Working On Elance

For about a year now, I’ve been running my business through elance.com. Elance is a web-based agency which connects freelancers with employers: most people there are hired on a project basis; Elance takes a percentage of project fees. Think of it as eBay for freelancers.

I first read about Elance in The Four Hour Work Week, and decided to give it a try as a place to hire people to work for me. As an experiment, I set up a profile to advertise myself as a freelance Rails developer, too. 

The hiring people thing didn’t go anywhere. The freelance thing? Well, that went pretty well.

Two Incomes, But Not In A Good Way

Before I started using Elance, I was doing a mixture of website design and website development work (for the uninitiated, design work involves making websites look nice; development work involves making websites do cool stuff — think Facebook or Twitter).

To be honest, the website design work was a bit of a nightmare. I’ve heard it said that website design is one of the worst freelance businesses you can get into, and after giving it a try I definitely agree: a combination of hundreds of bad designers, plus clients who don’t know how to recognise a bad designer, makes getting good work a nightmare.

The website development work, on the other hand, was fun: interesting, challenging, and better paid. The thing was, I couldn’t find enough clients to make it pay full time. I’d tried job sites and direct sales, with some success, but I still had to lean on the crutch of that awful, boring design work: my business was split down the middle, and it was stressing me out.

A Very Un-British Confession

At this point, I’ll mention something quite personal (which we British don’t do often): for the past ten years I’ve had some serious problems with my health. Not life-threatening, but life-changing: something that stopped me doing a lot of the stuff I took for granted. I had to fit my life around my illness, to help me take control: freelancing became a necessity, not a choice — I needed the flexibility.

When you’re sick, stress is bad. Stress at work is very bad, because we spend most of our time working. Stress with my design work was dragging me back into the state I was in five years earlier, when my illness was really bad — I hated it. 

Starting Small & Growing

In September 2010, I got my first job on Elance. It was a small piece of work: basically a test, designed by the client to check I could do what I said I could do. I passed the test; the client gave me more work. Suddenly I was making money.

Things really grew from there. I didn’t imagine I’d do as well as I have: clients appeared from nowhere (Elance’s reach is amazing) and after about six months I was turning people away, taking my pick of the best clients and the best projects. It was, and is, an amazing situation to be in and I count myself very lucky.

It’s Not About The Money

I don’t normally talk about money, but I’ve earned about $70,000 through Elance since September 2010. To most people that’s just a number, but five years ago I was too sick to walk, working a part-time office admin job where the manager treated me with zero respect — $70,000 in a year isn’t about money, it’s about progress.

I’m sharing this to show that a turnaround is possible if you’re open to new ideas. Elance has (in some circles) a reputation as being a place to go to get bad work for bad money: I disagree. For me at least, it’s been transformative.