A day in the life of a freelancer
Sometimes…
A request I recently received via email – and I quote:
We are working on a project that would basically be a Flash interactive application. I attached a PDF that explains the function. Keep in mind this is not the actual design but more of a functional representation…
Would you be able to give me a cost as to how much you would charge for a project as such? I really need the pricing early tomorrow….
Attached was a one screen pdf with five or six comments about video, slides, transcripts and pause/play functions. Pretty basic as for “interactive” (in quotes because that’s practically *not* interactive at all) presentations. No sense of size, or whether there are any elements besides just the video and slides.
So I responded with a fairly detailed email asking specific questions, and about 30% of the questions were answered usefully. A short back and forth followed, which didn’t really help me clarify the project all that much. Not all that unusual for us freelancers – and really not so unusual in any working environment. Anyone who is on the building or project management end of a project knows that often the most difficult part is guiding the client through the process of actually defining the project clearly enough so construction can start. But this was just an estimate, so I put together one with a fairly wide range and tried to explain the various options, and I listed my assumptions, etc. I do that for any project I estimate, even if the goal is very clear.
What floored me wasn’t that request. It was the one I got from the same client within hours of the back and forth on the first request.
And I quote:
Can the xxxxx site be leverage as?…client wants us to do digital presentation:
Is there any way we can leverage our website code into a digital presentation??
if you can…please put pricing together…
I couldn’t believe I got that request immediately after going back and forth about how I needed at least some rudimentary info if I’m going to put together an estimate that is at all useful. So I responded:
No problem, but I need a better idea of what you’d like to do with it.
And I got back:
More detail is as follows…it would be taking the theme of the site and focusing on the gallery…adding projects that we’ve worked on/capabilities.
How many in the gallery..? ….I don’t have a number yet…but you may want to say x # of items in the gallery $$….
I admit it was silly of me to not be more specific in my response so that they were forced to confirm/deny/clarify whatever it is they are looking for. I had a feeling that this was a 100% exploratory type of thing, and I suspected it would never really turn into a paying project. So I told them that if they wanted to dump the site on a disk or something like that, no problem. It’s a simple site with no back end at all. If they want to expand their gallery section, we can do that, but I need an idea of what they want to do. Right now it’s just thumbnails that don’t link to anything and don’t have any additional info. No biggie if they want to just add thumbnails, but I couldn’t see where that would be very useful. If they want something more in depth, that’s certainly possible, but I need an idea of what they would like before I can estimate it.
I never heard back. Of course I’m not going to do an estimate, because I can’t. Ugh. These are good people, I’m sure. This is a new client for me, so I don’t know them very well. They seem nice. Seems maybe they’re stressed, but that’s common. I’m sure they’re smart. So when then are requests like this such a regular occurrence? I really don’t know.