Most software developers have done freelancing at some point in their careers, so today, Steve and Drew get together to discuss what is involved in freelancing.  They cover topics such as how to find work, how to price it, how to get paid, and everybody's favorite topic, paying taxes.  They finish with picks, and the high point of every episode, Steve's dad jokes of the week.

Hello everybody. It is yet another episode of Views on View. I am Steve Edwards, the host with the face of a radio and the voice for being a mime, but I'm still your host. With me today, I have my special returning guest, Mr. Drew Baker. How you doing, Drew?

 

I'm great, thanks Steve.

 

Drew is coming at us from Europe these days. He's quite the world traveler, LA, Sydney, Europe. Meanwhile, I'm still still here in the same office where I've been for 13 years, but that's another story. So today, Drew and I are back, and this, we are sharing the pearls of wisdom that drip from our lips like water. And, oh, before I forget, sorry, Drew, before I forget, I almost always forget, and I feel bad when I ignore these people. Thanks to our Hello to our studio audience. Not sure how I could forget such important people, but thank you, thank you. So today we're gonna talk about freelancing, and which is something a lot of developers do instead of working for another company, whether it's a tech company that's providing software to customers or maybe a larger corporation where you're just sort of their internal software team. Freelancing is basically where you work for yourself and you do a job for somebody. Maybe it's an ongoing support basis where you build a new website for them or something and they pay you as a contractor. And there's various ways to do that from a tax standpoint that maybe we'll talk about later, all this stuff that makes my eyes water, just thinking about it. But anyway, we wanted to talk about that and how to get work. how you're scoping it out, how you price it, getting paid, that kind of stuff. So we'll let Drew start out. Drew comes up with the agenda. He's one of those wizard guys that comes up with lists and let's do this and this and this. So I'm going to let Drew start out. Where do we want to start out with Drew?

 

Thanks, Steve. I thought it would be interesting to talk about how to get freelance work and the different types of freelance work. Like is it moonlighting essentially, you know, like a side job? Is it you're just going to go full-time freelance for a while? You know, often people will do that between jobs, you know, take a while off and see how I go as a consultant or whatever it is. So let's start with that. I think the three different sort of approaches of a moonlighting on the side, how to get work like that is interesting. So maybe we'll start talking about that. But the one that I've seen work really well is, like for example, at Funkhouse, some of the freelancers that we've had the most success with are people that used to work for us. and have gone on to go work somewhere else and are looking to just fill sort of a night tour or a weekend, you know, with some extra pocket money. And that's been great for us. And what we would do there is engage them in a monthly retainer of some sort. And we'll talk about pricing later, but essentially sort of buy a certain amount of hours a month from someone. And we pay them regardless if we use the hours or not. And it's just like, we're gonna lock this person into a 12 month deal where we know that they're available, a certain amount of time a month. And that works out great for us. And I think if you're a full-time developer and you've got extra time when you don't mind spending time on the weekends, nights and weekends and burnout is a real thing, like certainly seen this backfire, like with freelancers, my twin brother who's a designer. He definitely is the type that will overload himself with work and get burned out on it all. But you gotta be careful. So, you know, make sure you sort of be real with yourself about what you can handle. So the best way to get that kind of work is I think, or how we find these people is either ex-employees that work for us at one time, or like I'm thinking through the different people us up and we've had success with. One guy we found off Stack Overflow, he was helping, he helped answer a question on Stack Overflow and then just emailed me saying, hey, I answered this thing. If you ever need any more help like this, I'm available at Freelance. And that was, and we still work with him. He's incredible. Another guy we found off of Hacker News, at the first of every month, Hacker News puts out who is hiring or who is looking for freelance work. Post. found someone off that. We talked about that on the hiring job hunting podcasts that we did, Steve, but that is, there's a freelance one that's great as well. I've hired a guy off that has been really good. Those have been good little freelancy ones. But then if you're trying to be a consultant, like go full time, then it's about growing a client base. And it kind of depends on the style of work that you want to do. But ultimately, I found over the years when, not that I've freelanced a lot recently, but I've definitely advised a lot of people and people like my brother and do it a lot. I think the way to do that is it's all about portfolio. Like what's the work that you've done in the past that you can show that you're good at to do in the future? It's mostly how you're going to get judged is your portfolio of work. And if that's, you can show completed projects or you can show... a Git repo of here's this thing I did. And it gets tricky when you work on projects where you're not allowed to show things. I would tend to, in those scenarios, try and, you don't wanna be respectful of your, whatever contracts you may have signed, but definitely try and show as much as you can. Or at the very least, hint at, I've worked for various Fortune 500 companies, and then show it in private. I would definitely not be shy doing that. Don't put it on your website or something. I think having a strong GitHub profile or Bitbucket or one of those things is really good and put a bit of effort into that will help definitely close the deal. Probably not great at finding work that way, but definitely helps with getting work. If you're a developer, I'm surprised that more people don't try and do this. how I started at Funkhouse originally like 10 years ago, how we started was my business partner, Dave Funkhouse was a designer and we took on work that our company we worked at couldn't do. Like they didn't have the capacity or didn't want to do it. And so we were just freelance nights and weekends doing that. And the deal was like, Dave would design them and I would program them. So it was a great little team and that's how we started. So I think the best thing you can do as just a freelance developer is try and partner up with some designers, like find some good designers. And that's surprising, that's way easier to find than a programmer because designers by nature are, it's much more visual. So they have really good websites, they talk about the work they do a lot. There's a website called siteinspire.com that is just a great place to look at like high-end design websites. Go through that. find a bunch of design studios that you'd like to look of and then find out if they need any programming help. A lot of them would, especially the ones that are like small shops, like one or two people, that would absolutely be looking for help. An email enough of them and you have enough of a portfolio or a GitHub presence, I think you'll definitely find success that way.

