Honest question for successful Contra freelancers:

If you had to start from zero on Contra today, what would be the first 3 things you'd do to get your first client faster?

Trying to learn from people who've already done it. Every tip is appreciated 🙏

Every consumer app I work on has the same conversation at some point. "Can we add the advanced project management? The custom workspace?" The thing only 5% of users will ever touch. After a decade of designing these products, here's the question that ends most of those conversations: what percentage of your users actually benefit from this? If it's 5%, you're overwhelming the other 95% to serve a handful. If it's 50% or more, that's a different conversation entirely. The trap is that every feature sounds reasonable on its own. A tagging system. Categorization. Assigning users to groups. Each one is defensible. Then you stack twelve of them and the product becomes a maze nobody can navigate. This is how products end up in the state I get called in to fix. Not one bad decision. A hundred reasonable ones, added one at a time, none of them removed. You can keep the power. You just have to be smart about what you show and when. A simple tool people understand beats a powerful tool people abandon.

The 'hundred reasonable decisions' framing is the most honest description of how apps get unmanageable. The percentage question is a good forcing function. What you don't say here is how you actually get stakeholders to remove things they already shipped, which is usually the harder part of that conversation.