[Advice wanted] I want to start freelancing as a software developer. I am 23 years old and I develop software since 2 years, since 6 Months I work as a working student in software development.

I am kind of feared that I am still to inexperienced, I am afraid of failing. What do you think? You got any advice/ experience you want to share?

Are you able to bill 60% of your time from the start and constantly?
Do you know how much your hourly rate has to be, in order to be competitive?
Do you think that you can deliver a product on time and on budget that brings value to your customer?

If you already have ~2.5 years of dev experience, what are you fearing of?

@asgs problem is if he cant deliver what the client wants as a freelancer hes gonna get a bad reputation which will ruin his portfolio and end his freelancing career because no one will want to hire a 1/5 star freelancer

@heyheni
Basically yes to all questions.

Thanks so far for the responses :)

@SukMikeHok oh, never knew he pursuing the freelancing angle. Freelancing is tough and leads to lots of hurdles.

@Sirhennihau If you are looking out for employment, that is a different story and relatively easier to handle. While you are employed, you can start from zero in the freelancing area.

Find a small niche
Make list of competitors
Make a master list of features
Improve the ux
Ad a few of your own unique feature write the software, should take no more than a month or its to big
Put up salesletter
Sell to end users
Get residuals for years
Repeat as needed

I would say that you learn to s more doing your own stuff than working for someone else. It will make you a better dev much faster but you will probably not learn some important parts about industry standards.

Also if you make a mistake because of those important parts you are gonna have a bad time. And when you are the fan that the shit hits it will make you incredibly stressed.

I worked for a company that now survives based on luck, at any time they could be sued and fixing their mistake would take 2 years. They made their own cms with no security and no way to roll out updates so now they have 150 websites. If one person finds a security vulnerability that has a very high likelihood then they can potentially breach all sites..

They didn't even version the software or log who is using what...

Get a few job at good companies that practice high industry standards, avoid bs in interviews like yes we do that but there are many ways to do that and we do our own way. Then do your own.

Time and material is always easier then fixed price. You can try to find some at remote.com

If you can read documentation and follow it. You don't have to be afraid of anything just get a client everything will fall in place.

Fun Story: My first was file security related. In first meeting project manager was talking about Macros and OLE had no idea heck he was saying.just kept noding
Took us 2 months to complete the project now it has been deployed over a large network
Told my manager about this during a one on one meeting and he still laughs about it everytime we meet
Moral:Don't be afraid just take the first step