 

Yeah, if I look back at my history of when I started in web development and all the different ways I've had projects, uh, it's quite the variety. It's really sort of interesting. So my first one was when I, I was first getting into PHP and MySQL. This is pre, I think maybe pre WordPress, pre Drupal or right about the time Drupal starting, um, And I did work with a guy that we did just a e-commerce store for a mountain bike shop. And we just did straight PHP MySQL Apache. You know, that's where I was working on the, when I had that story I told last week about having one space in a file that's timing me for an hour because something wouldn't work, you know, it's weird stuff like that. And then I started doing little side projects just to sort of get experience, put my name out there and those side projects, like some Drupal modules and stuff was what helped him land me my first job as a web developer. I was just back in an agency that doesn't exist anymore. They were based out of New Jersey, but they saw some of the work I did and I had applied and I happened to know somebody that was working for them that left and I said hey I'm interested and that was how I got my foot in the door was just by doing little side projects and Outside stuff and I'd be working out at the time I was in a business like a system analyst type role for a telecom and and first mother for a you know Daimler what's considered Daimler trucks now for eight liner back then They were pretty big presence here in Portland area But it was just outside work in the evenings. You know, I'd be home and kids were in bed and I'd go work for a couple hours and then you know, get them to go to work. I'd work at lunchtime. But a lot of extra, you know, side stuff because I was excited, I was learning it and this was my chance to do it and I wanted to do it full time. And then once I got in, I was at an agency. I would get... We would have people that would come to us and want us to do stuff, projects, but they couldn't afford the pricing for an agency or they're too small or various reasons. So my boss would hand me these and say, hey, here's one we couldn't do, but if you want to do it for them on your own, you're more than welcome to do it. And so I'd do a couple projects like that, doing stuff. One of my favorite ones though is how I bugged the crap out of somebody and they actually came after me because they got tired of me bugging them. So there's...and I've had Travis on a couple times on JavaScript Java, but there's a platform called Form.io. which is really a neat platform. It's all JavaScript based, it's a form rendering thing. It's basically a drag and drop form builder. It's really pretty slick, but what it does is it automatically builds REST API and points behind the scenes, and then you can customize the crap out of your forms, and it's really flexible, you can do some neat stuff. And I was looking for alternatives for doing a site where I didn't wanna have to manage the backend so much, setting up a database and server and all that kind. And I had met Travis at a conference, and I started they had a little thing a calendly type thing where you could set up a point with them for you know 15 minutes to explain things or something like that and I did it like four or five times and they finally came back said this is only supposed to be for one or one time not four or five and then Travis Vinson reached out to me and he said So you seem to know this stuff pretty well and you know angler and stuff you want to do some work for us? So I did a couple projects for them The one time I have had to go full-time And this is out of necessity was in 2020 Where I had been doing it was my first full view view job full-time view And it was almost exactly one year and it was, so this was right when COVID hit, but it had nothing to do with COVID. It was our whole department got gutted up here in Portland for the company I was working at and you know, it's like, it was then like it, let me spit that out. Back then it was like it is now where you've got tons of layoffs. So there's tons of competition for positions that maybe normally you wouldn't have. And so it was very hard to find. positions, a lot of competition. I still, I think I have this huge directory of all my cover letters I sent out during that time frame. But in the meantime, I still had to work. So fortunately, I had done some freelance one-off contract work for a shop out of Baltimore. And I called them and said, hey, you need somebody for a while? I said, yeah, funny you should ask. We got a big project going on. So I worked for them until I got the job where I have now. But almost all my other side gigs that I'll do here are... You know, references or somebody I know needs somebody, it's sort of word of mouth networking type of stuff. Um, the,

 

Yeah,

 

um,

 

it's obviously easier when you're further along in your career like guys like us, you know, when

 

Yeah.

 

you're starting out, it's hard to figure it out. So.

 

Well, one was this guy did some work for his company. He was like a consultant, a IT consultancy and it was an internal tool they were doing. And... they needed some help, but I got the recommendation from my buddy Eric Hanchett, who I've had on here a few times. He does program with Eric, and he's a view guy at Amazon now at AWS. And some guy had taken his class. He did a view class and needed some help, and Eric's like, I can't do it, but here, go talk to Steve. And then the one I'm doing now is a pretty good site for a private club organization that I belong to whose website is literally out of the 90s still, you know, it's you know, hosting on dot sir where you FTP changed file, straight HTML files up to their server and everything's paperwork. And so we're trying to automate it. So I'm doing a whole membership portal that automates that. But so yeah, it's, I've done the various types, you know, whether it's the side jobs getting in, whether it's the full time, whether it's, you know, overflow from somebody, you know, just some extra money here and there to do stuff.

 

And

 

And it's.

 

when you do the work, Steve, how do you scope it? Like what boundaries do you put around the job?

 

Well, I have, I know how many hours of week I can spare. So, you know, I have a set of hours of week, you know, outside of my full-time job that I already do for, and then, you know, family and other commits and stuff and say, okay, I've got so many hours in a week that I can spare to work on this for you, you know, and it. you know, it takes up a lot of my spare time once I get into something like this, but it's generally for a short period of time. You know, it's not like an ongoing thing where I'm, you know, I'm doing full time and then I've got another 20 hours that I'm doing on a project. So I can base it off of that. Say, okay, I can, this would probably take this much time and I've got this many hours in a week. So that means I could probably get it done this much done by such and such a date, you know.

 

And so you just estimate based on experience how long I think this is gonna take me to

 

Right,

 

do.

 

right. And of course it's almost never right. You know, I run into

 

Yeah,

 

this

 

that's what

 

or

 

I

 

you

 

wanted

 

run

 

to get

 

into

 

to

 

that.

 

is, is the scoping question

 

Never right.

 

is

 

But.

 

a really tough one. So, you know, if anyone hasn't done this before, what I mean by scoping is, you know, someone asks you, hey, can you, we need to build this website or we need you to fix feature A, B, C or D or whatever it is. And they ask you, how long is it gonna take? Therefore, how much am I gonna pay you? And that is an alchemy, you know, as old as time is like. trying to guess these things or estimate them. So, you know, one way is just based off experience, how long do you think it's gonna take, right? And also what is it you're asking me to do? You know, scoping is not necessarily pricing. We're gonna talk about pricing next, but scoping is more about putting a boundary around what it is you're asking me to do and what it is I'm not going to do, or like where my boundaries are. You know, for example, like if I'm building you the website, who's actually gonna put all the... content into it. Am I doing that or are you doing that? The client or whatever it might be. So it's really important to kind of define what it is you're doing and not doing. And then like Steve was saying, it's notoriously hard to get that right. I think it's easy to kind of come up with a called scope of works or SOW you'll see, which is like, here's what I'm going to do and here's what I'm not going to do.

 

Yep.

 

Figuring out how long those things are gonna take is a different question. And there's a few different sort of methods of doing that. One is just to eyeball it and use experience to be like, ah, I think that's gonna take X amount of hours. That's fine for little jobs, but when it becomes big, build me a members portal or something like this.

 

exactly what I'm doing.

