Isn't most freelance work a race to the bottom? This would be great, but most online job boards seem to go to the lowest bidder (who normally works for $10-12 an hour)
Remote freelance work is a race to the bottom. A better way to earn some extra money is to build a small service (SAAS) like OLark, or, Launchrock, and charge $10/month. Support your customers with a passion, add customers slowly, and before you know it, you will have 100 customers. That will earn you $12K every year forever. It is far better than doing odd programming jobs for others, there is no capital required, and, it is a far more certain way to make extra money than developing an App for iOS or Android.
If getting 12k/yr in annual in revenue is easy, then getting 1MM/yr is also easy (after going from 0->100, just make two more hops: 100->1000 and 1000->10000). Since we know that building a MM/yr business is anything but easy, one of our assumptions must be wrong. Which one is it?:
a) 0 -> 100 users is easy
b) 100 -> 1000 users is easy
c) 1000 -> 10000 users is easy
My gut feeling is that a) is actually the hardest step.
There are plenty of niches where the total market is smaller than a thousand users. It simply isn't worth a startup or existing businesses time.
For example I know a guy who sells detailed study guides for software engineering subjects tailored to his university. Even if he captured 100% of the market he would have maybe 300 paying customers.
Last time I spoke with him he was earning around 20k from the guides and another 30k from tutoring the students. An extra $50k on the side as an individual is massive but it's not really worth it to a growth focused business.
No. 0->100 is not easy (I know from my own experience), but it is a realistic goal and you can get there slowly. Adding even one user every weekday, you will get to 100 in six months. But, and this is a big one, if you support your users well, you will get referrals -- which is the best way to grow.
My whole point is to go for recurring revenues, and, aim for slow, sustainable growth. If you want to go for 10K users, you will need funding. And, that will be a much, much riskier path.
That kind of freelancing is yes, however, finding local clients who you can meet face to face to genuinely provide value to their business and you'll make decent money. Do a few talks at local business meetups on something really simple, like "5 Steps on how to win business online" or something, then just run through things like, get a website up, sign up to social media and update it, get involved in online trade forums, put "how to" videos on youtube and get listed on google places, etc. Theres your talk, and theres easily more than 10k - 15k a year, theres a full time wage.
I get paid ~$150/hour for freelance work I perform on the side of my Big-Corp job. If you sell yourself as high quality you can get paid as high quality.
If the only value you add is 'I can do it cheaper than the other guy' then yes it is a race to the bottom. However, I would strongly urge your consider what type of signaling 'I can do it cheaper than the other guy' sends to serious people who have serious amounts of money to get it done without too much involvement from them.
That's always been my problem with it: unless you consider $10/hr good pay (and some people do, and there's nothing wrong with that), but $15k at $10/hr is almost another full-time job. If you're in North America, you can get $10/hr or so as a greeter at Wal Mart.
You'll get paid a lot more in person. Go to local tech meetups. Many already have a who's looking/who's hiring announcement at the end any many others will let you take the podium for a minute to ask, not to mention the person to person networking afterword eating and the like.
