How to get into Data Analytics and start freelancing

A few people write me every week to ask advice on how to start freelancing in the Data Analytics space.
They typically are already working in a 9-5 job, they are not in the Analytics but they do want to get into it.
This is what I usually tell them 😒

If you want to get into Data Science/Analytics, it definitely helps to have a degree or professional experience. But I personally started without experience, just on the back of a Physics degree.

If I had to start again I would

1️⃣ Learn Advanced Excel. This means being comfortable with the basic statistical functions (sum, average, min, max...), the string manipulation ones (concatenate, delete spaces...) and the basic if else conditions.

2️⃣ Learn the basics of SQL. I learnt on the job, but when I wanted to skill up and learn Advanced stuff, I found a lot of good resources online. I personally recommend the mode.com SQL course (https://mode.com/sql-tutorial) 🔗
It starts from the basics and nicely brings you to the more advanced stuff, explains you the syntax and at the same time lets you try it out on real data with nice examples

3️⃣Learn Python + pandas (or polars) and scikit-learn. I have learnt Python on Codecademy for free, and they still have a nice module on the basics of pandas
(https://www.codecademy.com/learn/getting-started-with-python-for-data-science)🔗
Polars is relatively new and essentially a performance improvement on pandas, I recommend it if you want to get an edge on other candidates. A good point to start is this YT crash course (https://youtu.be/aiHSMYvoqYE?si=1fwuYUknVvqVM14N) 🔗

4️⃣Optional: Familiarise yourself with Business Intelligence tools, like PowerBI and Looker. Both are free and usually even medium sized companies use one of them for their reporting. Tableau is the alternative, but since it's more expensive, it's unlikely to be used outside of big corporations.

0️⃣All the resources I have listed there are free and some of them even offer some certificates.
I personally don't have certifications, and this has not stopped me from getting plenty of freelancing gigs. Having said that, if you can get certified in Excel, SQL, Python, or one of the BI tools, and can show it on your profile on Upwork, it will increase your chances of landing a nice gig, especially on proposals with a lot of competition.

Thanks for reading, good luck and let me know if you find this helpful! 👋

How to get started on Upwork step by step

👨‍💻I still think Upwork is the best place to start freelancing, especially as a Data Scientist or Data Engineer.
I started in October 2022 and made quite a few mistakes, but eventually learnt how to consistently find the best gigs and maximise the probability of getting hired.

👤 Set up a nice profile. This is vital, 99% of the people who will receive your application will browse your profile, so make sure it's polished, complete all parts, do not leave typos and make sure to pay a lot of attention to the 2 most important sections, your profile overview and your portfolio.

😎 Fill your profile overview carefully. This is where keywords really matter. Are you looking for SQL jobs? Make sure to list all SQL related keywords there, like MySQL, Database, Postgres and so on. The way you write this doesn't matter much, the main use for this part is for your profile to show up in searches. So make sure to add all the keywords you want to be looked up for.
The hourly rate doesn't matter that much here, but make sure not to set it too high, you could scare off potential clients. I always suggest to put it 10% higher than what you are looking to earn, so you can give some room for negotiation to your client and he will feel better.

📑Your project portfolio needs to be tailored to the market. It doesn't matter if you built a starship in your backyard, if nobody is looking for it on Upwork.
My strategy is to go and look for the most popular gigs with low competition and solve them in your own time. Once solved I build a slide, a notebook, a Github repo, or a small website, showcasing the solution and I place it in the Portfolio section. This shows that I am able to solve a problem very similar to the one my potential clients are looking to solve. Some evergreen popular projects are scraping, social analytics and data visualisation.

💸Be willing to set a cheap rate at the beginning. Your goal at the start is not to make a lot of money, but you will get there eventually.
My goal was to get a side income stream and prepare to leave my job after 6 months. On Upwork, your reputation matters a lot, and you want to get as many 5 star reviews as possible under your belt, before starting to bid on higher paying gigs.

🫣Impress your client from the beginning. I try to look for their past reviews and address them by their name, and I try to send them an MVP of what they are asking. For my first gig I needed to create a series of videos, so I made a short one and sent the link. You can imagine how much this increased the client's confidence that I knew what I was doing.

