The Business Loop
The Freelance Mindset #3
The year was 2021. I had quit my job. Took a long break. My brain wanted to work again. I was sitting in front of the computer, not knowing what to do. No more Jira tasks, No more meetings, No more managers. Common advice is to create freelancing profiles. That was up, sitting there doing nothing. It took me 8 months to figure out what a sustainable freelancing business would look like. I had to carve out my way of running my business. I call it The Business Loop.
This is the 3rd essay of a multi-part series called The Freelance Mindset.
The Business Loop
I highly recommend you read (1 & 2) before moving further
What should you do when you jump into the ocean of freelancing? Create a freelancing profile on different websites. Yes, that’s obvious. Figure out what you want to sell. Perfect. What next? Here is exactly where things went black. For most of us, this alone is not enough, i.e., this is not bringing clients to our door. We tweaked our profile and offered a little bit here and there, and in a matter of 2-3 months, we would lose all motivation.
Your aspiration for freelancing might be freedom, control, and variety, but ultimately, for a business to run sustainably, it has to make money, and it has to have a consistent stream of clients using the service you’re providing.
Throughout this series, I have comfortably left out specific business keywords. Not anymore. Marketing, Sales, and Service are the three main business keywords. No matter what business you run, you’ll constantly switch gears between one of these to maintain an ever-flowing, sustainable business.
So, you’ve put up your freelancing profile. Are people DMing you already? Then you don’t have to do any more marketing. It’s already working. Work on converting these potential clients. Devise a solution based on your client’s needs. Convince them to work with you and Deliver.
It’s been 2 weeks since your profile was up, and no prospective clients are knocking on your door, starting with marketing. Showcase your work and earn credibility.
You have a living business when
You have a compelling, unique service that you can uniquely provide
You are reaching more and more people via your work
People trust you to get work done by you
Service
Service can be divided into two parts: packaging and Delivery. Unlike marketing or sales, this is so unique that you must determine what works by trial and error. This is like a chef coming up with their signature recipes.
Packaging: What to sell?
Selling becomes much easier when you know
what are you selling?
My initial fivver profile looked like that of a fresher. It had all the skills under the radar. It had Python, which I had a lot of experience with, but it also had ReactJS, which I had zero experience with. This is casting a wider net, showing that you’re a jack of all trades never works.
Things started working only when I dropped everything and focused purely on “Airflow-related Data and infrastructure Problems”. Your service is not just your skills but how you present it to stand out.
How are you going to deliver it?
Is it a consulting call over Zoom, MVP for startups, automation code, or a design or code review session? Have a few of these under your belt. Refine them to accommodate your client's needs.
Here are a few Examples,
3 Zoom refinement sessions, 1 hour each, at 100$ per hour.
The project will be scoped and refined in 2 weeks. During the scoping, we will establish a milestone-based delivery system
Fulfillment: Delivery
Fulfillment is when you deliver what you promised to your client. During the sales process, we earn a degree of tr. Only by satisfactorily providing the service can we retain their business.
You order a 13” pizza from Zomato, and imagine they deliver 8” how pissed would you be? Exactly. Don’t leave people with a bad taste. Deliver what you promise even better, under promise over-deliver.
Marketing
Marketing has a bad rep among software engineers. We hate marketing so much that people have to come up with a new term called “Developer Advocacy” to sell to us. It’s no surprise that most of us are uncomfortable pitching our skills and capabilities to the outside world. Forget the world. We have so much trouble highlighting our achievements for appraisal reviews. We find it flashy and artificial. After all, why would we write catchy lines? We only like cryptic languages.
Let me reframe marketing for you, “Marketing is a vehicle that takes your work and puts it in front of the right people”. Take a look around your room. Look at the things you own. How did you come across them? Blog post? Reddit? Friend recommended? Marketing is the visible and invisible force that drives a product from induction to the hands of the right people.
So, how does marketing look for Software Engineers trying to sell their skills? You don’t have to do anything flashy. Unlike most marketing, showcasing your skills shouldn’t be gimmicks and games. We stand for quality and outcome. The real value.
Establish credibility.
Credibility is the strongest vehicle. Why would someone miles away, seeing your work on a laptop screen, trust you? Because you’ve done it before, you’ve done it well, you’ve been consistent.
One of the easiest ways to establish credibility is by sharing knowledge. I use public speaking, teaching, and blog posts like this one as a way to share my knowledge. As a side effect, I get to showcase my work to the world.
For example, I have been dealing with all kinds of Airflow problems for 3 years; when I started consulting, I’d get on Zoom calls to solve the same kind of problems again and again. It got boring. I compiled them all into a single blog post. This blog post got credit from one of the core contributors of Airflow. It was later published in Airflow’s Slack group under the troubleshooting page. As a side effect of all this, this blog post became the biggest source by which my potential clients could reach me. People read this article and jump on my DM because they face similar problems and need expert advice.
You can use code as your credibility. Write a tool, write automation, highlight the problem in an open-source project you already use, and propose your fix. Challenge an existing state-of-the-art best practice. Who wouldn’t want to hire a contributor to an open-source project used by 1000s of other people?
By establishing credibility,, you will attract people with baseline trust in you. You can code, you’re consistent, and you’re constantly learning.
Marketing software engineering skills = Showcasing your skills = Establishing Credibility.
Sales
Sales is not about selling. Sales happen way before when someone opens their wallet or signs a contract. Sales happen in stages. It often starts with a DM, an email, or an introductory call. So be reachable. People should be able to write to you. Have your Email or DMs open. If not, it’s equal throwing your marketing efforts down the drain.
In the DMs, people would already ask for specific help; if not, ask for more details. If you find it compelling, set up an Exploratory call. An exploratory call where they talk to you about the problems they face. Quote examples of problems you’ve faced before and how you solved them. The signing might not happen in this call.
At this point, Be prepared to be rejected or ghosted. It’s not all rosy on the other side. However, a potential client rejecting you or going silent is not a sign of your worth; it is just a misfit. Put them on a backlog client list; write to them when you have something new to offer.
The problem with engineers, as we discussed in the past essays, is that we need quick wins. We end up discarding these early connections rather than nurturing them. It’s about creating connections that will eventually become a long-lasting business.
People talking to you is a sign that your marketing is working. Your message reaches the right people (sometimes wrong people, too). When it happens, rather than shutting the doors, give it a shot. Get on a call. Sales calls are the interviews of the freelancing world. Earn their TRUST.
Marketing, Sales, and service are the three pedals that move the Business car forward. Knowing which lever to press to keep the car moving without running out of gas is the art of running a good business. For example, if you press too hard on marketing and sales and end up signing too many deals, now you’re context-switching every day and trying to serve them all. Bite only as much as you can chew.
This balancing act is what we call Business Operations. The invisible power, the very visible arrows, keeps the business alive and moving. You cannot have a deadline next week while preparing for a conference talk. An operational understanding of your business state allows you to balance and plan your day-to-day activities.