 

Yeah. I think the best way to do this and just this good rule of thumb is the granular you can get with it in your own, you don't have to share this with a client, but at least in your own kind of estimations, the better. So, Think about, all right, how many pages are they going to be? Individual pages do I have to build? Like a login page, an account page, edit my profile page, reset my password, whatever they might be, think of all the pages. Then think of all the components. How many components are you gonna have to build? What kind of form elements, all of the different things that you're gonna have to build? And then you can start to think, all right, how many hours will it take me to build just this one component? And do that for every component. and that is generally gonna be more accurate than you just going, I think it's like three days. You know, if you get more granular with it, you definitely are more accurate.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

That's like the next sort of level up of accuracy. And then you can Google this and there's some different spreadsheets out there that you can find. Then the next one is to kind of have all of that listed out and then assign a weighting of like a risk factor of how much... how accurate you think you are on these estimates. You know, like I think on the low side, this could take me half an hour, but if something really goes wrong, it could probably take three hours, you know? And then you come up with a range for everything. And then at the end, you're gonna have a range. On the low side, it's this, and on the high side, it's this. And so then you can either present that to the client and be like, on the low side, I think it's gonna take X, on the high side, I think it's gonna take Y. I will keep you up to date as I go. And if the client is okay with a little leeway, then that protects you. Or you can just say to the client, it's on the high side, I think it's gonna take the higher amount of time. So that's the final way to do it. And again, that's all scoping stuff. I think next we should talk about pricing, which is a different thing. Now, Steve, you got something you wanna add to the scoping stuff.

 

Yeah, like a statement of work is always a good way to go, you know, with ideally for a customer, they want to know, okay, can you do this by such and such a date because we have such and such a deadline or something like that. And so you want to give that, but I always, I know I will always stress to them, yes, this is an estimate, things can change, you know, and you're working, if you're working with somebody. it's an organization or whoever your customer is that has some knowledge of that kind of stuff, it's a little easier than someone who can't say, what? I don't understand you said it could be done. You know, that's, you know, I don't know how many times you scope something out and you look at the details, but I know that once I get into the actual programming and, you know, figuring out how I'm going to structure stuff, there's stuff that's going to come up. There's going to be questions. Oh man, I hadn't thought about this, you

 

Yeah.

 

know, until you actually, until you actually get in and start writing and start breaking it down. you're not gonna, you know,

 

I saw

 

no,

 

a great...

 

and the way around that is to maybe sit in, dig in, and start coding a little bit while you're making your statement of work and then build them for that time, I guess.

 

No,

 

I don't know,

 

I saw a

 

but...

 

great, you know, like little meme on Instagram that was a photo of a car engine and it was like, you know, every job is 20 minutes unless you break a bolt and it was like a bolt, you know, head

 

Alright,

 

snapped off.

 

right.

 

And that's totally true. Like, you know, if that bolt came out, easy job. But once you snap that bolt, then replacing that engine is a whole other thing. And the same applies to programming, you know? It's easy until it's not. So yeah, you know, you have to... be aware of that for sure, especially

 

Yeah, I

 

if

 

just

 

you're doing

 

had

 

something

 

my

 

you haven't

 

truck

 

done before.

 

worked on. They had to do the manifold exhaust. There's some issues and everything came down to the bolts. Okay, can we get this out or are we gonna have to completely pull it apart because the heads broke off and yes, fortunately

 

There

 

I was able to

 

you

 

get

 

go. Yep.

 

by on the low end.

 

Now, everything I said was related to a project-based freelance engagement. But a lot of the times it could be like what you said, like a time, like we need you for three months. It's a temporary contract and we're buying hours from you. And then you don't really have to worry about the scoping. It's more just about, can you do the engagement? Do you have the time to do what they're asking you to do? In those scenarios, I think your scoping is more about, what is my expectation? Like, do I have to be in meetings? Do I need to come to an office? Am I bringing my own tools? What tools do I need? Like, I'm assuming I'm a freelancer, so I'm bringing my own laptop, but are you gonna make me use some corporate VPN? Like, what level of stuff are you gonna have to, hoops are you gonna have to jump through to work for these people? That's definitely worth, and then. what's the payment terms? Like when are you gonna get paid? A lot of companies will pay you on whatever schedule they're on, not yours. If you're just a little nothing freelancer, sometimes you can hear horror stories, people get paid months later. So I think that's a good segue into talking about pricing.

 

Yeah, I've been fortunate in that the people that I've worked with, whether it's an agency or just a special customer, I've always been pretty good about paying, you know, as soon as, you know, within a reasonable amount of time. So.

 

I would urge any agencies out there or anyone working with freelancers, you should pay your freelancers as quick as you possibly can, like immediately. You know, like make it a thing to pay them the same day if you can, because it will, like you will find the level of attention you will get is very much tied to how long it is till you get paid. So like, you know, we've all... And also it's like we've all started the same kind of way, right? Like a lot of us have done freelance work. Like most people in the software world have done freelance work at some point in their career. And we all know how much it sucks to be like waiting to get paid as a freelancer because your cash flow is like so uneasy, so uneven and everything anyway. So, you know, don't screw over our past selves, you know?

 

Thanks

 

Do

 

for

 

it

 

watching!

 

like we're in this together, guys.

 

All right, so let's talk pricing. How do you

 

Yeah, well,

 

figure out your

 

I mean,

 

hourly rate?

 

how do you price for your stuff, Steve? You were saying you just... Okay,

 

No, I asked you first. You can't,

 

okay,

 

no.

 