🎥I got my first job on Upwork after sending more than 20 applications. It wasn’t even a data-related job, I had to use a Python package to create a series of videos. I got less than $60 for the whole gig, and probably I spent $50 on AWS charges, and I worked on it for an entire weekend. But I got my first 5-star review, which is the most important thing.

⭐️My second job was a long term gig for $15/hour. At the time I was making more than $50/hour at my full-time job, and I spent some night and weekends freelancing on Upwork. I got a pay rise after a couple of months, and after only 6 months my rate went up 4x and I was making more than I was ever able to earn at my previous job.

📊In the same amount of time I got a 5% pay rise at my full-time job. I mean, 5% vs 400%, it's not even funny. This is why I love freelancing and I love Upwork. Just go and get as many 5-star reviews as you can, increase your rate after each gig, go above and beyond with each of your clients and you will find out it doesn't take long to get to a place where you have no issues making more money than in a 9-to-5.

🤞Good luck with Upwork and let me know if you have any question on how to get started!

The importance of LinkedIn

📱 LinkedIn has a bad reputation among online platforms. The content there is most of the time cringy, pretty flat and very rarely you can find deep, interesting or controversial points of view. This makes the platform a bit boring and not really addictive.
Which is exactly its strength. LinkedIn is a B2B platform, where companies and professionals go to find or offer job opportunities. Not to learn, not to be entertained, but almost exclusively to find a job. This is why it's stupid to neglect your LinkedIn presence.

👨‍💻 I have personally got 50% of my freelancing opportunities through this platform, and it works particularly well for the European job market. A lot of recruiters browse the platform every day looking for Data professionals and you can make them land on your profile and write you simply by curating your profile.
Remember, this is a long game but it eventually pays off because instead of bidding for jobs, in the end, recruiters will start to write you.
I got a few teaching opportunities this way, and they were very helpful at the beginning, when I was just starting, and needed a few stable streams of income.

1️⃣ The first thing that people will see when they get your profile in the search results is your picture, your name and your headline. Make sure to have a decent picture, I don't think you need a professional one, just make sure it's your face.
They will also see if you have a verification badge. I personally don't see the point of this, but I have noticed that verified profiles appear at the top of searches, so it doesn't hurt (I should do it too).

😒 What I think is very important instead, is your headline. There are a few ways to personalise it, depending who you want to attract. Some examples
- Data Scientist @Google. This is ok, if you want to highlight the organisation you work for. Personally I don't like it that much and I think this is redundant because your current position will be also shown in the search result.
- Data Scientist | Ex Google, Meta, X. Use this if you want to highlight your previous experience at big companies and attract generic Data Science offers. This is better than the previous ones but I think there is a chance that it attracts generic offers that might not align with your tech skills.
- Data Scientist | Python | SQL | Power Bi | LLM. This is my favourite. It tells you exactly which are your strong skills, gives a signal that you know what you are talking about and filters out recruiters that are not aligned with your skills.
- Bootstrapping xtopics.co | Freelance Data Scientist. This is my current one. Since I am not actively searching for freelancing opportunities right now, I don't want to appear in many searches. Instead I hint at the product I am building, maybe people will be interested and look for it.

🧳 It's important also to document your previous work. I personally add every single experience I had in the Data Science field, both as a freelancer and as a full-time employee. For each experience I add a few lines describing the project goal, the results achieved and the skills used. I try to be as quantitative as possible, but it's not always possible to put numbers and I personally put more effort in writing in simple terms what the business goal of the project was, as I think it's an important aspect of a Data Scientist skill.

✍️ Your activity will appear before your experience on your profile. Most people do not have any activity at all, so this is an opportunity to stand out. It can be really helpful to post something work-related every week. I don't think it makes sense to post more often than that, and you should make an effort to understand what are the most interesting topics for the LInkedIn audience.

I don't think the rest of the profile is much more important. Maybe certifications and recommendations are worth it, but I personally have never been hired because of a recommendation and I have no official certifications to showcase on my profile.

