
Helping large businesses in 2010 increase conversion rates
Doing woo-looking massage for tech clients while signaling you speak their language
- More broadly, a lot of professions/industries have the unspoken assumption that everyone in every other industry is inferior because they aren’t smart/creative/hardworking enough to make it in My Industry. If you can say “oh yeah, I used to dabble in Your Industry, but I chose to do this thing instead”, they will respect you more and trust that you’ll understand the idiosyncratic needs of Their Industry.
  - (a more positive way to word this: in a world with infinite choice, speaking the language of your clients helps them understand it’s the right choice for them.)
Running the same workshop for different companies
Filling open roles for burgeoning biotech startups; finding biotech folks jobs at burgeoning startups (h/t Saul Munn)
Writing literature reviews/meta-analyses/systematic reviews that are Actually Good and Helpful for Important People (h/t Saul Munn)

Being known for doing a specific thing also helps with word of mouth, because if someone’s like “hmm, we should maybe have a podcast studio” your friend can say “oh yeah, Sammy’s good at that, let’s call him in for a consult,” in a way that might not happen if you purely advertise yourself as a generalist.

That kind of domain-specific knowledge can also turn you into a consultant. For the thing that I arguably have the most domain-specific knowledge in (podcast production), my value comes from:

Ten sentences of alpha on how to produce podcasts
Being a good project manager generally

Through the magic of capitalism, a 30 minute conversation in which I explain those ten sentences of alpha and answer questions becomes a consultation, for which I can charge…more money than you might expect.

Good Luck Out There

For many people, the hardest thing about freelancing isn’t client outreach or negotiation—it’s giving yourself the permission to actually try in the first place.

I hope this essay is helpful to you! If you have follow up questions, want help with your Hire Me page, or want to tell me about your experience freelancing, email me at hath@[this site] or book a time on my Calendly..

If you’re a freelancer (or an aspirational freelancer!), fill out this form, and I’ll reach out if I have something you’re suited for.

And don’t forget—have fun!

If you liked this post, you might be interested in working with me.

and if you want to read the next thing I write, subscribe here:

Thanks to Patrick McKenzie, Elara Creative Consultancy, Ozy Brennan, Duncan Sabien, Henry Bass, Amina Tushakova, Sasha Chapin, Saul Munn, Elena Lake, Parker Conley, Justis Mills, and Azmyth for giving feedback on drafts of this essay—if not for them, this wouldn’t be here.

Topics I didn’t write about (but I might later):

Concrete first steps for getting freelance work
Networks, Legibility, and Fixers
Managing client relationships
Why not to be a freelancer
How to work with busy people
How to write a good proposal
You can fire your clients—here’s when you should
Things To Use LLMs For
How To Get Things Done

Notably, most “marketing” that people notice in the world is annoying, poorly-targeted, or otherwise unhelpful. Good marketing is none of those things. ↩
Unfortunately the follow-up strategy of “work for him for a year and a half”, while extremely effective, doesn’t scale to non-Sammys. ↩