Nobody understands the phrase “time is money” as well as a freelancer.
But selling your time presents challenges.
While salary employees are selling their time in year-long blocks, freelancers are selling their time in hours, days, weeks, months, quarters, projects, and any other shape they can carve out of their lifespan.
To add to the complexity, freelancers might sell their time to multiple clients. Salary employees only have one buyer.
Plus, you might not be able to predict how much time your client might need in a given week. Some weeks might be slow, and others might be painfully busy.
There are ways to handle these challenges.
First, charge more than you think you should. Remember to price in the risk of not being guaranteed the same amount every paycheck. And companies are saving a lot of money by hiring you as a freelancer instead of as a full-time employee with benefits. Price that in too.
You can also hedge your risk by changing the units of time you’re selling. If you want more stability, sell larger chunks. Months if you can make it work. If you prefer flexibility, sell smaller chunks.
Some people are adamant that you should never charge hourly. I disagree. The larger the unit of time, the more stability you get, but the higher the barrier to entry for clients. Charging hourly can lower the commitment needed for a potentially great long-term client. Think of hourly rates like a casual fling that can turn into a long-term relationship.
No matter how you sell your time as a freelancer, your workload will be unpredictable from week to week. The more clients you have, the more your variability. Having multiple clients might be a good way to hedge against slow weeks, but you have to make sure you can handle the crazy weeks. Do not let the quality of your work suffer. Further, you are probably worth a lot more as an expert with deep knowledge specific to one business than as a pixel pusher cranking out mockups for anyone who asks. So you might be better off taking on less work, but take on difficult work that you can establish deep knowledge in.
Finally, you should learn new skills when the work is slow. Freelancing is great in this way. By learning to see your time as a precious asset, you’ll learn how to direct your own growth and expose yourself to opportunities. Diversify your skills portfolio.
How do you decide which skills to develop? Look at the work you do every day. Find the places where you feel limited. These are the edges of you expertise. For example, as a designer you might feel trapped in Figma and you wish you had some basic coding skills so you could bring your designs to life. Maybe you wish you understood the underlying economics of the business you’re working for.
Technical skills tend to translate more directly into money than soft skills, because a technical skill is a distinct activity so it’s very obvious when you’re being paid to do it. But non-technical skills and deep domain knowledge are extremely valuable as well and should not be ignored.
Here are some of the skills I learned:
Learn to code
If you’re a designer, you should learn to code. Just do it. You will thank yourself later. It’s not easy, but you can do it with patience and persistence.
The truth is that this skill took a long time to “monetize” for me. Nobody is going to pay you to know the absolute basics of Javascript, but you have to learn them (or similar fundamentals depending on the platform you’re focused on). It’s a long road. When I started learning Javascript my goal was to get paid to write code within a year. I think it took me a year and two months before I got paid to write code, and even then, I was only writing messy code for a landing page with an email collection form.
But as a designer you have an advantage: you are already sitting very close to the code. You don’t have to “break in to the industry” in a dramatic way. You just have to find useful ways to fit code into your workflow. For me, that started as prototyping interactions. It started with simple hover animations in CSS, and grew into more creative ways to express interactions in React. But once you show this skill to a team, you would be amazed at how the work keeps coming. Suddenly, people are asking you to build things you don’t know how to build – and this is great, because you’ll learn on the job. Over time, those learnings compound, and you’re getting paid to learn.
If you can only learn one new skill as a designer, learn to code. Stick with it until you get paid to do it, and then you won’t be able to go back if you wanted to.
Learn motion graphics
Similar to code, as a designer you probably have people asking you to animate things in ways that can’t be done with simple CSS transitions, or in Figma prototypes. Maybe you want to help out with a motion graphics video, or maybe you want to incorporate some Lottie animations into the product you’re designing. You can learn the basics of After Effects in a weekend or even an evening. This will give you enough skills to add simple animations to an app, for example. And like the coding example before, once you demonstrate this ability to your team, they will ask you to keep doing it. At this point it’s like getting paid to do homework assignments: people ask you, “Can you make this face icon wink and smile?”. You have no idea how, but you’re confident you can figure it out. Your skills keep building in this way, and you’re being paid to learn because you’re finding the answer and delivering quickly.
