I did well in Kaggle's highest-prized competition[1], so I wondered if I should explore this kind of consulting myself.
The competition I was in was effectively limited to US residents though, but as a "remote" freelancer you compete world-wide, potentially with people willing to work for far less. Are there reasons your clients prefer US-based freelancers enough to justify the gap in pay?
[1] Top 1% (5th/518), #1 result in California: https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/news/2018/07/09/n...
How often will the clients find you again to do the follow-up work, e.g. new software feature requests, for the previous projects? If you refuse the requests, will this undermine the business relationship?
"NLP/ML for Asian language processing" covers anything that has text in CJK/other languages. I work with Japanese and lots of things taken for granted in NLP pipelines require entirely different approaches specifically for Japanese. For example, there's no spaces, so word tokenization is actually a complicated issue.
As you work between Japan and the US, I'm curious about the rate difference. Are you able to charge the same?
Note that I wrote this post back in February 2020 and there are a couple of things that I would like to add:
- Due to high demand, I increased my rate to $250/hour + some fixed monthly fee in April. I didn't drop any single client :)
- I'm seeing very little impact from the coronavirus. I have a client base spanning between Japan and the US in a little-impacted industry (education). Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
- I would strongly encourage everyone who's considering making a leap to read "The Win Without Pitching Manifesto" https://www.winwithoutpitching.com/the-manifesto/
- Due to a sheer volume of my incoming emails I can't answer all of them, but do let me know if you are interested in working with me!