🙏 Now go and make your LInkedIn profile attractive.
Comment with your profile and I will happily rate it and give you a few tips to improve it

Start freelancing without experience

❓Can you start freelancing without any job experience❓

Many people have the ambition to start freelancing as soon as they can, ideally before having significant job experience.
I like this attitude and I am a big fan of independence, and freelancing is definitely the first step to achieve it.
I tried to start freelancing with little experience in 2017. Did the usual stuff. Set up an Upwork profile, applied to jobs at nights and during weekends and waited for a reply.
❌Crickets. I applied to 11 jobs and didn't get any.

Looking back at that experience I see a few mistakes

1️⃣ I didn't have a portfolio of projects that matched the jobs I applied to.

2️⃣ I only used Upwork, without leveraging LInkedIn, Catalant, Fiverr and others.

3️⃣ I gave up too early. Just 11 applications over one month is not enough. I recommend applying to 20-30 jobs per week if possible.

4️⃣ I set an unreasonable hourly rate. Don't set your hourly rate as your daily job, Freelancing is a market where you are the product. When there is no demand for you (because nobody knows you) it's a smart move to set the price low. Once demand picks up, increase the price accordingly.

❗️ Overall, I think experience is not the number one factor that a client looks for when hiring a freelancer. It's way more important to give the client confidence that you can do the job. So you should always work with that goal in mind, from the way you build your profile, to all the communication with your client.

🌐 Last bit of personal experience. I found success in my local market at first. In Italy there is not many Data professionals that are also freelancers, and that helped me. People like to work with familiar faces and speaking the same language, sharing the same culture, goes a long way building confidence and long lasting professional relationships.

What a Data Science tech interview in a big 4 looks like 😱

Last month I went through a fairly complex interview process with a big consultancy company. 💼

The position was for a Senior Data Scientist, and it involved 4 rounds of interviews, of which 3 were technical interviews. Here are all the questions they asked me.

🧠Machine Learning
- Explain what is RAG and when it's used
- What is K-fold cross validation? 
- How do you fine-tune a LLM?
- How to avoid pitfalls when training on a biased dataset?
- When to use fine-tuning Vs Vanilla LLM output?
- What is the Loss used in LLM models? 
- How to deal with high throughput in Depp learning models?
- Loss used in Logistic Regression vs Linear Regression
- How to monitor the training parameters of a NN and which tools to use?

👨‍💻Python
- What is the difference between list and tuples? 
- What are some ways to ensure test coverage in a git repository?
- How to ensure output types of a model are preserved?
- What is a decorator?

These questions are also quite relevant for many other job positions and I think they might help you in case you are applying to one of this 6-months to 1-year contract positions.
Hope they can be useful to you too!

📱 How to write your Upwork proposals

✍️ The way you write proposals is very important on Upwork. Impress your client and they will be happy to hire you.
My first proposals where so boring that nobody wanted to read them, but then I started to think like a client and developed a very different strategy.
Now my proposals on Upwork get me an interview 50% of the time and 20% of the time I get the job. This is what I do differently.

🎯 Be direct
Stop showing off your credentials, how long you have been in the industry, who you worked for. Nobody cares. What clients care about is that you are able to do what they ask for. So I just start with something like "I have done this before", "I did a similar gig before" or "I already made a sample of the work". This catches the attention immediately and if you are able to catch the attention in the first lines the client will keep reading the rest of the proposal.

🤝 Be personal
The clients are focused on their business and want to feel that you have invested a bit of time in understanding what they are up to. I address them by name (I find it in their previous reviews), make a nice comment on their business, and generally try to show that I am excited to work with them. Also, if I find out that the client is Italian but the job description is in English, I write them in Italian. This goes a long way establishing trust and makes you more likeable.

🔗 Send links to previous work
If you have done something similar in the past the chances that the client hires you increase a lot. Make it clear that you know what you are doing and drop examples of previous work that you have successfully completed. The proposals where I insert one or more links are a lot more successful than the ones where i don't put any. People are curious and will click on the links. So add your Github project, your app, a link to your published book, blog post or article. I promise the clients will click on it and spend more time on your proposal.

👨‍💻 Show skill and expertise
If the work is fairly technical you must show off your technical expertise. Drop names of libraries you would use, relevant cloud services you have used in the past and in general give the client the impression that you know the tools. If the client is non-technical (most of the time) they will surely be impressed. Bonus points if you can already make an MVP of what they want to do. It will make you stand out from the crowd.

