Although I'm currently working full-time as a Rails developer and reasonably satisfied with my job, I've been daydreaming about becoming a freelancer/consultant. I've had a taste of that lifestyle once before and really enjoyed the freedom. I was able to do things that are impossible to do in a traditional job - for example, I took a 5 week road trip and worked 10 - 15 hours a week while I was on the road. And unlike some hackers out there I really enjoyed the business side of freelancing as well. It was fun to speak with new clients, manage my own income, and send out invoices. The only reason I decided to take a full-time job was so that I could get some professional experience with building enterprise scale web apps and to learn from people more experienced than me.
This job has allowed me to grow tremendously as a developer, but I've only been at it for a little over a year and I'm concerned that potential clients will want someone with more experience. I consider myself to be a pretty good dev (and have a lot of Github projects to prove it), but for some reason I'm fixated on the idea that I need X number of years of experience under my belt before I can be taken seriously as a full-time freelancer/consultant.
Those of you who are freelancers, how many years of professional experience did you accrue before jumping into freelancing full-time? What did you charge your clients when you first got started?
This job has allowed me to grow tremendously as a developer, but I've only been at it for a little over a year and I'm concerned that potential clients will want someone with more experience. I consider myself to be a pretty good dev (and have a lot of Github projects to prove it), but for some reason I'm fixated on the idea that I need X number of years of experience under my belt before I can be taken seriously as a full-time freelancer/consultant.
Those of you who are freelancers, how many years of professional experience did you accrue before jumping into freelancing full-time? What did you charge your clients when you first got started?