How can a freelancer find an order abroad. Where is it good for a freelancer on the web: an overview of exchanges for programmers

How the job actually works
export-oriented
IT companies

PWC estimates that 100,000 people work in the IT industry in Ukraine. Since 2015, this industry has been in third place in terms of the country's export earnings. The lion's share of specialists develops software and is engaged in servicing foreign customers, they also bring in most of the income of the industry as a whole. 15% of frames fall on five largest IT companies– EPAM, SoftServe, Luxoft, Globallogic, Ciklum. But at the same time, little is known about their projects and customers, since the companies are bound by non-disclosure agreements on project details and even customer names. The editors of the site spoke with several large export-oriented IT companies to find out how their work works.

How projects are sold

How the theater begins with a hanger, successful business begins with finding clients and selling projects. Since Ukrainian export IT companies work with Western customers, the search for clients and the sale of projects take place outside the country.

Ilya Vinogradsky

CTO, Astound Commerce

“Our sales representatives are located in the Western European and North American markets. When they find a client, Solution Architect gets involved. Interacting with the client, he determines his needs, outlines the scope of the project and proposes a potential solution. Next, the Delivery team enters the work, the task of which is to calculate total hours needed to implement the solution,” says Ilya Vinogradsky, Founder, CTO Astound Commerce.

Yuri Antonyuk

Head of EPAM Ukraine

“EPAM is a global company, business development is carried out in many countries, mainly in the countries where large customers are present. Business development is carried out by experienced EPAMers who understand the business challenges facing companies in various industries and jointly develop product and platform end-to-end solutions. If the way to solve the business problem that the client proposes to solve is not effective enough or more innovative solutions are possible, the team proposes and subsequently implements them,” says Yuriy Antonyuk, Head of EPAM Ukraine.

EPAM clarifies that business development occurs through three channels:

1. New clients and projects that are attracted through the global business development organization and sales representatives in different countries.
2. Expansion of existing business through major program managers and account managers.
3. Potential upsell through any employee on the project who can help with business expansion.

Customer Relations

The teams of an export-oriented IT company interact with the client in three ways.

First, the client receives a turnkey team that brings a specific project to life.

The second and third, in fact, are two subspecies of another model - turnkey software development. When a development company builds a team for a client's project and is responsible for everything: expertise, team, technology. There can be two approaches here: pay as you go (payment for as much as was done) and fixed price (payment for the finished product according to a clearly defined TOR, in which there will be no changes).

Most of the teams in Ciklum work according to the first model.

Ivan Pogrebnyak

Delivery Operations Director, Ciklum

“We offer the client to build a team depending on the technological requirements of the client and surround it with a full range of services,” says Ivan Pogrebnyak, Delivery Operations Director at Ciklum. – This is his team that lives by his brand and processes. The client thinks about what the product will be, who will buy it, how to sell it. The company’s programmers communicate directly with the client and have the opportunity to influence the result.”

In the process of building a development team at Ciklum on different stages recruiter, HR partner and specialists responsible for integrating the development team into the client's business are involved. In addition, the company has created an ecosystem of additional technological services such as Performance and Security Testing, BD&A, Business Analysis, client consulting, IC Agile and SAFe certification, etc.

The turnkey development model is used by most export-oriented IT companies. The first of the two subspecies (pay as you go) is more popular, as the specifics of the software are changing - projects consist of many small stages and the software is implemented on the principle of continuous delivery.

Alexey Merkulov

VP, Client Success, SoftServe

“Hybrid models are often used - when part of the project can be done as a fixed price, and high-value services (architecture, design, Big Data, Data Science, and others) as time & material,” says Alexey Merkulov, VP, Client Success at SoftServe .

Command structure

Within companies, specialists are divided into teams of developers and other practitioners who are connected to the project at certain stages. For example, QA specialists can be part of a team or be their own division, the same goes for architects, DevOps and other areas and specializations.

“Astound Commerce has several engineering departments - WEB developers, Java developers, Frontend developers, QA engineers, UX and UI, Business architects. Everyone joins the project at their own stage. For example, UX / UI designers and Business architects also provide consulting services - from identifying the needs of a business, company, to analyzing the behavior of the buyer on the site, ”says Maxim Ilnitsky, head of the Astound Commerce project management office.

Ciklum has Big Data & Analytics and R&D teams inside the CTO that deal with IoT, VR, AR, AI and can join projects if expertise in these areas is needed.

SoftServe has its own team of industry experts for each of the company's core markets: media, fintech, healthcare and retail. They understand the specifics of the area for which solutions are being developed: legislation, the market, business features, technological trends. Industry experts are connected to the project at the solution development stage along with project teams and also take part in communications with customers.

When it comes to specialists who go beyond the company's expertise, finding a solution depends on the specifics of the project. For example, at Luxoft there was a case where for a project in the field of surveying, the company trained surveyors in programming - it was easier than hiring third-party specialists or teaching programmers the nuances of another industry.

Andrey Yavorsky

“At GlobalLogic there is always a certain percentage of people who are passionate about a particular area or technology. As a rule, they become project development drivers, participate in pre-sales work and improve technological expertise,” says Andrey Yavorsky. Previously, the company tried to create working group architects to develop the technical knowledge base, but experience has shown that individuals hired separately often simply perform assigned tasks, routinely follow processes, and do not produce as brilliant a result as those who “burn” in a certain direction.

Freelance or a remote form of income using the Internet is gaining more and more popularity and thousands of people are constantly looking for employers.

Many freelancers develop within the Runet, but more experienced and willing to increase their income are gradually moving to foreign customers.

Surely, everyone already knows that paying for services on a foreign Internet is much more expensive, which is why working “abroad” is much more profitable.

In order to evaluate the difference, it is enough to go to 2 stock exchanges, Runet and foreign, after which you will be convinced that foreign freelancers have higher wages.

Foreign freelance

Everyone wants to earn more, but how to achieve this? Go to freelancing in the bourgeoisie? Then where to look for foreign customers for freelance?

Before talking about the search for foreign employers, it is necessary to touch on the topic of your criteria. To go to foreign freelance, you must be fluent in the language of the country in which you will be looking for customers.

The use of translators is not a solution, because in some cases, translations are meaningless and ambiguous, which can lead to inaccurate requirements or conditions.

Considering that you will receive money from foreign users, you will need to open a wallet in the global payment system or choose the one used in the country where you are looking for customers.

Translation Money should not cause problems, it can “frighten off” the employer. Presenting a portfolio is a great way to grab a client's attention, but given that you're moving into a foreign market, you'll need to present "understandable" materials.

In this case, we are talking about articles that will not be understood by foreign customers.

The methods of searching for foreign clients do not differ from those used in Runet. Visit several forums, post order fulfillment announcements, and be sure to visit foreign freelance exchanges.

On the foreign exchanges ah, you can find a lot of potential customers, while you will have minimal risks, because. The exchange itself will act as a guarantor.

Below you can see a list of the most popular foreign freelance exchanges that you can use to find foreign clients:

— odesk.com;
— elance.com;
projectlance.com;
scriptlance.com
freelance.com
freelancer.com.

We decided to switch to foreign freelance? A different idea, but now you will have even more different complexities.

Hello friends!

Now something incredible is happening in Ukraine and Russia. The exchange rate of the ruble and the hryvnia against the dollar is growing by leaps and bounds, so I decided today in the article to really raise important issue.

Freelancers, as well as people who work offline, are getting the same salary, and prices are rising, with no end in sight. As for me, now you need to think about your future. My opinion is this: it is necessary to gradually master foreign freelance exchanges.

Naturally, without knowledge of English, nowhere, but this knowledge will always be useful to you. I advise you to invest in yourself, because it is in a crisis, if you have knowledge, then you are always valuable as a person and specialist.

Why do I advise looking at foreign freelance exchanges? Elementary, there you get money in dollars, and this is a certain benefit for you.

Watching now what is happening on freelance exchanges and in general in Russia and Ukraine, I see that employers want to get more for less. They are understandable, the crisis makes them tighten their belts, and freelancers themselves, if they are not top 3-5 in their field, are already getting harder work, as competition is growing in the market. Naturally, people are ready to work for low prices because there is no way out, but you have to eat.

So, in total, I personally counted 3 large foreign exchanges for remote work:

My advice to everyone, just try to register, look around, look at the projects that foreign freelance exchanges offer. It is likely that there will be a job for you. Well, do not forget that we and they have a different concept of dollars, and with such growth, earning there, you can be king here

That's all, subscribe to blog updates, share a link to the article in social networks.

And by tradition, at the end of the article short video with a joke about freelancers:

How can companies get their first foreign customers? Nikita Vashchenko, director of Lodoss Team, answers this question and explains how to start entering the Western market.

Why go West?

Our company was founded 10 years ago, in 2008. At that time, we understood that expensive large-scale projects, advanced and loyal customers, were in the West. Therefore, initially we were aimed at working with Western clients.

In ten years, we have come a long way: we have grown, we have made bumps and gained invaluable experience. Now in our portfolio there are dozens of large non-standard projects for foreign customers. In this article, we tell you how to get the first foreign clients and put this work on stream.

What tasks did we set

If you are a small country, then it is very difficult for you to enter the Western software development market directly by physically opening a representative office of the company abroad. It's expensive, and without a good portfolio it's just pointless. Therefore, we began to look for opportunities and tools for remote work with foreign customers.

First of all, we paid attention to freelance exchanges. The co-founders of the company had experience working with the oDesk exchange, at that time it was the most serious resource on the Internet. We decided to start looking for orders on it.

At the time of launch, we had several important tasks ahead of us.

Understand the mentality and specifics of orders from foreign customers

Based on our experience of working with foreign clients, we can draw such a general portrait. The client knows what he wants, understands the importance preparatory stages such as analytics and creation project documentation ready to pay for them.

In Europe and the States, they think about the final result, and not about the opportunity to save money here and now. They understand that any work on the project must be paid.

Build technical competence

Foreign clients love to use new hype technologies on their projects, and this spurred us to be at the forefront of technological progress.

We started using the Node.js development language in commercial projects. A client came to us with the Koding.com project. Rotating in the thick of the Western IT community, he said that you can write in javascript not only on the client, but also on the server. This miracle at that time was the Node.js language, we began to write on it from version 0.0.4.

Build a portfolio

At first glance, it seems obvious - you need to take on large and serious projects. It is also desirable to take into account such a moment as the possibility of rapid implementation. If you take on a cool but long-term project, you will be able to add it to your portfolio in a year or a couple of years, and new clients are needed here and now.

harsh reality

First, if your customer - you can expect unpleasant surprises. A startup may never release a product or shut down a few months after the release. You end up with useless pictures in your portfolio.

The year before last, we worked on the Android library for the Betcade platform, brought the product to the release of the beta version. After that, the client began to have financial problems, and he turned everything off, and disbanded the team. The product never left the beta, which means that we cannot boast of the work done. It's a shame? Still would.

The second serious problem is the long development without a release. If you failed to convince the customer to release the MVP, then you will not be able to demonstrate your work to new clients for a long time.

We have been cooperating for more than three years with a client who created social network on the interests of Fearless Little. We recommended that the customer enter the market with the current functionality ready, but he generated new ideas and wanted to release a fully finished product. In the process of work, we greatly increased our competence in matters of highly loaded distributed systems, but for a long time we could not confirm this experience by showing a working full-fledged product.

In order to regularly replenish the portfolio with new ones, we decided to work according to this scheme. While work is underway on large-scale projects, we cooperate with teams that have already launched their service or product, but they need some improvements. Yes, you can’t say that you created the entire product from scratch, but by describing your contribution to the development of the project, enliven your portfolio.

The main problems of working with exchanges

There are many resellers and intermediaries among customers

Intermediaries take over the communication with clients. When the performer cannot interact directly with the customer, the effectiveness of communication is lost. The situation is complicated by the fact that the quality of the project is not particularly important to the intermediary, so he can deliberately filter your questions to the customer. In such conditions, it is difficult to release a worthy product.

Not all intermediaries work according to this scheme, there are adequate companies that value their reputation. By working with them, you can get a steady stream of clients.

How to distinguish one from the other? It's pretty easy to do this when communicating. If the intermediary does not delve into the project, this is one of the indicators that he does not care about the quality. We usually use this method. At the stage of coordinating the work, we indicate to the customer some problem of the project and look at his reaction. If the client is worried and trying to figure out what will be best for the product, then this is good. If he says: “This is all nonsense! Do something to make it just work”, then it is better not to cooperate with such an intermediary.

Really big projects rarely come across on exchanges

Working with a team on small projects is difficult. You will not have enough tasks to evenly load all the participants. It is not very good for one specialist to work on a project. For example, you have many developers, but one person is engaged in front-end. In this case, his team qualities are poorly developed: he does not learn to communicate, solve problems together and be responsible to colleagues.

Usually bad skills joint work are identified when such a specialist first gets on a major project. A person can not cope and slows down the course of the entire development process.

Therefore, working with small projects did not allow us to pump the qualities of developers we needed.

Outstaff is often required, that is, only the developer himself is needed in the client team

With outstaffing, the developer is physically located in our office, but in fact he works completely in a foreign team and interacts little with the company. A problem similar to the previous one arises: if there are a lot of such people in a company, then the word “team” becomes an empty phrase, and the office is more like a coworking space than an IT company.

All these problems associated with the specifics of working on exchanges negatively affect the development of the team. Once we realized that we were starting to stagnate, and if we didn’t change anything, then degradation would await us.

We wanted to develop towards turnkey product development with our own team, and we had experience and technical competence in this. But in the Upwork market (as oDesk became known after the rebranding), there are few customers who needed such a wide range of services and quality level.

Office abroad vs direct contracts

Under such conditions, we could go one of two ways.

Open a representative office of the company abroad and look for direct contracts for the development of a turnkey product

Representation is necessary in order to provide you with weight in the eyes of customers. We had a negative experience of concluding a direct contract with a foreign customer. As a result, we received only an advance payment, and he decided not to make the final payment. Our costs of litigation would be commensurate with the size of the final payment. So we decided that we paid for our sad experience.

You can take a full prepayment only from your proven old customers. The risk of being left without the final payment is high, because some clients understand that litigation from abroad is unlikely.

Try to work with direct contracts in the domestic market

We thought about it and settled on this option. Opening an office abroad is a responsible step. Therefore, we first decided to gain experience with direct contracts.

We found a domestic client and signed the first direct contract with him. In addition to the fact that all our previous experience on exchanges was useful to us in this project, we were finally able to fully include all the components that we wanted so much into the development process, but the specifics of Upwork did not always allow this.

For example, they began to hold full-fledged retrospectives after sprints. We connected a full-time QA engineer to the process, instead of testing only some parts of the product: on the exchange, the client often does not want to conduct full-fledged testing or orders it from another contractor.

When working with direct contracts, there were problems that we did not encounter on the exchanges. For example, downtime between sprints. And we did not immediately figure out how to minimize it.

Later, a solution was developed in which, after the completion of the current sprint and retrospective, the team immediately receives the next scope and does not stand idle.

There were additional risks during development, which we began to take into account and developed for this systems approach. There were also legal issues that I had to deal with and draw up my own version of the contract with the client.

We recently started working on a new direct contract. This project is a news data aggregator on the blockchain. If everything goes smoothly there, we will think about how to open an office abroad.

Now we believe that even after we fully enter into direct foreign contracts, we will still continue to work with Russian clients. Practice shows that here, too, we receive projects that are interesting to us both in terms of technology and from a financial point of view.

If we take the technical side of the issue, then it’s worth starting with what you already have experience in, and you know for sure that you will pull such a project. In terms of the promotion itself abroad, you don’t have to worry that customers of the Samsung level don’t immediately turn to you. You can start working on the stock exchanges, through partnership programs or subcontracted.

Then everyone goes their own way. We decided that it was important for us to upgrade our technical expertise. Therefore, we try to take on more and more complex and interesting projects. After working through the portfolio, building processes and testing them in battle, you can take the following steps. For us, this step is to establish ourselves as a turnkey developer of finished products.

Western customers provide Russian freelancers with a stable piece of bread, and it is very convenient to work with them, says Fedor Virin, founder of the Data Insight agency. If a freelancer works well, then orders go one after another, and earnings are comparable to regular salaries. On average, according to the study, a Russian freelancer receives 6 foreign orders per month against 7.3 orders from Russian clients, and can earn up to 13,813 rubles on one single order from foreigners. against 5788 rubles. for order from Russian company. But the most difficult thing is to get these orders.

According to the study, 33% of Russian freelancers have been working with foreign clients for less than a year, and only 14% for more than five years. At the same time, 26% of freelancers received one-time assignments, 49% received a repeat order from a client, and 26% of the lucky ones received permanent orders from abroad.

Don't sell too cheap

In order to form a decent portfolio of completed work and get a high rating, freelancers at the start agree to carry out prestigious orders for small fees or free of charge, in the expectation that they will make good money on the next orders, says Anastasia Khovrina, manager of the Russian Internet platform Freelancem.

RUB 60,697 per month

on average, a freelance worker earns on regular orders from foreign clients. When working for a Russian customer, a freelancer's income is lower - 53,273 rubles.
39% of freelancers working with Russian clients receive orders through personal connections. Among freelancers oriented to foreign clients, this share is lower - 16%

And this is a mistake, says Perstov. To earn a reputation among foreign customers, he first took small orders of $50-200, but only in developed countries like the USA and for a high fee, to show that he is a professional and is not inclined to work for a penny, just to get an order. He posted his first works in the portfolio on the Upwork exchange and collected customer reviews to increase the rating on the freelance exchange (the rating is based on customer reviews). Large customers appeared about a year later, Perstov recalls.

Most in demand for international market Russian programmers, says Khovrina. They are highly qualified, and almost everyone knows at least a little English language, it necessary condition to communicate with foreign customers. But competition is high, as there are many good specialists from developing countries that are content with low fees, she notes.

Personal connections

Business contacts and personal connections help to establish a constant flow of orders. This is the main tool for obtaining Russian orders, the study showed, and the third most popular tool for finding foreign clients. Yulia Sevruk, a freelance IT project manager, previously worked at the representative office of an international IT company in Russia. After the dismissal, she retained her client base and continued to do projects for them, connecting a team of former colleagues. Now she has two main international clients, with one she has been working for five years, with the other for three years. On average, she manages to earn about 60,000 rubles per month. If she realizes that she will earn less this month, she immediately starts looking for smaller customers for software development and rigidly plans her schedule.

Sevruk admits that freelancing with foreigners is troublesome, but foreigners pay extra for processing, do not distract on weekends and set realistic deadlines. In this, Sevruk says, they differ from Russian customers, for whom all projects are always on fire, and their first phrase in communication with the contractor is “it should have been done yesterday.”

Discipline and bureaucracy

However, Western customers demand discipline in execution - they include intermediate deadlines in the terms of reference, and if a freelancer is a little late or does not do something, he is immediately thrown out of the project and another contractor is hired, since the international market is full of Chinese, Indian and Vietnamese freelancers , who are productive and almost all speak English tolerably, adds Anton Mazhirin, co-founder of the Russian exchange fl.ru.

Russian freelancers make life difficult for excessive bureaucracy, in foreign companies it is much more than in Russian, says Mazhirin. For each project, Western customers draw up a lot of documents and so-called briefs, which describe all the stages and terms of work. Then these documents are coordinated by the management of the customer company, changes are made to them, which also need to be coordinated. And then, when the freelancer is already running out of time, says Mazhirin, it may turn out that some little thing has remained inconsistent and it is necessary to coordinate it again.

How they pay

People are often afraid that unfamiliar foreign clients will be deceived with payment. Sometimes this is what happens. In this, Sevruk believes, the performers themselves are most often to blame, because they did not take an interest in the reputation of the customer, did not check the reviews, or did not agree in advance on the terms of payment.

On the online exchange for freelancers Upwork, through which Perstov is looking for new clients, the following rules for paying for orders apply: the customer company usually transfers the entire prepayment amount to the exchange account, this money is frozen on the exchange account, the contractor sees in personal account that the company paid for his work, but gets access to the money only when the work is fully completed and the customer has accepted it. In cases where the execution of an order is divided into stages, the customer can transfer payment in parts - for example, the contractor is promised $ 200 after the delivery of the first part of the work, this money is immediately credited to the account and the contractor can withdraw it when the first stage of work on the order is completed. After that, the client immediately charges the amount that the contractor will receive for completing the second part of the work. According to Perstov, this system is designed specifically to insure the performer, who not only does not know his customers personally, but is also located in another country. But in direct interaction with foreign customers with whom he has already worked, Perstov issues an invoice after the fact, without receiving any advance payments. “Only stars can require 100% prepayment,” he explains.