I don't think most freelancers put enough effort in writing their proposals, and many of them even use AI to write hundreds of identical cheap messages.
Don't do that, spend some time crafting a good message and I can guarantee you that you will be ahead of 90% of the competition.

What do you think? Do you have other tips to improve your Upwork proposals or cold emails?
Would love to hear those!

Sorry guys/gals 🥺

I haven't posted in a while, super busy with many clients and traveling around Europe 🚂

But I want to still point you to a great article by Dominique, who spent the entire 2024 as a Machine Learning freelancer and wrote a very interesting review of lessons learned earlier this year. Check it out 📕

https://thisiscrispin.substack.com/p/a-review-after-one-year-of-freelancing

👋 I got in touch with Dominique on X 🔗https://x.com/DominiqueCAPaul
I asked him a few more questions about his experience as a Machine Learning freelancer
Amazing conversation, I learnt a lot and I am sure you will learn a few things too.
This is the full transcript. Enjoy! 📖


❓How long did it take you to land your first client and what channels did you explore? Mostly personal connections and word of mouth?
🔈I found my first client during the last months of my master's thesis. I was working from an AI coworking space and met the founder of a legaltech start-up who needed help building sales demos for what AI could do for the companies.

❓Have you ever used Upwork or other platforms? If yes, what do you think of them?
🔈No, never. I do not recommend them. You are being priced as a commodity and will never be able to charge more than 60€/hour. You want to make trust your main selling point. People will never go to upwork to get a critical task done where they'll be fucked if its messed up. They want someone whom they can trust to get the job done. I wrote on this in my blogpost.

❓I quote you "the ‘right’ amount of demand is one that far exceeds your capacity. A constant stream of requests gives you the confidence to raise your price. If you only get a request every two months, you’ll be afraid of not having any income". Totally agree with this. In practice, how to evaluate demand? Do you look at the job market on LinkedIn or other indicators?
🔈This is literally the number of project requests you get for actual projects. You want more people asking you to do a job for them than you have time. An indicator can be first calls with potential clients.

❓You seem to work on high rate projects. In my experience those are not so common and most clients would be scared of those. How to get there? Do you need credibility? Or is it a matter of working with the right clients?
🔈Offer a discount for the first leg of the project. Once people get used to working with you and see what you can deliver they will be happy to pay more instead of a) taking the risk of finding someone new and b) onboarding them to the companies work / the project. If you sell your work for e.g. 60€/hour and then ask for 120€ for the second part of the project you look like an asshole. If you say that you'll offer a discount of 50% for the first two weeks then the default is that it will be 120€ after that. By then the "default" is also that you're working for them and they need to go through much more effort to find someone else.

❓What does closing a client looks like for you? How long does it take from first contact to signing the contract?
🔈I have one get-to-know call where we discuss the project high-level and where i tell them how to fix the problem without me (this creates trust) and if its clear that they'd need me then I tell them how to go about it. Ofter there will be a second call where I do some basic homework before on how to build what they need, structure it into a minimal version that we can build in a week or two, and a cost estimate. Often that's enough. Those calls might be one week apart and then work might being 1-2 weeks later. My sample size is 6 projects though just to be clear.

❓You mention "It happened twice on the same project that I agreed to a fixed price only to work more than double the expected hours". How you deal with the costs of a project getting higher, or maybe missing a deadline with a client? Any tips?
🔈Yes, take the estimate for how long you think you need and multiply it by 1.5x or 2x. Or just don't do fixed prices. Q: Where do you find contractors? Platforms or personal. connections? A: Ideally friends of mine but for basic tasks I use upwork.

❓I noticed you spend for clients dinner/travel/Wework. Did these pay off? Which one gave the best result?
🔈Wework was important because I have a office wherever I go and I was working from different places. I am much more productive at a desk than working from a cafe so this paid off 100%. Meeting a client in person is invaluable. BCG and Mckinsey also spend 20% of revenue on travel because of this reason. Meeting in person builds trust and trust is the main thing that you can charge a premium for in your hourly wage.