okay. No, I mean, I'll tell the story of my first freelance thing. I remember I first got asked by, like this was at the company I worked for way back in the day and they asked, can I do this, you know, on the side? And I had no idea how to price it, which I'm guessing a lot of people out there do. And I think I came back with, you know, like 50 bucks an hour or something. I don't know what it was. And the guy... giving me the quote, who was obviously a friend because I worked with him. He said, well, I only work with professionals and professionals charge $100 an hour. And I was like, and he just did me such a solid. And I was like, all right, thanks. So that's, that was how I first started. But the real way to do it is you have to ask yourself for a certain job, are you going to value price or are you going to like cost plus a margin price? So what I mean by that is... If you can, you should value price, meaning what is the company asking you to do and what is it worth to the company? And if that is a higher number than just like your cost plus a margin, you should go with the value pricing if you can. So, you know, if someone is asking you to build something that is very valuable to them, don't be a sucker and just get paid hourly, you know? I've always tried to not be, you know, like the plumber or the mechanic. and try to be the artist. You know, we should all, I think we should all be aspiring to do that as a software engineer. Like I'm being paid because of a whole wealth of knowledge, not just like an hourly fee. Now, ultimately, sometimes you have to just do it as an hourly fee, but keep in mind the value if you can. Now that's easier to do when you're more established in the beginning, you know, it's hard to like. you know, be a nobody and be like, ah, I think this is worth so much money. I'm gonna charge you, you know, 50 grand or whatever it is. But just worth thinking about. So if we're talking about the other side of it, which is an hourly rate, figure out what your cost is, you know. So for example, how many hours are you going, do you have available? And if you're a full-time, you know, it's like a regular 40 hour work week with minus. the vacation times that you want over the year, figure out the total amount of hours in the year that you have minusing some vacation time and minusing, you know, I don't wanna work 80 hours a week, I only wanna work, you know, eight hours a day or five hours a day or whatever it might be. Figure out that and then say, how much money do you wanna earn? Or do you need to earn for your costs? So if you can just easy add up all your expenses for the month. your rent, your phone bill, your car bill, these things and figure out your cost. Divided by the amount of hours that you think you're gonna work, that's your cost per hour. Now obviously you don't wanna work to make just profit, just, no, sorry, you don't wanna work for no profit. So what you should do is figure out your cost and then plus a 30% margin on it. That's a good baseline, like that's the minimum you should do it for. You should treat yourself like a company. You're not trying to just make salary, you're trying to make your salary plus a margin. So whatever your cost plus the margin is, so I think 30% is a good place to start. That is your bare minimum. And then try and get it higher than that again if you can, with whatever works. I think if you're not in America and your client, like depends on where the client is, what I'm gonna say is like you should localize your, your salary too. Like if you live in New York or San Francisco and it's really high cost of living and the client is in San Francisco and New York, well then that's easy. You can just translate it straight across. But if you live in, you know, in Guatemala or, you know, Brazil and you're working for some American companies, you're not gonna be able to charge American prices. Like... I know we're all remote now and everyone likes to think that it doesn't matter where you are but the reality is a lot of people are going to work with you in Brazil or for us we have a team in Croatia. You're doing that because it's cheaper not because it's easier. Working across time zones is really annoying. So unless you're willing to make some real big sacrifices basically like pretend like you're not living in these other countries. it's generally going to be easier if you adjust your salary, localize it. So there's a website out there called, we'll put a link in it, it's called Numio, Numio, Numio, I can't pronounce it, but, and it's a really good tool for localizing cost of living. So you can use that to figure out, okay, if I lived in, you know, if I need to make 50,000 U.S. to live a good life in Buenos Aires, what does that translate to in America? And then you

 

on.

 

can figure out like therefore, like what's a good salary that you could charge, that won't be insane. Obviously you wanna try to charge a little more than what you can. So that's like a long way of saying, figuring out what your price is. But if you live in America and you're good at what you do and you're trying to build, JavaScript based like websites or web applications, I think the definitely... you wanna charge at least $100 an hour. And if you're really, really, really good, you can charge $300 an hour or more depending on, more if you're doing crazy like CTO level stuff. But if you're doing that, you probably don't need to listen to Steve and I.

 

Oh no, no, no, you always need to listen to us. Yeah, I had a similar story where a couple years ago I was gonna do some work for a guy there, an IT consulting agency, and he's like, well, how much do you charge? And I said, 85. He goes, that's it? I said, okay, I'll charge 100. Okay, that's good. It was that easy. I was like, all right. Because I had been charging that rate for a few years.

 

Yeah.

 

Honestly, I don't think I've ever done any serious market research on going rates for developers in the US living in where I live or anything like that. It's always just been sort of, I hear what other people charge, whether it's an agency or other freelancers that I know or talk to, and listen to that. And then

 

I think

 

for

 

it's

 

this...

 

a really good idea to charge on the low side in your first,

 

Yes.

 

you know, first stuff. Like I've definitely had guys that have quoted to me like, you know, 90 bucks an hour. And I'm like, man, this guy's like a genius. He's like really good. Like we would jump on this, you know, and then later it's like, I am raising my prices and you're like, I don't care. You're great. Like whatever. So.

 

Well, the, the counter side of that is I fell flat on my face doing that a couple of years ago, about two and a half years ago, working for a buddy of mine. Um, the guy that I'd known for a long time from the Drupal world who had his own had split off and had his own company that focused on a certain aspect. And they wanted to develop a view front end that used their backend with an API. And I was felt pretty sure of myself and, uh, bid such and such. I can't remember what the hourly rate was, maybe a hundred. And it was more than they were used to paying, but he was like, yeah, I'm willing to do it. Well, I felt flat on my face and they ended up, you know, say, okay, this ain't gonna work. And I got paid

 

Mm.

 

for what I did, but it was really pretty embarrassing for me.

 

Oh,

 

And

 

because

 

so,

 

you couldn't do it?

 

yeah, because what I did, I didn't have, I should have had more familiarity with the JSON API, which is what they used and it was confusing and I was having to ask a lot of questions of their developer team. And yeah, it was not good. And

 

Yeah,

 

he was

 

well.

 

pretty gracious with me and I got paid. And it was during that time when I was job hunting and I really needed the money, cause I'm just to pay my bills with my family and everything. And it was pretty embarrassing. So, I'm leery of overcharging because I don't want to overcharge and under deliver,

 

Yeah, yeah, of course, no.

 

for sure.

 

Yeah, that's good.

 

And I've had one particular case where I did some stuff. Pricing, sometimes I'll have to price down just because of what they can pay. And you know, you sort of got to take their word for it. Like I did a project and I've blogged about it before for a foundation. Uh, it's a sort of like a red cross type of foundation here in the area where I live that was tied to my old fire department and they needed some work done. They just had a really old website and nobody could trust and they could trust to build it. And so I did it for them, but I did it like half the price of what I would normally charge. They could only, you know, for like $50 an hour at the time. And I was like, you know, it's a good cause and I know the people

 

Yeah.

 

and, and stuff. And, and that was when I actually nailed like on the hour, the rate to the hour estimation to get it done. I mean, I was like within an hour or something like that. And so I felt pretty good about that one and I made

 

Yeah.

 

less money, but it was a good, it was a good experience, you know, anytime like that, even if I'm taking less money, I'm looking to see, is this a learning experience? Is this a chance where I can you know, not have us quite high the risk and expectations, but in the process I can learn how to do something new that I haven't done before.

 

Yeah,

 

And so

 

that's a

 

that

 

really

 

was a

 

good

 

great,

 

way to look at

 

that

 

it. Yeah,

 

one.

 

I'm...

