SW Freelancing, How to Start?

Just wondering if anyone is willing to share some advice in how I could get started doing freelance SW work. I'm struggling with Pro/E during my day job, and its a joy when I get to do personal stuff with SW, wouldn't mind making a few bucks at it.


Thanks in advance for any and all suggestions.


Erich

Hi Erich,


I do freelancing with SW and ProE. I mainly get my work through contacts that I know in the past. Earlier this year a toolingcompany I worked with in the past were looking one of their guys trained in SW so I did 6 days training with him over a3 month period. This company were making tools for a food company who required some 3D CAD work so the tooling company passed my name on. I've now done 15 different jobs for them and hopefully it looks like this will continue for a long time. Word of mouth is a strong tool which if you're good at your work will be your best friend. However if you miss deadlines and produce poor work it will be your worst enemy and bad news tends to spread quicker than good.


You could try approaching prototype companies, universities, people you have worked with in the past and see if you can get any leads.


Michael

I use www.guru.com





good luck

Never heard of guru.com - looks interesting. Quick question: I was scanning the "reviews" and noticed the "amount earned" seemed low for most of the folks. Is it that that many customers only want to hire someone for only a few hours?


I would be looking for a longer term relationship w/ a customer. Of course a job that's onlya few hours would be good for moonlighting.

lol... orbsah....


Its better to start a relationship before you look at long term...


baby steps .. crawl .. walk .. run as fast as you can...


good luck

orbsah,


I worked for a design consultancy for 18 months. Initially they took most clients that came to them with work but after a while all they wanted was the big clients and ones who wanted to do multiple projects with them. That's all ok until 2 of the large clients who were involved in networking went under cause of the dot com crash. We had no smaller clients to keep us afloat and hence a few of us were made redundant. I agree to a point with ttraser. Start off small and build your relationship with these clients. If you do good work they will almost certainly come back to you for more. It's always good to have lots of smaller jobs/ clients to fill the gaps of bigger projects. I do think you should be looking to be with them long term, that is the ultimate goal but do take baby steps to begin.


Michael