The Rise of the Full-Stack Freelancer

In the past, being a freelancer meant being a specialist.

The only way you could generate enough income to make it as a free agent was to focus on a single, highly monetizable skill. For example, copywriting, coding, graphic design, photography, journalism, or language translation.

You had to be able to perform this skill in isolation, because collaborating closely with others involved too much friction. Thus paradoxically, becoming a freelancer has traditionally involved making your work more predictable and structured, not less. You could only afford to make your lifestyle more flexible by making the work itself more rigid and monotonous.

This has always limited the number of people who could sustainably become freelancers. There are relatively few people who have the passion and intensity to develop a highly specialized skill, who also are willing to spend years deploying it in isolation.

But there’s another, deeper drawback: freelancers have always been exposed to the downsides of self-employment (income volatility, no safety net, no benefits, changing market needs), while at the same time not being able to take advantage of unexpected upsides. Forced to stick to their prized skill, they’ve had difficulty moving to related fields, riding upward trends, or training in new skills, because any such move resulted immediately in a drop in income.

But I believe we’re witnessing the rise of a new kind of worker: the Full-Stack Freelancer.

Full-Stack Freelancers respond to technology as an opportunity, not a threat. They leverage software-as-a-service and online platforms to vertically integrate a “full stack” of capabilities, instead of focusing on one narrow function. This allows them to capture a much greater percentage of the value they create, instead of giving it away to gatekeepers and distribution bottlenecks.

Full-Stack Freelancers are responding to a series of technology-driven trends — contingent employment, intensifying globalization, and automation — by taking advantage of the other side of the coin: technology finally becoming powerful enough, cheap enough, and user-friendly enough to be deployed productively by a single individual.

They borrow freely — from tech startups, digital nomads, lifestyle designers, independent contractors, the sharing and peer-to-peer economies — but placing them squarely inside any of these categories is not quite right.

That’s because Full-Stack Freelancers manage a portfolio of income streams, not a job based on one set of skills.

These potentially include both products and services, online and offline businesses, digital and physical products, active and passive income sources, in-person and remote interaction, individual contribution and group collaboration, and offerings that are low margin and high margin, mass-produced and customizable, high risk and low risk, monetized directly or indirectly, short-term and long-term, or any combination of the above.

Sound impossible? It’s not. But it requires a skill that virtually none of us are educated for: portfolio thinking.

Portfolio thinking
It’s trendy now to proclaim the universal superiority of “deep work.” We’re advised to lock out all distractions and interruptions, fixate completely on one project at a time, and optimize for long, long stretches of focus.

This advice isn’t wrong; it’s just limiting. It’s appropriate if what you want is to be the best employee you can be. If, on the other hand, you want to be a manager, run a business, develop side projects, or collaborate with others, it is terrible advice. It gives you no portfolio to work with.

Portfolio thinking recognizes that having multiple parallel projects provides many opportunities for synergy. They don’t have to interfere with and impede each other — they can actually combine into something greater than the sum of its parts. Each one can make the others easier, more fun, and more profitable.

My freelancing business, Forte Labs, turned 4 years old this month, and I’ll use it as an example. My portfolio contains (in the order they were added) public workshops, self-paced online courses, corporate trainings, consulting on various topics, 1-on-1 performance coaching, and a membership subscription for my blog.