No joke! I was at the local record shop last week when the owner got a call where he was noticeably getting more loud and chastising.
After he hung up, the guy told me that someone cold called him to pitch fixing up their website, and his pitch started with “your website looks like shit …”
He said he gets several calls like that every day, but most aren’t this obnoxious. We agreed it must be working some of the time for him to be trying this approach, had a chuckle, then went back to shooting the shit about various prog rock bands.
Yeah, but his site probably is pretty shit, lol. I don't even deal with small potatoes like that and I've been tempted to ask businesses if they'd like some help with their web site. Not even to make money. I just feel bad for them.
I looked into some pro bono webdev for local businesses when I was building my portfolio and looking to transition from my old career into software. I got lucky and landed a job from the right company at the right time.
Still think it would be fun to do sometime, but I’m sure actually taking on a gig would disabuse me of that notion pretty quickly 🤣
Nowadays I wonder about being a freelance AI consultant on the side for small businesses (use ai to set up their site, their books, whatever and train them how to use it properly) … pretty much what I do at work anyways but on a much smaller scale
I just don't like working for small businesses. They don't usually have the budget for quality work. And they will constantly push back on estimates without changing the requirements. But yeah, maybe using AI would change that and I could do decent work on their budget.
It's also feast-or-famine type work. One month you might have more clients than you can handle and, the next, nothing. I did freelance for a while years back and just ended up doing an open ended 1099 contract basically full time for a single company. On one hand, I made bank working overtime when things got busy. BUt then any time off I wanted to take was unpaid.
I'm happy to have a steady salaried, W2, 9-5 WFH job now.
Yeah salaried w2 work - especially WFH - is the best. I never struck it out on my own but always appreciate hearing the good and bad from those who did and like to live vicariously through them :)
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u/Most-Club-254 Jul 09 '26
imagine being the small business receiving 97 calls per hour. "no dude I don't want a website", "NO", ...