7 Useful Tools For Freelance Web Designers
Being a freelancer sounds very cool… You have 100% freedom in deciding what projects you will work on, the way you will organize those projects as well as the tools you will choose to work with. Not even mentioning that you decide whether you will work from home, office, cafes, park or any other place you like. Awesome right? Well yes and no. Both, yes and no, are because of one reason: 100% freedom. When you are given the freedom to decide on everything, from working hours, to working place and working tools, then often you might get lost. You are distracted by things that normally people with ordinary jobs do not encounter, you need to create the “system”, you need to find the right tools and use them in the right way, and all this should be done on time or before due or deadline. If this doesn’t happen…the freelancer is out of game.
In today’s article we recommend 7 tools we believe are useful for every freelance web designer. Let’s take a look:
Simple time tracking, fast online invoicing, and powerful reports. With this tool you can track your time spent on projects from your web browser, mobile phone, or desktop. It also allows you to create invoices fast, with customized logos and translations, and invoice in different currencies. Harvest also enables you to keep track of your expenses, as well as to send professional - looking estimates to your clients. You can check Harvest pricing here.
It is a great tool to get a new project to work on. Clients post projects for free and if you are one of the matching designers then you are notified via email immediately. Freelancers post bids to win contracts.
3. Shadowness
“Our vision is to create a simple and powerful tool to allow artists and designers to connect to each other and share their work. We’re tight-knit, pretty picky about our work, but always friendly, ready to help and learn”. This simple tool allows you to design your portfolio, be awarded as you contribute, join and create art groups, participate in forum topics, access to instant chat messaging between members of the community etc.
4. Vecteezy
It is a community of vector art! Members create and exchange free vector graphics like vector icons, vector patterns, vector swirls, or flourishes. Check it out!
5. FreeAgent
Great tool to manage your books and accounts. This tool is specifically targeting small businesses and freelancers. They say: “FreeAgent launched in 2007, hewn from the frustration that managing company finances was just too damn hard for most small businesses and freelancers. Since then we’ve doggedly stuck to our mantra of demystifying accounting and redefining the relationship people have with their finances”.
6. IconFinder
This tool helps you to find a variety of high quality icons in an easy and efficient way. It is said to be the first search engine focused on icons and “with millions on icons downloaded every month it is among the most popular icon sites”. So maybe it is worth to try it!
7. FontForge
It is an open-source application for font design. FontForge allows you to create your own postscript, truetype, opentype, cid-keyed, multi-master, cff, svg and bitmap (bdf, FON, NFNT) fonts, or edit existing ones. “Also lets you convert one format to another. FontForge has support for many macintosh font formats. FontForge’s user interface has been localized for: (English), Russian, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Vietnamese, Greek, Simplified & Traditional Chinese, German, Polish, Ukrainian”, is explained on FontForge official website.
We hope you will find these tools useful. Any other tools you would like to recommend?
Interview with Mackram Raydan, the Founder of Cuevox
As we reminded you in our last blog post, Seeqnce is hosting its first session of the Naked Startup Series presentations, featuring cuevox.com and its founder Mackram Raydan.
Mackram Raydan is a 27 year old engineer at heart whose passion lies in bringing ideas to life, and in dissecting problems and understanding them. After majoring in computer engineering at the American University of Beirut, Mackram spent a year as a programmer at Trilog and then 4 years as a IT Project Manager at Procter & Gamble. In 2010 he went solo and started his one-man company to build and consult on software which he is still running.
“You are young, so whatever happens you still have tomorrow to do whatever you want so really there is no big deal in just jumping in and doing it. But if you don’t do it then you are always going to find some excuse not to do it and in 5 or 10 years you are going to regret” - Mackram Raydan.
Yesterday we had a chance to talk with Raydan who shared with us great insights about the Cuevox project. In fact Cuevox is a service which reminds clients of their appointments with you and sends you their responses. If the traditional solution was either to hire an extra assistant to handle followups or to have the current one focus more on phone call followup, now you have the Cuevox solution. Raydan was talking about the beginnings of this project, how it all started, who is this product for, what stage is the project at, what the greatest challenges were and what the future Cuevox plans are. In the end he provided great thoughts and advices on the “fear of failure” issue, which we wrote about in our last blog post, “Fear of failure: You cannot avoid it but you can learn to live with it”. “Whatever you do, anything you do, if you jump in and decide to start a new venture, by the end of it whether it succeeds and becomes your lifestyle income or it doesn’t you are still going to learn a lot. It’s going to turn you into a leader because you are going to have to lead and motivate yourself” said Raydan. You can find the transcription of the interview below.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Seeqnce : What does Cuevox do?
Mackram Raydan: So Cuevox basically is an appointment reminder for businesses. Think of a business that is based on appointments, like a doctor, clinic, or maybe a spa. These businesses have a problem of no - shows. So clients might have an appointment but they just miss that appointment. And the problem is: this missed appointment is a direct missed profit. And if you have an appointment with some client and somebody else walks into your business but you don’t know whether the appointed client will show up, then you can 1) bring the new client in, but then what if the appointed client shows up and you cannot serve both of them at the same time or 2)you can say to the other client “I don’t have a place for you” and then he/she will leave and if the appointed client doesn’t show up then you have missed an opportunity. So here comes Cuevox which is an appointment reminder for the clients of these businesses. They will call clients before their appointments, ask them if they are going to come or not and then it will tell the business if the client is showing up or not. In this way they can make actual choice when they have walk in customers.
