To learn new libraries or finally do what the clients want?

Freelance data scientist? Forget about “2021 study guides” once and for all

Strategies and tactics for independent experts

Illustration from Upslash

Remote work is a new normal today. The first months of “freedom” from the office were pretty fun but that job stays the job: dependent on a fixed salary / hourly rate, limited opportunities, risks of losing a warm place. Lots of us have tried to go solo, finding customers online and learning new in-demand skills. However you could notice, that new clients, that you have conquered so hardly, don’t pay you for Udemy certificates and Tensorflow skills — they just want “99% accurate solution in 2 weeks as cheap as possible. Don’t forget about that time tracking too”. As a result for you — more stress, less money, less satisfaction from supposedly independent, creative, and inspiring work. In this article, I want to summarize practical insights, that I have in-detail talked about at the Univesity of Verona meeting that will help you to build an independent expert career right. Also, I am inviting you to join a Clubhouse chat next week, where we can discuss our experiences together more in detail and help each other out:

Data science 🧑🏽‍💻 Freelancing 🌴 Happy clients 💰

What a client really wants from you

Business is created to satisfy multiple goals: revenue generation, social and environmental impact, relationships, which are measured in dollars, jobs created, air quality, etc. In order to maximize the numbers above, founders and managers create structures where everyone has their own place to do the qualified work. As an employee, you produce a piece of this result (technology in our case), but sometimes the structure doesn’t do it as expected.

As an independent expert, you don’t compete with employed data scientist on the payroll who fits the function. So why you keep doing same things as they do?

This is where external help is used, to provide funds, connections, expertise, or any other resources to achieve the result. And here you as an independent expert can step in and boost the numbers because the system can’t. And the difference between an employed person in a system and an independent expert lies in the focus of work: both can write code, but the first one reports passed CI/CD tests to the direct manager and leaves office at 18:00, while the second one reports the growth of revenue to the owner and is accountable for it. Which one do you want to be? And what are you doing right now?

Change your mindset

Picture from http://thinkapps.com/blog/post-launch/how-start-startup-competition-losers/

Sounds scary, right? How you can promise business boosts if you’re just a technical expert? There are three typical mental blockers that lead to unsatisfying results both for you and for the client:

• “I am not good enough”. If you compare yourself by the FAANG standards where they have these ranks from 1 to 10 — maybe. But it only matters if your goal is to have a steady payroll and be a function in a system. You can actually deliver more value to the client being 4/10 from the technology point of view, but knowing 10/10 the client’s business and having 10/10 unique value proposition compared to a person with 10/10 technology skillset but 4/10 business knowledge and 4/10 uniqueness.

Illustration from https://libraryofconcepts.wordpress.com/2017/10/29/three-most-relevant-stages-of-human-development-nowadays-kegan-13/. Employees usually sit in the “socialized mind” cohort, self-employed are “self-authoring” and entrepreneurs “self-transforming”. This illustration shows the difference in thinking: employees want to correspond to the group norms, self-employed want to be different, and entrepreneurs understand them all and connect the dots

• “I am afraid to ask too much”. Forget emotions in the money talks — this is all about returns on the investment. If you can gain $100'000 for your client in a month, asking $20'000 is a sweet deal for the client: 5x investment! And who cares that in your country a monthly salary of a data scientist is $3000 — they settled to do a function, you decided to deliver results!

Illustration from https://www.consultingsuccess.com/consulting-fees shows that of course there are other more classical financial models of how consultants charge, but I highly encourage you to be the one in the “Value and ROI-based” group. This is the top-level!

• “I will lose what I have now”. The most common and most irrelevant blocker. If you are doing something that you love and you do it well, you can deliver results working 10–20 hours per week. There is literally no need to leave your job to become an independent expert. Legally this is also not forbidden AFAIK (but check your contract and the local law). You have evenings and weekends to get and work with new clients and later on, you can decide which lifestyle fits you and your closest better.