❓You mention that one of the challenges of freelancing is that "Cash flow is very uneven" and you were in overdraft for a the first half of 2024. How do you deal mentally with it? Any practical tips?
🔈Tell your clients that you send them the bill for each month in the first 10 days of next month and ask for payment within 14 days. Most people will understand this. Sometimes stress is also a good motivator :p

❓In the future you write "I’ve decided to focus 100% on freelancing until I have enough money to sustain myself for 6-9 months, and then 100% focus on a product". This is polarizing in the builders community on X. Why you think you can't build on the side?
🔈I actually don’t think it’s polarising—it’s just a tradeoff. You can only have one true priority at a time. Imagine you’re aiming to launch a product by a certain date, and a few days before, your client asks you to build a feature by next week. You can’t do both well. If you prioritise your product, you let the client down. If you prioritise the client, you lose momentum and compromise your own goals. To build something great, you need uninterrupted focus. Momentum compounds, and the returns on full commitment are asymmetrical - being twice as good doesn’t just get you twice the outcome, it can be 10x more impactful. At the end of the day, who’s more compelling: the person who’s #2 at two things, or the one who’s world-class at one?

❓What are your plans for the future?
🔈Building general purpose machine learning models for robots to make Europe lead in Robotics and not just follow the US or China. If you know somebody working at a company using robotics or interested in automating more with robots I'd love to speak to them.
Read more here
🔗 https://open.substack.com/pub/thisiscrispin/p/robots-and-runway


If you want to follow Dominique here are a few links
🔗Substack https://thisiscrispin.substack.com/
🔗Blog https://www.thisiscrispin.com/
🔗LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominique-paul/
🔗X/Twitter https://x.com/DominiqueCAPaul

👋I just published my latest blog post on my side projects results for May 2025

With the full revenue and costs breakdown.
🔗https://www.tropianhs.com/diary/2025/06/06/may-report.html

👋Hi everyone I am back! 👋

This month I wanna talk about about the type of freelancing I do. I used to write these reports more often in 2023/2024, in my first year of freelancing. You can read a few of them on my blog.
When I started freelancing again at the beginning of this year I stopped updating on the financial side of it, and limited myself to say a few words about the type of work I was doing. The main reason is that I am not comfortable sharing online the numbers, since some of my clients also read my blog posts.
This is a safer space in that sense, and I feel free to share more than I would be able to share in my personal blog.

💵 To sum up In July I freelanced for two clients. I worked less than 3 days per week, and I made roughly $4200 before taxes. Which is $3100 after taxes in Italy.
Below the details.

Client 1️⃣
I am working with them since January. I won't name them , but it's a Product agency that helps B2B companies build their online products with a focus on SaaS.
The founder is a guy I met in Milan in 2018 and, even if we both moved to different cities, we still kept in touch on X. When he heard I was looking to go back to freelancing, he contacted me and we started to work together.
They onboarded me to look at their clients Analytics, take care of A/B tests and deep dive into their clients data and find insights to build a better product.
During these months I was busy setting up some metrics on GA4, looking into their clients custom dashboards and integrating the GA4 data with the custom dashboards one to evaluate the impact of our UX/UI changes on the conversion rate and the sales funnel steps in general.
Not a typical Data Scientist job, but it gives me the opportunity to be very close to the clients product, and I love working on improving products with data.
My rate with them is $48/hour and I work at most 80 hours per month. So this keeps me busy around 2.5 days per week. But there were a few months when I worked much less.

Client 2️⃣
I am working with them since a couple of months. They are based in the UK and they are friends. They contacted me since they are scaling their business and they need someone to help with the tech side of it. They tried to hire on Upwork, but got so disappointed with the quality of work and lack of professionalism, that they asked me.
My work for now is basically writing scripts to modify they Google Sheets they share with their clients. Nothing fancy and 100% Javascript code. I am not a fan of JS but I was able to do a lot of work, mainly by letting the I write the bulk of the code and fixing here and there when needed. Amazing stuff.
Since they are friends, I am not asking more than $45/hour, and they don't have a big monthly budget. I work for them between 9-10 hours per month but it might increase in the next months.

And that's it for now.
Let me know if you like these reports, I will try to make them each month, although they might become boring, since I do not plan to onboard more clients in the next months.
I have worked with other clients during 2025, maybe I will talk about them in the next posts.
👋 Bye!