If you have gone remote recently, what is some good advice?

If you're going to use the same PC for work and non-work, install a separate OS for work. It will help maintain work-life balance.

Also, decide on your work schedule and follow it strictly. You don't want to spread your work over entire day. You won't get anything useful done during breaks and you'll feel like you were working the whole day.

@gronostaj I just started freelancing and it almost feels like I am getting no work done unless I finish something pulling an all nighter.

Tell us what you do? :D
What's your service that you offer?
How do you acquire customers?
Did you think the financial part through? Are you able to bill at least 60% of your time to the customer? (40% is for acquiring customer, marketing, and other paper / bookkeeping stuff)

organise yourself
Without a kanban board i'm lost. I'm happy www.zenkit.com but you as a developer i think https://www.gitkraken.com/glo is better as it integrates with git (gitkraken) and shows tasks and issues directly in VS Code.

maybe have a look at www.zendesk.com in order to manage your customer inquieries and communication.

For accounting and sending Invoices https://www.waveapps.com

Also use www.zappier.com to connect and automate your saas software.

@heyheni
I am offering machine learning related services. End-to-end. Mainly working with TensorFlow and GCP.
Most of my clients are from Upwork.

I don't think I am billing 60% lol. I want to have a reputation first than I will charge more. Hopefully haha

Right now I am only using the Upwork app which comes with a few neat tools but I will look into the ones you suggested.

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

@omar16100 Cool! a trade that is extremely sought after! :D

I would't want to work with upwork. Too much competition, horrible customers and a company takes advantage of your effort by taking a cut of your wage.

I would advice you to procactively try to find companies in rich countries to sell your service. And find a field/business type where you can specialize. Have a look at www.ocean.io it may will help you to find businesses. To acquire them https://convertkit.com could help.

What's your current hourly rate?

My current hourly rate is $40/h and then there is the ~23% cut.

I agree that it's not the best place to get good clients.

I have been doing ML for sometime now so I will pursue opportunities in this field.

Thanks for sharing the links

Are you also freelancing?

@omar16100 man! $40h is way too underpriced for Machine Learning.

If you find a customer in western europe depending on the country you could charge something between 80 to 250 $ per hour.

Imagine what that would mean.The average income in Malaysia is about $600 a month right?

Let's say you manage to acquire a customer in Germany. And you could bill him 80 hours @ $160 = $12800 /$600 = 22 Months of the average income in 2 weeks work. You could stop working for a year, go to university to get a masters degree in AI or hire people to do the work for you. :D

@heyheni Looks like I really have to start looking for better clients.

Are there any other resources you can point me to? (For client acquisition)

@omar16100 sure! haha :D

so a great resource for anything, is https://medium.com just search what you want to know, wether it's machine learning, programming, design or in this case Sales / Marketing.

For Marketing many marketing software companies have extensive blog and knowledge bases.
HubSpot https://blog.hubspot.com
Hootsuite https://education.hootsuite.com
Buffer https://buffer.com/resources/

Have a look at the online courses at, coursera, khan academy, edX

Search Amazon for top rated books?

Also Youtube is a great resource :)

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If you would concentrate on one country, you could consider to hire a virtual assistant / marketeer on fiverr upwork freelancr in that country, that speaks the language and helps you to adapt your service. And manage your customer requests.

If you have questions just write here, i'll help as I'm bored often at work.

@heyheni thanks for all the help!!

@omar16100 just had an idea.
Write a concept statement. A small Business Plan so to say. A Document where you write down your thoughts, a plan on how to do it.

- Your Mission Statement (what you do and why)
- Your Goals
- Detailed list of of your skills / what you offer.
- Your unique selling proposition (why should people choose you over someone else)
- From the skill list you've made, think of each point at the benefits to the customer. Write it to a List. You can use that later in sales and marketing material
- Market research (price range and target audience, and demand)
- Measures needed to achieve your goal (which tools you need and how they work togheter)
- Cost, calculate ruthlessly every cost togheter.

So that you keep on track and if you need to explain yourself you are covered.

@heyheni That's a great list

I have a doc of project proposals that worked before and refer to it a lot. Almost every time.

Maybe I can put a modified version of this as my website bio

@rEaL-jAsE discipline is major