I. First of all, please narrow down as much as you can.
Do not call yourself just a Machine Learning Engineer, but Financial Data Scientist/Data Annotator/Medical Computer Vision Expert/LLM Architect, or Geo Data Scientist like in my case. You’ll be able to get a general data science project, but you’ll also a have a fixed niche.
Almost all the projects I had were in the geospatial field, but one of them was focused on the synthesis of the NLP datasets from scientific literature. I definitely had the competence to collect, structure, and describe this kind of data, despite officially being a geo person. By the way, the client gave 5/5 stars! So the niche will not limit you, don’t worry.
II. The lower the competition the better.
Sounds controversial, but please believe me. I saw hundreds of projects with more than 50 proposals from other freelancers. You don’t want this competition not because you’re not worth it, but because the client just won’t be able to adequately estimate the skills of all the professionals. They just want the work to be done.
So apply only when there are no more than 10 applications submitted, or apply, but avoid any false expectations about you working on this contract.
III. Don’t neglect what you write inside the proposals you submit.
Normally UpWork hides the name of the client, but if you check their testimonials, you might find that other freelancers mentioned the name of this person in their reviews, so please address clients by their names!
Add an external portfolio like GitHub/personal website or any other platform which can become an indicator of your skills. UpWork allows you to attach up to 3 projects from your UpWork portfolio, which often is not enough. So definitely share some links with the client to get familiar with other projects of yours more deeply. In my case, many clients referred to my blog on Medium as one of the key reasons to hire me. It’s a straightforward way to see my technical and communications skills.
Lastly, don’t center the proposal around your personality. I know you want to prove you’re the best for this project. But no one cares, sorry. The only thing the client cares about is the problem being solved. So focus on it. Show your care and passion to help. Treat the client like a doctor willing to heal a wound, not a businessman chasing another payday.
IV. Stay away from “re-sellers”.
This is the kind of clients who act like brokers or agents. They hunt for sweet projects on many different platforms, get the contract, and then go to UpWork to hire someone else for the lower price.
Why is it bad? Because they barely communicate with you and the client on the other side. They are not in the context of the project at all.
I was unfortunate enough to get this kind of a client for my first project. He ended up creating a group chat with me and the initial client asking me not to tell this person that I’m the one doing the job.
The solution is simple: check their previous projects. Normally, the agents have tons of reviews (not necessarily bad). But the titles of the projects are not connected at all. If this person is hiring people to do data analysis, satellite imagery processing, editing a video, solving math olympiad, and 3D design, it does look suspicious!
V. Use GPT to make your pet project shine. Anything you put in your portfolio on UpWork should have some story behind it. In the very beginning the only thing you have is a pet project or some assignment from a class. Leverage ChatGPT to create a compelling description of your work. Make it look like a real job with some impact and industry application.
With your first clients you’ll be able to add more and more, but from my experience, 4–5 examples of your work is enough.
