Get Clients Before You Even Start Your Business

If you are a freelancer thinking about striking out on your own, having a few clients in the bag before you make that leap is a pretty smart step. This can be a particular challenge of course, as you most likely don’t have the time it takes to market yourself successfully while still gainfully employed. Not to worry, there are plenty of ways to do this nowadays. One of my favorite ways is to find an online marketplace where you can both market yourself and find suitable projects to bid on.

One site that I would like to suggest that you check out is Guru.com. In a nutshell, Guru.com is a site that brings freelancers and prospective employers together. Guru.com has been around in one form or another since 1998 and they definitely have the marketplace model down pat. In 2007, over 93,000 projects were awarded to freelancers on Guru.com, mostly in the U.S. At any given time there can be more than 5,000 projects posted on the site for freelancers to bid on.

Freelancers can scan thousands of projects posted by companies and then select those that they are most qualified for to bid on. Projects can be filtered using Guru.com’s search engine. The bidding process is all done on the site and notifications are sent to you via email. Freelancers and hiring companies generally communicate with each other via Guru’s “private DB” feature at the outset of an engagement. This is essentially a bulletin board where companies can post a message and the freelancers can respond in kind. This allows the selection and Q&A process to move forward in relative anonymity.

Once a project is awarded and work is underway Guru offers a number of ways for funds to exchange hands. The site includes functionality that helps freelancers create invoices and set up an escrow account. Companies then pay the invoice by transferring money into the escrow account (or paying by credit card) and freelancers simply request payment which then comes to them directly from Guru via check.

Additional features on the site include: a project tracker so freelancers can see the status of projects they have bid on; a watch list so they can track projects they are interested in; and a proposal template manager for bidding assistance, etc. The user dashboard is well organized and easy to use.

Freelancers can see all projects, but can only bid on projects that match their posted profile. This helps ensure that folks are only bidding on projects they are qualified for. In addition, you might be prevented from bidding on projects based on your subscription level. Although you do not have to pay to play on Guru.com, those freelancers that become “Guru Vendors” pay a small annual subscription fee and have access to more projects (companies can limit those who can bid on their projects to “serious” consultants only in this way).

The downside of Guru.com is that although there are some large projects available for bidding, for the most part companies are either small (it’s a good resource for startups too!) or the project budgets are limited. IT consultants in particular also have to compete with a large population of offshore freelancers and smaller companies (mostly in India) that use Guru.com to find projects from U.S. based companies.

It is difficult if not impossible to make a living on Guru.com projects and they are certainly not the only marketplace out there for freelancers, but it does represent a nice sales channel for freelancers and a good safe starting place for the newly self-employed so you can see what is out there in the market while getting some valuable experience selling yourself.