 

So on the one I'm doing now, the member portal type thing, I'm using inertia in Vue and Laravel, which is awesome. I love working with that stack. And I did like, I wrote a whole statement of work and we knew what I was doing and we had a, it was, we had a vendor who was doing the first iteration and they had used Vue with Node and Mongo and just some really weird stuff and they had basically dropped off to the face of the earth and sort of left us high and dry and we're like, and I, I had come on board a little too late and they said, man, we should use you upfront. Well now we're going to start over from scratch. I'm rebuilding it. And I came in, I bid 150. And so. I present, I wrote a whole statement of work with dates and I'm gonna have this done by this date and this done by this date. And so it's all done by here because we have our renewal process coming up. And we presented it at a board meeting, had to go to a board meeting to present it. And there's a number of other people in the organization that are in the IT world, development, programming, that kind of stuff. And they looked at it and one guy was, yeah, I mean, everything he's asking for is within norms for that kind of work, you know, for a day. So I was like, okay, good, I got some validation there in what I'm doing. So it helped to have other people with professional experience, you know, sort of evaluating everything as well and looking at it. But so yeah, that's the one I'm in the middle of doing now, but I was happy that I was able to charge, you know, $50 more an hour than what I had in the past, you know, over the past couple of years, just that seems to be what the market will bear

 

Yeah,

 

at this

 

I mean,

 

particular

 

it's a great

 

point.

 

point about, you know, like if you want to charge $300 an hour and the client's gonna pay 50, doesn't matter. You know, that's

 

Yeah.

 

all they have. So, you know, it's at that point you're, you know, when we run into those sorts of situations at Funk House, what we try and do is trim the scope. Okay, well, you know, those 10 things you're asking me to do, you can only really afford to do three of them, you know, and try and get them to kind of like come down on their ask, you know, and then eventually you either like, do we need the money?

 

Right.

 

Do you need the money? Is it just a time of the month where, hey, you know, I'm on sale, let's go. Or is it, you know, but the little saying that we have at Funkhouse is like, it's the jobs you say no to that actually improve your life.

 

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Cause you don't want to, you have some big project that you're getting underpaid on and you know, but in the end you're almost losing money, you know, because of what it eventually takes. You know, I think from a developer standpoint, probably the ideal situation would be a time and materials like, okay,

 

Yeah.

 

whatever it takes, this is what you got to pay versus, you know, some sort of fixed scope thing where we're estimating it's going to take, you know, this many hours at this rate. And so this is how much it's going to cost you when you're stuck with that, regardless of how much it actually takes. So.

 

Yeah, the time and materials thing, that's obviously great. If you can do it, it's very hard to get the trust to do that, you know, and especially when you're doing a project not direct to a client, you know, like if you're working for an agency or you're working for a development shop or something where they might have like a fixed project cost, you know, and that's not a hundred percent, like most people. Like imagine if you just said, I'm gonna build me a custom car. I don't know how long it's gonna take, but just pay me hourly. It's like, man, that is so open-ended. I don't think anyone's gonna agree to that. They're gonna want an hourly estimate. It's gonna

 

All right.

 

take between 40 and 60 hours. So if that's the case and you get to like 100 hours, there's gonna be a real problem. So I think it's a little bit. Personally, I think it's a bit naive to do the time and materials with no, you know, range you're locked into. So the question there is like, if you tell them it's going to be between 60 and 80 hours and they're okay with that, you know, why not just say it's going to be 80 hours?

 

80

 

You

 

right

 

know,

 

right yeah we've had

 

I...

 

I had that before with an agency where a guy got into something and wasn't paying attention oh I'm 100 hours and the customer's like what

 

Yeah.

 

I didn't agree to this and you know the agency's got to eat it

 

Yeah.

 

but it's only fair for the customer too because they need to budget they need to know how much they're going to spend they just can't have write you a blank check and say here go do it whatever it costs you know maybe there's some places that can do that but that's that's

 

Isn't

 

more

 

that?

 

the exception than the rule you know

 

Totally. The way I look at it is, and I've said this to other people before that work for me, is like, if you're a professional, you should be able to tell me an estimate on how long this is gonna take, or at least these things are pretty definitive, we know, and then these other things might be harder, and I'm gonna have to do a little bit of research to answer those questions for you. Or like, I won't really know that until I've spent 10 hours, then I'll be able to give you, you know, but to just straight up be like. I'm not gonna answer any of those questions, time and materials. It's like, all right, cool, I'll do it. I'll find someone else who's more confident about this. You know, what kind of philosophy you wanna have as a freelancer, you know, like me at Funkhouse, I've been so burned on hiring other companies to do things for us over the years, where like, you know, they'll have a, we're gonna build this thing for you, and then we have 30 days to like identify any bugs and we'll fix them. And if you find something on day 31, that's you're gonna have to pay us to fix that. And I've been so burned in those kinds of arrangements that I personally just feel that, hey, you don't have to pay me to fix mistakes I made. Like

 

Yeah.

 

if we build something for you and it doesn't work a year later, whatever it is, if something is broken, we will fix it. Like I just personally, that's just the point of pride I wanna have. And I think as a freelancer, you should decide like, all right, am I just in this to like clock in, clock out, and I don't really care if this client's gonna have a good experience or not. I think you're not gonna have a good go at it. You're probably better off having a little bit of a, personal guarantee touch to things. I think you'll just do better.

 

Uh

 

And don't, the

 

huh. Yeah,

 

other

 

for

 

one

 

sure.

 

that annoyed me was like paying people to learn, you know?

 

Yes.

 

Like I'm happy if you're gonna come and do a project because it's interesting to you because you haven't done it before. But don't charge me like a hundred hours because you have to read all the docs, you know, or whatever

 

Right.

 

it might be. I just think that that's a little disingenuous, you know? Like I could go and hire someone that already understands it then.

 

Right. Well, I've been there in the past. Like, I can remember working on a project that was, and it was pretty long and it was seeming to take longer than I guess the people I was working for would have liked. But there was a lot of learning I had to do. But what I did myself was I didn't charge for those hours. You know, if I was learning something, if I was having to read docs, if I was having to, you know, really didn't know what was going on and it was fairly basic. you know, versus an issue maybe with the platform or something particular that was out of my control, then I just didn't charge for those hours. Because I just didn't feel right, you know, billing them for something that, you know, where they're paying me for my expertise and for my knowledge to bill them for... for having to learn how to do it. They don't need somebody to learn, unless they wanna pay me half the rate and assume that I'm gonna

 

Yeah.

 

learn as I go.

 

It's different, I guess, if you're working on something fully custom. You know, it's just like, you're going to have to learn this only for this one client, this one time.

 

Right, right, right for sure. All right. So now let's talk about getting paid. Um, I know I have a, you know, pretty, uh, uh, straightforward generic setup ride I'm looking at switching because it got so expensive all of a sudden, but QuickBooks, uh, is, uh, my tool and I just I have a system where I record my hours in there you know I have an invoice designed and I can just say okay invoice grab all these hours from such a such time frame add them and then I can save it as a PDF and send them and they're usually pretty good they'll pay me if I have something set up with gusto or they'll send me a check or you know whatever's the the ways have varied I know some people use fresh books I've used that in the past when I first got in the agency I was working for used fresh books and since we all me, you know, I could send them invoices through that instead of having an email, something and they would, you know, auto deposit into my checking account. But usually

 

Yeah.

