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If You Have No Work Then You Have Plenty Of Time
written by Steven Bristol on December 16th, 2009
Allan and I have a friend who is a talented designer. Over the past few years his freelance business has done well. He’s made a solid living even though he hasn’t marketed himself. By “marketed himself” I mean his potential clients have no way to find him and even in the design community hasn’t heard of him. During the past years’ economic bubble this wasn’t a problem because somehow the design projects always found their way to him. Now that the economy has tightened it’s belt his workload has all but dried up, leaving him scrambling for full time or freelance work.
Last week he came to Allan and asked for some work. Unfortunately we currently do not have any projects in the design phase. So Allan suggested using his down time and going into a few popular open source projects and making them beautiful. He argued that he doesn’t have time because he’s spending all his time “trying to get paid”.
This is highly flawed thinking. If you have no work then you have plenty of time. At the very least you should be able to find 2-3 hours a day to contribute to an open source project. Most new business comes from referrals, so becoming the hero of a bunch of developers will likely lead to those developers mentioning your name when they have the chance. This is a great way to get some fairly easy exposure.
Side Note: I might argue that once you have no work that marketing yourself is a bit late and we should all be taking time everyday to network ourselves in some form or fashion.
Makes me think of one of the first tweets of Mike Matas after he left Apple “Enjoying my first day of unemployment” :-) We’re never happy, when we have too much work we’d like to have time and when we have time we’d like to have more work. Tell the guy he should enjoy his life, his family, and yes, get into something who doesn’t directly pays. If it wasn’t for Pomcast.com a few years ago (a podcast who never really brought me real money), I wouldn’t have today all my clients as an iPhone developers. You can only connect the dot backwars (S. Jobs at the Stanford speech.)
I think working on an open source project is a great idea and a good way to show expertise and get future business but only as part of your total self-promotion.
I think your designer friend won’t be feeding his family anytime soon if he sets out to help out on an OSS project. He probably should get out and attend some user groups and business meetups.
Certainly fair advice but not to try to feed your family today.
Contributing to Open Source is a great strategy if you have more time than work but it does take awhile to get going. It took me about 3-4 months of working on Redmine before I started to get some business from it. It started as “we heard of you because of your work on Redmine” but now about 90% of my work is “we want you to work on Redmine for us”.
There is a large gap of designer talent in the Open Source community. If someone really focused, they could make a great living off of it. That 2-3 hours per day could easily build a new theme for Redmine, each day! Give it a few weeks and that market is cornered. Then they could take on Radiant, Fat Free CRM, or any other project if they still need more.