How to work as a freelancer?

[jpnbino]

Hi Folks,

at first, thanks to ecworks for make me think about this subject with his topic "freelance PCB designer".

So, I had never worked as a Freelancer professionally. How does it happens? Could you share some experiences?

Some questions I have are:
Is there always a contract?
How does the requirements are made?
How does the payment process occurs? (Some percent before and the rest later)
How could be if I offer my job on this forum?
Which documentation should I always afford for the customer?
What type of portifolio should I have?
... and so on.

Well, There is a plenty of questions from my side as I am a noob on this but I want make sure that I don't make some basics mistakes. I would appreciate to listen some advices and cases of you.


Thanks in advance,

João Paulo

[robertferanec]

Hello jpnbino. I will make a post on this topic.

[jpnbino]

Hi, robertferanec. Thank you !

[robertferanec]

jpnbino I hope this video will answer some of your questions: How to work as a freelancer? The key topics …

Answers to some of your other questions:

Is there always a contract?
- Depends how you plan it, but it's never 100% guaranteed.

How does the requirements are made?
- Client makes specification (or should make it)

How does the payment process occurs? (Some percent before and the rest later)
- I mostly did part of the job first and asked for payments after that.

How could be if I offer my job on this forum?
- You can try post here or you can try also other forums, e.g. the eevblog

Which documentation should I always afford for the customer?
- I am not really sure what do you mean by "afford".

What type of portifolio should I have?
- You may want to list all your projects, you never know what clients will be looking for. This is example what I have (it has not been updated for a while): http://www.fedevel.com/projects

[jpnbino]

robertferanec , Thank you so much for the video!!!

Yes, indeed, the video answered me a lot of questions and gave me some important clues for my career. I could think really hard about where I am and where I wanna be... It has cleared my mind because I could draw the whole picture of what means to be a Freelancer.

Which documentation should I always afford for the customer?
- I am not really sure what do you mean by "afford".

By afford I meant what docs( Gerber, .SchDoc, .PcbDoc, BOM and so on) should I give to my client and I think I already have the answer which is here : http://www.fedevel.com/how-do-i-work

Thanks for the eevblog tip... I have already registered.

Btw, your Portifolio is great. There is a lot of knowledge on those boards. Challenging designs

[robertferanec]

Thank you jpnbino. I am very happy you found it useful

[mairomaster]

Great video! I wonder how you have enough time to create such content and such long articles. It looks like lots of effort.

[robertferanec]

Thank you mairomaster It took two days to prepare the article and video.