 

it's like, you know, within 30 days, it's payable within 30 days or within two weeks or whatever the case may be. I've been very fortunate that I haven't had somebody that screwed me or not paid me or, you know, when they've owed me the money.

 

Yeah, we use FreshBooks in the early days as well. And I really liked how easy and intuitive that was, but it scales like terribly.

 

Oh, really?

 

Just like once you get, we just got too big for it. And yeah, it wasn't fun going, moving off that on the QuickBooks. Personally,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

I hate QuickBooks, but it is

 

Ah, it's

 

the

 

not the best.

 

default sort of platform. Yeah, so what you're gonna wanna do is, prepare an invoice.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And if you're the kind of person who's gonna make the client sign a contract up front, you know, like a lot of freelancers don't because it's very trusting, but you should do some Googling around the contract killer. And it's just like a one page freelance open source contract that's really good.

 

Hmm.

 

And that's a good, just kind of basically a sign. Because one of the things you wanna, you sort of wanna make sure is like who owns the work. And the client is gonna, the client should require that too, but a lot of clients don't understand. But you wanna kind of make it sure that like, I'm doing the work, you're gonna own it. I'm gonna use a bunch of open source stuff that maybe I don't necessarily know about the providence of, you know? But that's kind of like your responsibility. You don't wanna have to be in a situation where the client's like, what do you mean you use this other package? And you're just like, a lot of people don't necessarily understand how that stuff works. So that's always good to have. But yeah, then you wanna send an invoice. And I think you wanna be, generally you wanna be not insanely detailed on those invoices, but if you're charging hourly, you should include three hours did this thing, four hours did this thing, one hour did this thing, whatever. You wanna break it down a lot. Don't just do 40 hours built website.

 

Yeah.

 

If you're charging hourly. If you're... If you were just doing a flat fee, then that's totally fine. To do something like that. In the beginning, a lot of freelancers are like, all right, well, how do I, like, do I charge a deposit? Do I get paid, you know, progress payments? How do you handle that? I would recommend if you're building a project that you do some sort of upfront payment, 50% if you can, is a good way to do it. And you also have to ask yourself what motivates you as a freelancer, like is the carrot on the end of the stick the thing that like kind of keeps you going? Like I need to finish this and get paid or are you like a procrastination type or are you, is that not a problem for you? Because if you're the procrastination type and you might be good to leave like a big chunk at the end so that you're pushing towards it if that's what sort of gets you there. If you can trust yourself to do the work, I... This is a lesson that we learned at Funkhouse and took us way too long to learn. I would say a hundred percent you should try and get on a, like if you said the project was gonna be $10,000, you should charge them a thousand dollars a month for 10 months, you know, or even if the project even took you three months to do it, if you can, you know, there's a risk factor there because you might be building it for a company that might not be around in 10 months. So you kind of have to make the call, but if you can... If you can splice your payment out into equal payments over a certain amount of months, even if it's only over three months or four months, or, you know, and the clients are gonna agree to that, you should do that because cashflow is your biggest problem as a freelancer. And anything you can do to kind of like smooth out your cashflow, you totally should do. And if you're doing the hourly thing, then just pick a time that kind of works for you and the client like monthly or bi-weekly, every two weeks. you know, if you do weekly, cool, but a lot of clients won't want to deal with the paperwork every week to pay you. So monthly might be a way to do it, you know, and do little check-ins along the way on that X amount of hours, you know, coming up to this project X amount of hours or something like that.

 

Yeah, I've usually done just sort of the hourly thing. OK, here, or sometimes I'll do 50%, OK, this is halfway done. OK, now here's the rest. When I was working for the agency, it was basically full-time 40 hours a week. And I would submit my invoice at the end of a month. And then they would cut me a check. Um. That was the only time where I really had to depend on it. Otherwise, when it's outside projects, I haven't had quite the dependency of getting the money by a certain time because it's paying my bills. But yeah, I like the suggestions about having equal payments or having the cash flow. Yeah, because it sucks if you're used to, especially if you go freelance after having worked for somebody and you're used to the regular paychecks, all of a sudden you start getting irregular payments. The way to get around that obviously is budgeting and figuring out, okay, I'm going to have this much. I can't spend all of it now because I might not have this later down the road. So there's a lot of budgeting and planning that is involved. with stuff like that.

 

Yeah, that's really tough then. The last thing I think we should talk about is the inevitable situation that you'll run into eventually where someone doesn't wanna pay you for whatever reason. It might be that they can't afford it, but generally it's more that, I mean, the way I've seen it really go badly is the client thought they were gonna get A, B, C, and D, you thought you were only gonna be building A and E. and then you get to the end of it and the client's not happy for whatever reason. It's definitely more common on the design side, especially when it comes to like, we got someone hired us to design a logo and then the logo, they don't like it, or whatever that is. In that case, I could not explain it better than this video that every freelancer should watch. And are we allowed to swear on this thing,

 

Prob,

 

Steve? Probably

 

we're trying

 

not.

 

to keep it family friendly.

 

Okay.

 

Let's put it that way.

 

So the video is by a guy named Mike Monterio and he runs an agency out of New York, I believe. And he's a legend. And the video is called F U Pay Me. And it is required watching. I mean, I remember

 

There it

 

when

 

is,

 

we first

 

okay.

 

watched it. And the whole sort of, I'll paraphrase it all, but you should watch it. It's a brilliant presentation. The whole thing of that is, Look, I did the work. If you're happy with not happy with it, it's almost not the problem. You know, like as long as I did it to a certain level of quality and it works and you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, you have to pay me. Like, and if you don't like it, that's not my problem. Like I built what you asked me to build and it works to the level that I told you it would. And we all agreed on it. If you pay me. And you should watch, it's really, it's really, really good way of sort of explaining a lot of the pushback you'll get from bad clients about not paying you because of something changed on their end. It's very common, you know, how a lot of this stuff happens isn't so much that you did something badly, you know. I'd say if you'd built something that doesn't work, you should not ask to get paid. You know, have some professional integrity. But if you... It's more that the client changed their mind. You know, we've, like even at Funkhouse, we've built entire websites that never see the light of day, like six figure websites that, like a few times it's been things like the client, the person that worked for the company that engaged us, wasn't authorized actually to do it. So they went out and said, oh, we need a new company

 

Oh

 

website. we'll hire these guys, we'll pay these guys, you know, and they had all the authority to do all of that stuff. But then when we present the website, that's finished to them, like company, like, you know, the CEO is like, we're not doing this. So like,

 

Oh jeez.