Do you already see what you need to focus on? Is it a brand-new ML course from the Internet or something else? Let me know :)

Change your strategy and tactics

Settle with what you’re good in

There are different techniques designed to help you to understand your unique competitive advantage (often shamelessly promoted as a search for purpose):

Illustration from https://zekluu.com/en/self-development-ikigai-el-sentido-de-la-vida/ shows that in order to avoid competition and build a unique, independent from other skillset and business, you need to work on the intersection of your talents (what you love), your trained skills, economic value, and requests from the world

In a nutshell, you should leverage your talents (instead of social dogmatic behavior) by using skills that you’re good at (again, instead of what’s supposed to be cool) in a professional area that is highly paid and impactful (instead of working where others told you to do so). I have written a whole article about this topic only, please take a look at it:

From developer to entrepreneur: what is your way up?

Leverage your network

It remains the easiest way to obtain good customers, which almost no-one uses because “it’s cool” to do growth hacks instead of building relationships with people you already know. Your family, school and university peers, and teachers, colleagues and bosses, neighbors, and acquaintances — they all know people who know other people. Start getting interested in their lives and helping them and tell them about your new unique proposition. If you do something which is you obviously (for the others) well and the in-demand and impactful area, you will get your projects faster and will do exactly what suits you with people who appreciate it and trust you.

Demonstrate your expertise publicly

I understand that your network might be limited or not include people from the area you aim to work in. How to get there? Start to be useful to strangers online! As we agreed, you work on the unique intersection of talents, skills, and business area, so start helping others with answering questions in the professional communities, participating in discussions and online conferences, analyze industry news, show insights and case studies. Kings of sales at Hubspot agree with this as well (check out “authority messages”):

Using Content Marketing in the Professional Services Industry

Be proactive in media (choose the one you like) and your network will explode.

Measure yourself and your efforts

As a data scientist, you understand, that if you will make modeling and decisions based on the rubbish data, such will be the outcomes. Measure your finance (even with Excel), your working efforts (with something as Toggle), engagement with your content as a minimal set of activities. I recommend Objective Key Results as a methodology for setting up the goals and measuring the progress later:

re:Work - Guide: Set goals with OKRs

Now you are a single-person business, so you combine all crucial “roles”: CEO, CFO, CTO, CMO. All that you do in those directions have to be tracked and reflected on regularly in order to be improved.

Take accountability and ask for the feedback

Now we are getting to the point of what you need to study as opposed to the technical guides. Ask your clients what is going well and not so regularly and focus on that! Your success will depend only on the satisfaction of the person you help, which is usually expressed in saved or earned time, money, health, information, connections, and opportunities. Be accountable for these results and focus on them, not on the code you write and you will see that what you actually need to study includes:

• Business models and processes: because you need to measure your impact on the client’s business
• Sales and marketing: because you need to sell your unique expertise
• Communications and negotiations: because you need to understand your customers and build win-win relationships

Later, you will realize that all coding part can be done by others who are actually focused only on that and thoroughly going through every “202x data science guide”, but this is a story for another blog post :)

Conclusions

Actually, I have a slightly longer presentation here that contains a bit broader economical and sociological point of view, but the gist of it you just have read in this article:

I hope this article could show you, that for the independent/freelance data science expert technical skills, popular courses, and books are a nice-to-have, but not as critical as for the person who wants to build a career as a function inside a company. You can do more impact with linear regression, knowing where to apply it than doing very complex stuff which eventually could be forgotten. The choice for the lifestyle and relationships you build is yours.

Also once again I want to remind you about the Clubhouse chat next week. There is not many of us, so let’s unite and help each other :)

Data science 🧑🏽‍💻 Freelancing 🌴 Happy clients 💰

P.S.
If you found this content useful and perspective, you can support me on Bitclout. You also can connect with me on the Facebook blog or LinkedIn, where I regularly post some AI articles or news that are too short for Medium and Instagram for some more personal content. If you’re looking forward to becoming an AI entrepreneur and solve challenging problems, ping Neurons Lab, we are partnering up with top-class AI freelancers :)