Freelancer Profile: Adam Kopec, UX & UI Designer

Name: Adam Kopec

Freelance Profession: UX and UI Designer

Website: http://www.adamkopec.com/

---

Q: How long have you been your own boss?

I guess a year now, almost exactly a year. It’s pretty crazy. Although, I guess I am my own boss, but I’m in client services so I do a lot of servicing of clients, not just my own things.

Q: Why did you decide to become a freelancer?

My last full time position, I was at a company called GroupMe, a group messaging app, I was there for a while and in my time there I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. I wasn’t exactly sure but the one thing I knew I wanted to do was travel a bunch. So, I knew had this two month trip planned and I was really excited to do it. I was like, let me save a little bit of cash and go do this so instead of committing to something full time I decided to do a consulting gig and kind of fell in love with it. Went on my trip and then came back, and I’ve just been doing the same thing since. It’s been fantastic.

Q: What are some of the clients you’ve worked with so far?

Trying to think of what I can say that I worked on. [Laughing] But I’ll just say, mostly consumer stuff in New York, a couple mobile apps, some web apps, but predominantly consumer facing things.

Q: When you get started with a client what’s the first thing you do?

I think the first thing I do is make sure we’re cool…that they’re cool, that I enjoy working with them as people and I enjoy the product. But then when it comes down to it, getting a contract together and putting some stuff on paper. We start outlining some terms, payments, schedule, scope, stuff like that. And then agree on a start date and go.

Q: Do you have a client horror story you can share?

I don’t know, I hear of these clients from hell and terrible stories about clients not paying people or stiffing them in some way. But I’ve been really fortunate that the folks I’ve worked with have been awesome and, knock on wood, I haven’t had any horror stories yet. [Laughing] Unfortunately, I can’t provide any entertainment there.

Q: How are you sourcing your clients? And how are you avoiding terrible ones?

I think I’m really careful to go with referrals and word of mouth. I do my due diligence and generally the people I work with are friends. Or I’ve worked with someone they’ve known in the past and said they’re cool to work with. So I generally don’t work with people that are completely out of my network. There’s generally some referral stuff there.

Q: What is the one tool that you couldn’t live without as a freelancer?

Probably my design tools just to get things done but I’m not super sophisticated with my tracking or whatever freelancer management tools are out there. But I think email is huge, and I’m really excited about what you guys are doing with Benny, stuff like that.

Q: Are you working on any side projects of your own right now?

Not currently. But I have some things in mind that I’m pretty excited about.

Q: Is there anything that could get you to go back to being an employee, not just servicing clients?

[Laughing] Yeah, I think so. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, freelancing is absolutely fantastic and you get this flexibility, you can bounce around between different clients and work in different things. But, I am open to the idea of going really deep into something else again and either starting my own thing or being somewhere early on where the things that are being built are very closely aligned with my interests or hobbies or just like spaces I’m interested in learning about. So, I’m open to the idea. It’s a tough sell just because I really enjoy this lifestyle right now but I can see myself eventually going back.

---

Adam Kopec was interviewed by Jacob Brody on July 21st, 2015

Freelancer Profile: Annie Gaus, Journalist & Content Consultant

Name: Annie Gaus

Freelance Profession: Journalist & Content Consultant

Website: https://about.me/anniegaus

---

Q: What do you do?

I do a mix of journalism and consulting work, and the consulting work that I do is mainly around content strategy, which is kind of an umbrella term for many different things. In my practice, that’s been everything from running people’s social media accounts to developing content plans to actually writing blog posts and things like that and running email marketing campaigns. It’s really anything related to content production and content management. So that’s a piece of what I do, and the other piece is my own journalism work where I just independently pitch and write my own stories. Those are the two main categories of what I do.

Q: How did you get started as your own boss?

Well, I was a full time journalist for quite a few years. On the side, when I was still working full time, I did my own little social media management project so I kind of started developing what was the beginning of my consulting practice when I was still working full time. And then I left that job partly with the specific goal of building out my consulting work. So, I gave myself a little bit of time to develop that out more and worked for several months on defining my own value proposition and figuring out how to package my skill set and sell that out to agencies and publishing companies and anyone who really needs to offload their content tasks. That was about a year ago, and here I am. It’s been ok so far. [Laughing] But, there’s always a lot of paperwork and bullshit involved in being your own boss which is kind of what led me here.

Q: What has been your biggest triumph since you started freelancing?

I think one of the biggest hurdles for me – which is a triumph, but it’s not going to sound that exciting – one of the biggest personal hurdles that I felt was a block for me was the idea of contracts. You get to a point where you’re talking to someone about helping them out with work and then there’s a point where it’s like, ok, I don’t really want to help you anymore without getting paid, so what’s my system for writing and developing my own contracts. I’m not a lawyer, obviously, so  just overcoming that and figuring out a base contract that I can use for certain types of things and then the process of being comfortable with your rate and confident in your rate and sending that out to people. So I don’t know if that’s a really specific AHA moment, but it was, for me, a hurdle that I had to overcome.

Q: Have you had any nightmare projects or clients?

There was one client (a would be client, I guess) who never ended up hiring me for anything. You meet a lot of people who expect you to do a lot of things, ‘oh let’s do this trial project that I’m not going to pay you for and then if you do well on that we can talk about’… I’ve encountered a fair amount of that, and the big line, especially around here, is: ‘oh well we’re a startup so we can’t pay you.’ Just because you’re a start up doesn’t mean you get free work. One specific instance, not really a nightmare, but a huge amount of back and forth to the extent where I spent hours and hours of my life on this developing contracts, revising contracts, giving them a seed of a plan that would ordinarily in another situation be enough to hire me and then they demand lots of changes and then just go completely dark. That’s a version of what you encounter in a lot of ways when you’re your own boss.

Q: Is that something you wish someone had told you before you got started? If they keep going back and forth, it’s just not going to happen, let it go?

Yeah, I think that’s just something you learn as you go along and you learn how to manage those kinds of situations. But yeah, definitely. 

Q: Was it the negotiations and not the actual work itselft but getting the work set up what you wished someone had advised you on before you went out on your own?

I think it was that and the things I already mentioned about contracts and how to handle contract negotiations, that kind of stuff and also general advice on how to manage or mitigate people’s expectations. Especially when you’re someone like me and you’re working in this field content strategy which is fairly nebulous sometimes people’s expectations of you are completely unreasonable and expectations of what you can do in any given amount of time. And those of course those are all factors in the contract that you’ll end up putting together. And it’s just something you learn as you do more and more of them. I had very little advice when I went out to do this and that would’ve been certainly beneficial. [Laughing] So communicate with other freelancers about how they deal with stuff like that.

Q: What are the tools (software, whatever) that are indispensable for your freelance business that might not be obvious to other people?

[Laughing] Actually, it sounds lame, but I use Facebook a lot. I get a lot of work on Facebook. It’s a pretty lame answer, but it’s a huge communication tool for me and I’m in various sort of mini-professional groups and I end up getting tons of work from there. So that’s a communication tool for me. As far as organization, Skype, any communication tool you can think of, Google Docs – the whole Google suite generally, I’m kind of a junkie. Every project that I work on starts with a Google doc, I would say. As far as expense management and stuff like that… I really have no system, I just throw everything into a drawer and forget about it until tax time. [More laughing]

Q: Are there things you’re still trying to get better at? 

Areas where I can always use help are the expense management side, taxes, anything where you could help me predict my taxes which I just kind of kick money away and hope that it all works out. Which is kind of my current system. [Laughing]

---

Annie Gaus was interviewed by Jacob Brody on July 7th, 2015