 

essentially we always joke is like, they drove a Land Rover off a cliff. Like they just bought it and crashed it in the ocean and they were like, money well spent. So, you know,

 

Cheers.

 

stuff like that can happen.

 

Wow, yeah, fortunately I haven't been there. But that doesn't sound like fun.

 

Yeah, no, that's not. So now I think maybe we should finish on the favorite subject for everyone, taxes.

 

Oh, taxes. Yeah. So, you know, there's different arrangements for how you can structure your business. At least I'm not sure familiar how things are in Europe or Australia or outside the US. But in the US, there's things where you can be as simple as a 1099, which is basically where they pay you directly as a person. and they submit a form 1099, IRS form 1099, that says, okay, I paid you money and I didn't withhold social security and I didn't pay you insurance and I didn't know, you just got all the cash. Then you are responsible on your personal income taxes for accounting for that and having to pay for the social security or any, you know, state income taxes or federal taxes or whatever. Then you can do, if you wanna help that, you can set things up as a business ranging from a sole proprietor, a limited liability corporation or liberal liability company I think. which is what I do, or up to like an S corporation, or there's other types of business structures that you can do that would allow you to, you know, have a separate business and then basically you pay yourself a salary from that business. And so it's a separate tax entity with a separate tax ID and stuff. And you have benefits there over attending NIN, in that you can write off business costs. I do it, you know, for instance, with hardware, my computer, my monitors, my mouse, my printer, If you travel to conferences like ViewConf, for instance, that's a business expense in the meals and you can spend money on that. But write that off so you're not paying taxes on it. These are things that I'm not an expert on. But what I have done in the past is I'll go sit with an accountant. When I first started freelancing, I set up some time and I paid him for an hour's worth of his time and said, how do I do this? How do I set this aside? How much do I need to set aside? for taxes and pay it, how do I need to structure this and how do I account for this? So I was prepared ahead of time and knew how to do it. And I used to do, what I used to do is do that and then use something like TurboTax, small business to put all my information in it and calculate it. Over the past couple of years, especially the year that I was freelancing, were such a large chunk of my time. of my income was freelancing for that month. I just paid an accountant. So a friend of mine works for a local accounting firm and I pay a few hundred dollars once a year and I give them all the tax forms and he figures it out. And it saves me so much time. Cause I literally, when I would do TurboTax, I would be, let's just say that if I was filing it on April 14th, I was early. because I'd always have it in April 15th, which in the US is your tax personal tax filing deadline based on a calendar year. And so with this guy, like January, February, I say, okay, here's my form, have fun. And he figures things out. Now the year that, now in terms of setting aside, you have to set aside a pretty good chunk. And the other headache, and this is a whole wormhole we're not going to go down to, and what keeps me from going freelance full time is insurance, you know, medical insurance and benefits and the costs and having a company paying part of your premiums versus having to do it yourself. Obamacare was a freaking disaster that made things worse instead of better. That's my opinion. And so you have to set aside for that. And I was fortunate that year when I figured out, he said, you need to set aside such and such a percent for taxes and you can take the rest. change set aside for my taxes. Well taxes came in it was like half of what I'd set aside. I was like, woohoo, extra money. I sat on that for a while. So you know when it comes to setting aside for taxes you're gonna want to probably want to be set aside on the high end, you know more than you think you might need just in case you know something changes. Tax laws are always changing and write-offs and so on. But then it's better to do that and maybe over set aside versus not setting aside enough, then taxes are coming up for the next year. You're like, shoot, I gotta make some more money to pay off taxes, cause I didn't set aside enough money. And yeah, so taxes are just a lot of fun.

 

Well, the thing that I would say as a freelancer, the number one risk to your lifestyle is taxes. The amount of freelancers I know that have just ruined their happiness because of the taxes is huge. Because you go from, so just to kind of clarify, and it is the same in Australia and it's the same in Europe, if you're an employee at a company, the company is... is taking amount of your salary and paying your taxes for you. When you go freelance, or even if you're just moonlighting on the side and you're getting paid, you're getting paid the entire amount and it's on you to pay the taxes. So Steve was talking about there's different entities to do this. If you're gonna go full-time freelance, you absolutely should set up a business entity to do it. You know, like again. Not financial advice, but an LLC is probably the bare minimum a good idea unless you talk to an accountant tells you otherwise Like Funk House is an LLC still it's a limited liability corporation and it's a great way to just do it It's cheap in California. It's like 500 bucks a year unless you earn enough a lot of money and then it becomes more But for most people it's like 500 bucks a year to set it up You set it up on legal zoom for free or you know close to free 200 bucks or something like that and then then The biggest advantage there is you can write off all your expenses. And so you totally should do that. Now, if you don't wanna do that because of whatever reason, then the bare bare minimum that you should do is if you're just gonna earn all of this as like an individual, is that you should at least open up a different bank account that is all of your business expenses.

 

Yes, for

 

If

 

sure.

 

you start mixing your business expenses with your personal expenses, it just is such a headache. and really hard at the end of the year to be like, oh, this laptop I bought is a real expense, versus like, whatever it might be. The very minimum do that. I know people that haven't done that and it's just such a disaster. I would say a really good rule of thumb, again, speak to an accountant and do this correctly, but if you're not gonna do that, a bare minimum rule of thumb is 25% of everything you earn is gonna set that aside for tax.

 

That's the bare minimum.

 

Yeah, yeah. I mean, put that aside and don't spend it.

 

I was

 

And

 

setting

 

if you...

 

like 40

 

Yeah,

 

of mine,

 

well,

 

40

 

that's,

 

to 45.

 

you know, that's... Again, if you're paying like 40%, you're just not taking advantage of all the tax deductions and stuff, I think. Like, depends where you live, but in, like, Los Angeles, it's high, that's high tax in the

 

Yeah. Well,

 

Republic

 

there's also

 

of

 

what

 

California.

 

they call the self-employment tax. You know, basically

 

Yeah.

 

since the company is not half of your, you know, social security contributions or whatever, then you have to make up that. So it's

 

Yeah,

 

sort

 

it

 

of a penalty.

 

gets rough.

 

Yeah.

 

Insurance. Steve, as an Australian, I have to just point out to all of our American listeners that your healthcare system is terrible and this insurance system you have is a total joke. And that in quotes, socialized healthcare is actually a million times better and you should do it. Give up on insurance, it's such a scam. You're all getting ripped off.

 

Oh, you and I could get into a long fight about that one, for sure.

 

But

 

I will leave it at that.

