tech-company, business-plan, software, growth, lean-startupI have 4 years of experience in Ruby on Rails and Android applicaiton development. Till now I am working through oDesk and elance. This are temporary work that I am getting from oDesk and Elance. None of the clients are permanent as it is freelance work. I have registered a company in my country.
Because of unstable workflow, and partial work, I could not manage my expenses.
Thank you in advance.
You have a few options. If you want to continue taking projects on freelancing sites, one option would be increase the number of sites you are on, there are plenty of those and a simple Google query would reveal that.
In order to move beyond that you need to do some business development, try to develop contacts in the target region and use them to get projects. It could be a friend you have there, a previous client, or simply cold emailing and cold calling companies that may require the service you provide and making inquiries. If you have good rates, good quality and can prove good references for previous work you can find people willing to give you projects. Referrals from previous customers are always a good way to get new business.
Some people would make a deal with a development company to take on sub projects. For instance if there is a web development company in the UK, you can convince them to give you ruby on rails projects that they get or portions of it. If you provide a good service, the advantage for them is they may not need to keep a full time ruby developer as they can outsource it to you.
You can also use advertising to bring in new customers. Targeted online ads at the right demographic in the city or country can give you leads to follow. You can also try contacting other developers in that country and asking if they have any projects that they can offload to you. For example, you can find a few ruby developers in Sweden on linkedin and develop a relationship with them. If they have more work than they can handle, or if there is a project they are not interested in, they may give the project to you. And as @zazaalaza pointed, you can also try startups. Try sites like cofounderslab.com, ventureloop, angel.co etc. I have seen lots of non-technical founders looking for a developer co-founder on some of these sites.
Bottom line is, if you are freelancer, you are going to need to invest some amount of your time to new business development and that is what would get you new projects to work on.
If you’re worrying about inconsistent income, I suggest you join a startup. You can find plenty of jobs on http://angel.co/
If you’re looking for ruby specific jobs try http://jobs.rubynow.com/ which is a great resource.
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