About a year ago, I started accepting freelance jobs on Upwork. I noticed that WordPress and eCommerce websites are in high demand, so I decided to focus on that. The plan was to gain a deep understanding of how both WordPress and eCommerce works. I've completed 16 jobs over the last 9 months with a 100% success rate (meaning five star reviews on every single one). I started out not knowing anything about either WordPress or eCommerce and have since become an expert in both.
I wrapped up my latest project last week and am thinking about what to do next. You can check it out here: boomerangworkouts.com (Note: this isn't my business, a client paid me to build it for him.) (Note 2: since I wrote this the client has taken it upon himself to completely redo the design of the landing page)
Right now I'm at a fork in the road. I started freelancing in order to learn what companies are looking for when it comes to software. And I've succeeded in learning a lot, but being an individual freelancer isn't a scalable business model. So what now? The most obvious next steps are:
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Build an eCommerce agency. I would hire a team of developers and designers, supervise them, and sell their services to companies. We would handle design, development, and maintenance of several online businesses on a contract basis. I think I would need to secure at least one project where the client pays around $60,000 in order to get an agency off the ground.
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Same as the above, except instead of a fixed fee I would take a cut of each sale. This might be more feasible because $60K projects could be too hard to find. If I go this route I would need to have some way of predicting the likelihood that each potential client's business will succeed.
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Take my learnings and use them to build plugins. Both Shopify and WordPress have large plugin ecosystems. Many companies are making a lot of money doing this. It would probably be easier to sell a $100 component to 1000 companies than to build a single online business for $100,000.
There are some other possibilities as well, but those are the main ones.
Right now I'm looking for both clients and potential collaborators.
Feel free to reach out if you'd like to talk: