How to find freelancers (девушек или парней :o) & clients in Belgium

Hey, a post in English!

TL;DR
I’m looking for freelance mobile developers & UI designers in Kiev.

More info here:
jobs.dou.ua/...​p-advies/vacancies/17579
jobs.dou.ua/...​p-advies/vacancies/17776
jobs.dou.ua/...​p-advies/vacancies/17777

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I’ll explain a bit what I’m trying to do:

I’m an iOS developer and started to do freelance work recently. I’m Belgian, so it makes sense to look for clients in Flanders (Belgium): I can talk to them in their native language (Dutch), and I can charge them more: €50/hour (+VAT) seems to be reasonable, it’s also what I charged when still doing web development in PHP up until a few years ago.

But I have a hard time finding clients in Belgium, probably because of different reasons:
• I’m in Kiev, so all communication will have to by phone, email, Skype,..
• Clients probably prefer the security of hiring an agency, because they might need и iOS, и Android, и UI design, и an icon, и a backend,..

So I decided to try something new:
I made an ‘ask me any question about app development, no strings attached’ website (appadvies.be). The idea being: people looking for app development might have many questions, questions that I can answer quickly, and it might lead to some actual development projects.
I’m buying some Google AdWords to get some traffic, but up until now I mainly get to answer stupid questions from students or the odd small restaurant thinking ‘maybe we should get and app’,.. nothing serious.

So this is what I plan to do now:

1. Tweak the AdWords ads to get better results (there’s only 1 single ad now, and too many different keywords)

2. Try to filter out the stupid questions by making visitors schedule a time and date in an online calendar (they will have to pick a time-slot, and I’ll call them), instead of the current ‘call me anytime’.

3. Offer some real services:
• A tappable prototype/mock-up of the desired app, probably for a fixed price (let’s say €200), and probably made in Briefs (giveabrief.com). Mainly because in this phase -when figuring out what the app should do and how it should work- there’s is going to be a lot of back-and-forth with the client, so I can do that in Dutch. After this we have description and mock-up and can move on to:
• Offer UI design and development by Ukrainian designers and developers, with me serving as a project manager.
• Possibly: offer to write out a detailed technical specification of the app in English, so they can go shopping on Elance/Odesk without having to explain any more details, also for a fixed price. (don’t know.. €100?)

What do you think? Would this work? If you have any advice or tips: please, комментируйте. (Можно на русском тоже.)

What I also was thinking of:
l would be nice to show the faces and names of possible devs and designers on a page, just like the team page of a real company can give you the the idea that ‘these people are ready, and eager to work on your project’. But I wouldn’t know how to do that with freelancers, or if they even would want to. Maybe throw a party and get everybody’s picture taken?

btw, I’ve been interviewed by the Kyiv Post a few weeks ago (фейм! :o) because they were looking for stories with a connection to Belgium. I talked about this + my apps, etc.
www.kyivpost.com/...​w-mobile-apps-384554.html

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Regarding writing specifications... It seems that you underestimate efforts of writing a decent spec. It usually takes full day of work — 8 hours to write it for the simple mobile app. You need to understand not only functional but non-functional requirements or so called quality attributes to correctly estimate and design software project. If you telecommute it will bring additional time gap to deal with communication issues.

p.s. Good luck with your new venture!

This is very helpful. Good to know before writing the first one and spending a few days on it (Will probably get easier and be more copy/paste when you do more of them, I hope.) Thanks!

Коментар порушує правила спільноти і видалений модераторами.

You came here to learn russian, so why don’t you write in russian?

Since I guess it would be easy for him to communicate with people who also speak English. Russian is not international language (the same for German, Danish, etc).

Это кто тебе сказал, что русский не интернациональный язык? Википедию читать не пробовал?

“Someone is wrong on internet” © xkcd

Официальные языки ООН — можешь и тут глянуть.Ну, так что бы наверняка.

И че, если в бельгии зайти в кафе, то там тебя по русски уже поймут, или как ?

А если в Броварах зайти в кафе то там тебя на французком уже поймут, или как?

Вы французкий от английского не отличаете ?

а причем тут английский? если речь шла о русском и французком?

Я вам на всякий случай подскажу: пост написан на английском, Про французкий, вы там чото себе нафантазировали непонятное.

oh, now I see, you meant that he mentioned Russian in KyivPost article. But anyway, it would be stupid to express your idea in language that you not perfect yet (of course if you want to have feedback).

This is practise. Why not?

Since, I guess, the idea could be lost in translation :)

His native language is Dutch, so English or Russian it still needs translation.

c’mon man, I hope you didn’t mean that seriously

When I write in Russian I do it here lang-8.com , so native speakers can correct it and I’ll learn from my mistakes. (great website for writing practice!)

All languages but English are useless.

I dream of the day when all people would speak one language.

Я пишу ещё очень медленно, потому что я не привык к использованию кириллицы с клавиатуры. So I use Google Translate + dictionaries, copy/paste stuff, correct it, change it... I could have written in Russian, I suppose, but it would have sounded strange, and receive a bunch of comments about the mistakes :o)

Idea is nice, hopefully it will work for you :)

I would also search for clients by myself, I mean do not really rely on AdWords :) But I guess you know it already.

Ah, yeah. That as well. I got the advice form a guy in sales here to go look for ‘the Belgian DOU’ or similar websites, or any place where clients could be found. AdWords is very much a ‘catch all’.

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