Seeqnce: What sparked the idea? Mackram Raydan: A couple of things made the idea happen. First, I was looking for a small project to build which is actually a point that will be described later in the presentation as a failure. So I wanted to build something with my preferable language at the time and I had just heard about this company, a startup called Twilio that offers APIs that I can use to make phone calls. And then I had this particular incident when I went to a clinic, I was just waiting there for my appointment and I had to wait because they were not sure if another client is going to come or not, they were trying to call him and I was thinking this could be easily solved by a calendar program. So when all these factors came together I said “ok I can build this”. Seeqnce: Who is the Cuevox team? Mackram Raydan: The team is me and that’s it. So the company Cuevox is a single founder startup. Seeqnce: What is your market and target audience? Mackram Raydan: The market today is North America, so basically US and Canada. The target audience is small and medium sized businesses that are based on appointment. There is a problem here and this is something I am going to discuss in the presentation. In fact the reason I have to offer it only in North America is that phone call costs are cheap in the US but unfortunately that’s not the case elsewhere. And if clients are calling outside countries than I need to charge them as it is an international call and then the business proposition is no longer valid. So that’s why now it’s only focused in the US and Canada. Seeqnce: What stage are you at? Mackram Raydan: Right now Cuevox is ready, it’s built. I already attempted to market it. It’s another point that I will be bringing up as well and that is how to know your distribution channels. Right now Cuevox is fully ready. I had a couple of clients but not enough to make it a profitable business yet so the cost of hosting and other costs are still higher than the generated money. Right now it’s about trying to find clients. Seeqnce: Are you looking for funding? Mackram Raydan: At this stage not necessarily. I was looking for something different. I built Cuevox as a platform so people could white label it and then they can use and leverage their business skills in selling it rather than just depending on my business skills. So people can come and sign up for Cuevox. As a white label they can name it whatever they want, offer whatever plans they want and then based on that they can sell it to clients. Seeqnce: Are you looking to hire? Mackram Raydan: Not until it becomes profitable. Seeqnce: What is the biggest challenge in your business? Mackram Raydan: The biggest challenge in this particular venture is the distribution channels. Generally these small to medium sized businesses are not people who are searching for appointment reminders on the Internet. So if you go and do a quick keywords search on who is looking for appointment reminder it tends to be consumers, not businesses. These businesses need more a face to face or phone call kind of selling which requires a different kind of workforce. So I was thinking about putting some money into ads such as Google ads or Facebook ads but that is not bringing in a proper return. This particular venture requires more of sales people. Seeqnce: Any regrets so far? Mackram Raydan: I’ve had some mistakes, several of them actually but I am very happy that they happened. Mainly because they taught me a lot for the next ventures I am building. Luckily that this has been a single founder non- funded project. My expenses were very limited. I was very conscious of it and I had to build it accordingly. All the things I have paid for have been a learning experience so there isn’t any major regret like “I wish I didn’t do this project”. But there is one thing that I would change and that is: I wish I did more homework in the very beginning so that I could understood better the clients I could have been selling to. This would have helped me understand that I need sales force and will have gone about it differently. Seeqnce: What’s next? Mackram Raydan: With Cuevox, I am going to try to push with some people that might be interested in white labeling it. So I will actually attempt to have someone do the business sales. There is a plan for maybe introducing a referral program so that people will be interested in trying to sell it and then tell about it. There are couple of other projects, new ideas, things that help people to bring up features in their web applications. Seeqnce: What was your greatest fear while working on the idea? And how did you overcome it? Mackram Raydan: My biggest fear was making ends meet because when I started it I left my job and I decided to do this full time. And without funding there is always the problem of “what are you going to do” and I decided to do consulting projects on the side and try to live as much as possible with savings until I have a job again. So the fear was not being able to make ends meet. And the only way to face that is actually to just jump in and then you are going to realize that there is nothing to be afraid of. You can pretty much easily do a lot of things in your life that can make ends meet. You don’t have to worry what people say. This is another thing, a cultural thing in Lebanon. A lot of people worry about how others will stigmatize you if you go and do your own thing and the way I’ve seen it, the way I’ve looked at it is everyone has to go through it. And the only way you can go and make something of yourself is by actually jumping right away. So you can plan and plan but you just need to make that first step. Seeqnce: What advice can you give to fresh entrepreneurs to overcome the fear of failure?
Mackra Raydan: Whatever you do, anything you do, if you jump in and decide to do something, to start a venture, by the end of it whether it succeeds and becomes your lifestyle income or it doesn’t, you are still going to learn a lot. It’s going to turn you into a leader because you are going to have to lead and motivate yourself. Everyone in the market place is looking for employees that are leaders and are motivated. So there is nothing to be scared of. Just think of it as a learning experience that at the end of which you might learn the lifestyle you want or you might just increase your value in the employee market. So there is really nothing to worry about and a friend once told me an advice I can give to people: You are young, so whatever happens you still have tomorrow to do whatever you want so really there is no big deal in just jumping in and doing it. But if you don’t do it then you are always going to find some excuse not to do it and in 5 or 10 years you are going to regret.