 

yes, the insurance, like if you want to have your own insurance and you're like under 40 and you're healthy, it's probably going to cost you, well look, depends, you get a whole bunch of subsidies and stuff, but depending on how much income you earn and things like that. You know, I know DJs that don't earn any money and their health insurance is like $2, but if you're earning a you're probably gonna spend between three and $500 a month just for your own insurance. I mean, what we pay at Funkhouse for our employees is about four to $500 a month for our employees, and that's not even like the best plan. It's expensive, it's really expensive.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

So, factor that in to your calculations for sure. And be just really disciplined about setting aside, like Steve said, 25 to 40% of your income Now you can do some smart stuff with that. Like you can set aside and put it in a term deposit and earn some interest. Interest rates are decent enough now that that's actually worth something. You can get

 

Yeah.

 

four or 5% on your tax savings because you don't need to pay it until the end of the year. You know, sometimes you should be, you can pay it like quarterly and stuff like that if you don't trust yourself, but definitely don't do, don't buy crypto with it. Don't do dumb stuff

 

Hahaha!

 

because... uh... at the end of the uh... you're gonna have to pay that and

 

Let me just give you a

 

it

 

stock tip. FTX is probably not the way to go. So just saying.

 

Yeah, so anyway, to just be real careful with taxes, I would strongly, like I actually have a little finance presentation that I give to all the new employees at Funkhouse that want it. Cause I got scared of all these college grads that we were hiring and being like, this is the first time you've got real money. And just, you know, the second day that they show up, they've got a new car, you know, and I'm just like, oh. So I think a really just good tip is to you should be paying yourself a salary if you're a full-time freelancer so think of it like that. Don't think of it like I just got this $10,000 job so I have $10,000. No you don't. You have a monthly salary based on the calculations that we talked about earlier like what's your you know what are you trying to get a year therefore your monthly salary should be this. And when you earn more than that, it goes, that's company money. You know, that's the Drew Baker company money. That's not your money,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Drew Baker,

 

Yep.

 

you know, whatever it is. Pay yourself a salary and you'll be way better off than just like riding the roller coaster of freelance income and spending the money that's supposed to be taxed and hoping that you'll pay it back later and stuff, because you won't. You'll just end up

 

Alright.

 

owning the IRS like 40 grand. So be careful.

 

Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right, we have sort of hit the limits of our time, so we are going to switch over to pics. Pics are the part of the show where we can talk about whatever we wanna talk about. Do you got any pics for us, Drew? So, we're gonna talk about pics.

 

I just, I would just watch that F you pay me thing. I think it's brilliant and uh, I mean it's...

 

Yeah, I've got the link here. So I'll

 

Yep.

 

put it in the show notes for sure. Oh, and then I'll, going back to another thing you mentioned, Numbeo, I think is how you say it, is the cost of living calculator,

 

Yep.

 

N-U-M-B-E-O.com. So I'll drop that link in the show notes as well. And then I

 

There

 

think

 

was

 

I

 

a

 

found

 

really

 

the contract killer,

 

Yep.

 

the plain language design contract. So that looks pretty cool.

 

My other pick would be the Nuxt released their like vision for 2023. And it's just basically like a roadmap of the things that they're gonna kind of go after. And it's really interesting read, especially if you're using Nuxt.

 

Yes, and...

 

I'm excited to see the work they're gonna do on some of the community, not the community module, but like the Nuxt core modules, like Nuxt Image. And then they're doing one called Nuxt Script, which I'm not a hundred percent sure what that is, but. must be interesting because they put it on their roadmap. So yeah, check it out.

 

Yes, next week our host, our guest will be Daniel Rowe, who

 

Oh, a

 

has

 

little

 

recently

 

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the big cheese with Nux now. He stepped in for Puyo Parsa, if I remember correctly. So Daniel, we've had on here two or three times and he, if you want to know anything about Nux, he's the guy to talk to. So it'll be a lot of fun. Looking forward to having him next week for sure. So for my picks, before I get to the high point of every podcast, the dad jokes of the week, I actually came across a song that, and an interesting story behind it, in the Christian tradition there's a hymn that is called It Is Well With My Soul. And the history behind it is just fascinating. And I've heard this story a couple times, and it came up again this past week at a memorial service that I was actually at. This story's not real long. Back in the 1800s, there was a very successful lawyer and property owner in Chicago named Horatio Spafford. And he had quite a lot of property in Chicago, real estate investments. And then came the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the famous fire that was started by Mrs. O'Leary's cow, if you go by tradition. And he lost all of the property, it was all destroyed. And on top of that, he had five kids, he had four daughters and a son, and he lost his son to scarlet fever, all about the same time. So they managed to make it through. You know, he was an attorney, I believe. And then in 1873, they decided to go to Europe as a family. And something, a business deal, something happened that Horatio needed to stay behind and he sent his wife and four daughters ahead to Europe on a ship. And then he was going to join them, get a ship and leave a couple days later. While the ship was sailing, it was... collided with another very heavy ship and his wife Anna and their daughters went down with their ship. His wife barely survived but his four daughters drowned. Another boat coming by happened to find her still alive and rescued her. She sent Horatio a telegram that basically said, "'Survived alone, what shall I do?' And so he got on the next ship he could and headed over and about four days out, The captain pulled him aside as they were passing the spot where the ship with his family had gone down and pointed it out. And it was at that point that he wrote the poem, It Is Well With My Soul, and it was later put to music by another musician, I forget his name, Philip Bliss in 1876. But if you ever... gone to church and you've sung that song is an incredibly powerful, powerful hymn. And the story behind it's fascinating that a guy could write a song like that after having lost so much, you know, in the previous few years, but really good song. I'll drop a link to the story behind the song, uh, in the, in the show notes. And then on more of an upbeat note, shall we say, uh, it's time for the dad jokes of the week. Um, The other day I was sitting eating breakfast with my daughter and she said, why does a fork have four prongs? So fork has four little prongs on there. And I said, well, if it had any less, it would be called a threek. you know, for somebody else pointed out to me that it's actually would be a trident, you know, like what Neptune uses to eat with. And then for all you math people out there, how do 37 mathematicians board a bus that only has 36 seats? They carry the one. All right. And then finally, my wife recently was threatening me to leave me because I never put the toilet seat down. You know, it's a pet peeve. It's always the men's fault, never the women's, but that's another story. But that was okay, because I was getting tired of carrying it around anyway. Yes. There we go. Sorry, delay on the rim shot there. So anyway, that is all we have for Views on View this week. Another fascinating episode of pearls of wisdom dripping from our lips like water. Hopefully those of you who are newer in the development community will find this useful to learn from our experiences and mistakes in my case. But go forward, prosper, develop, keep using View and we will talk at you next time.