Motion graphics – especially in the context of Lottie animations in marketing websites and product design – is a great skill to learn. It’s an especially expressive form of design that not every designer knows how to do. Similar to coding, you will set yourself apart, and you’ll make fun stuff in the process.
Learn the hot new design tool
We’re seeing an explosion of innovation in design tools. Think about how comfortable you were in Photoshop until Sketch came around. Just when you got comfortable in Sketch, Figma came around. These upheavals are great, because they’re usually due to the fact that the hot new tool saves designers time, or helps them design better products. Chances are, you’ve had your eye on a tool that you’re curious about. Go and play with it. Have fun. Try some tutorials. See what you can make. Even if the industry doesn’t switch over completely to the new tool, you might find a clever way to enhance your output. Or the tool itself might teach you a new way to think about design.
Sell your byproducts
I learned this term from Rework, an excellent book from Jason Fried and DHH. The idea is that in your work, you’re solving problems all the time. If you have a problem, chances are that someone else has the same problem. So you should sell your solutions so other people can use them.
You should absolutely do this. First, it makes you more thoughtful about your work. Second, it teaches you to scale small solutions into a business. It doesn’t have to be an earth-shattering innovation. Maybe you have a set of icons you made. Sell them. Maybe you have a Figma file with templates for various email apps so you can mock up email designs. Sell it for a few bucks.
For me, I noticed that I was dragging and dropping screenshots into my design files many times per day. It was a great way to pull in notes from a Slack conversation, or to reference the UI from the production website while I design a new feature, and so on. But it was tedious to find my screenshots on my computer, position the Finder window on top of my design file, and drag and drop.
I thought, “wouldn’t it be great if I could just click an icon in my Mac menu bar and see all my recent screenshots so I can drag them into my design file?”.
I figured if I was having this problem, others might have it too.
So I launched Shotty and the reception on Product Hunt was amazing. It turned out that it wasn’t just designers who could use this. I’ve had engineers, students, journalists, architects, and doctors tell me that Shotty is an important part of their workflow.
The added income is a nice bonus too. By selling your byproducts, you can diversify further by selling things other than your time.
Learn Google Web Designer
This one is so random. I had never heard of Google Web Designer. It’s a clunky WYSIWYG editor for HTML5 ads. But don’t turn your nose up at it. Ads are often an important piece of a client’s strategy both for branding and customer acquisition. So if you can reach into that world as a designer, you can make sure the ads (often the first touchpoint with users) express your brand in a thoughtful way. You can actually get pretty creative with animation in Google Web Designer, and you can even use Javascript, HTML, and CSS.
I learned the basics of Google Web Designer in an afternoon trying to help animate an ad, and ended up creating a whole ad campaign of animated ads at various sizes, with different colors and copy that could be A/B tested.
Learn deck design
Designers who fancy themselves Product Designers have probably been asked many times to design a slide deck. I know, I know, it’s so beneath you as a Product Designer, right? Maybe not. Sure, Google Slides is clunky, and the font selection is weak. But you might be surprised how valuable deck design can be. In the startup world, slide decks are often used to raise millions of dollars from investors. Applying design in this context can make or break a startup, and smart people know this.
The technical aspect of this skill isn’t really the point. It’s the ability to communicate. It’s the ability to really understand what someone else is trying to say and showing them how they can say it most effectively.
Read books
Books expand your mind. They are the antidote to our ever shortening attention spans and shallow thinking. They allow you to explore a new topic in-depth, written by an expert. The more you read, the more you’ll be able to connect ideas together, often across disciplines. You’ll see new ways of approaching problems in your work. You’ll have a better understanding of the machinations that underlie the world you operate in. You’ll gain perspective.
Anyway, this was a longer post than I expected. It’s the weekend! Bye!