There must be at least 3,298 articles around the web on “How to Launch Your Freelance Career” or “How to Start a Freelance Design/Copywriting/Photography Business.”

Have you seen them?  The advice is remarkably consistent and utterly sensible.

Have six months of living expenses in the bank. Assess your skills and strengths.  Survey the competition. Identify target clients. Devise a ‘positioning’ for yourself.

Set a launch date with 30-, 60-, and 90-day milestones. Write a detailed marketing and promotion plan. Build a network of contacts, enhance your social media presence. Hone your portfolio. Set up your workspace, set up your pricing, invoicing and accounting systems . . .

That’s all well-reasoned stuff. Hard to argue with any of it.

Except for one thing.

None of the freelancers I know did it that way.  Not a one.

Mostly, they just leaped over the fence. With only half-baked plans (if any), not nearly enough money, and often without a clue.  (Me included there.)

They convinced themselves they were ready, even if they weren’t “properly” prepared, at least according to the conventional advice.

They weren’t thinking, “I’ll go freelance as soon as I. . .” It was “Once I go freelance, I can. . . .”

Fact is, I contend you will succeed much faster if you just make a break for it.

Sure, if you jump into freelancing, you will screw up at first. You will chase the wrong assignments, take jobs you should have avoided. You will charge less than you should have. A slippery client may chisel you. You will kick yourself more than once.

But you will do all that anyway, even with all the pretty preparation and targeting and six months of money in the bank. You will make the same rookie mistakes we all make.

It will just take you longer to get them out of the way.

The sooner you’re out there plying your trade, talking to clients, looking for assignments, the sooner you’ll hone your freelance instincts and get your head in independent mode.

But what’s wrong with planning?

For a freelancer, planning is just guessing. It is impossible to know where your best opportunities are until you begin chasing some. What looks promising on paper doesn’t necessarily work out here on the front lines. And there are opportunities you won’t find until you’re out here mixing it up.

In his first year on his own, my friend Eyal made 50% of his income from consulting work he never even thought about doing. The services he planned on offering didn’t exactly fly off the shelves. It is always this way.

You need to be out there trying things, not working some idealistic plan. There is magic in doing stuff.

And what’s wrong with a financial cushion?

Nothing wrong with money in the bank. Lord knows it might save you a few sleepless nights.

But here’s the paradox. When you’re starting out, having six months of living expenses in the drawer can slow you down dramatically. Even dangerously.

If you’re flush with cash, it’s way too easy to fritter away your time on things that feel like work, but aren’t. Such as tinkering endlessly with your web site, getting your business cards just so, spending hours working LinkedIn and Twitter, trying to decide between Blinksale and Billings and MacFreelance for invoicing. That is all ninth-priority busy work.

What you need is a laser focus on the stuff that matters, which is:  finding clients, doing remarkable work, and getting paid.

You need a sense of urgency, a feeling of “Holy crap, this is for real.”

You need practice feeding yourself and paying the rent without the “security” of a 1st and 15th paycheck.

Working without a net will get you there faster.

And you’ll realize you’re actually doing what 92% of people are too scared to try.

The more you think about the freelance model, the simpler and simpler it gets.

Example.

If you are a musician or a sculptor or a fine artist, the thought is, you need about 1,000 true fans to make a living at your chosen craft. To live large, you need maybe 10,000.

If you aspire to open a restaurant, you will need a surrounding population of at least 50,000 people, and then convince 2,000 of them to eat at your place. Over and over again.  (And, you will need about a half-million in cash to even get in the game.)

If you want to launch an iPad killer, you’ll need to wow a few million paying customers, minimum. And you have to lure them away from Apple.

But to carve out a living doing what you do — whether it’s illustrating, writing content, coding, InformationArchitecting, project managing, making logos, coaching, or taking pictures — all you need is, get this, ten true fans.

Just ten.

And by true fans I mean people who regularly use what you do. People who have already paid you money. People who, when they need what you offer, automatically call you, and no one else.  People who, when asked “Hey, do you know a good ____?” they will tell people about you, without thinking.

With ten people like that, you are okay.  Maybe not rich.  But you are alive, well, and solvent and not selling your soul to the company.

You don’t need to be famous.  You don’t need to show up number 3 in Google.  You don’t need 5092 followers on Twitter and 664 contacts on LinkedIn.  You don’t need to be profiled in Wired.

You need just ten true fans. In the real world.

Ten living, breathing human beings who think you’re swell.

Fact is, as my freelancer friends and I realized over a few beers one night, none of us ever had more than 10 true fans at one time.  Ever.  Even when we were raking in the cash like autumn leaves, it wasn’t because we had ninety-two clients. The huge money always came from a relatively small circle of paying, avid fans. Always, always.

Better still, once you get your head around ten true fans, everything clarifies.  Your daily task gets simpler. You can shed a lot of bullshit, and lose excuses. You have focus.

You no longer have to worry about ‘the economy’, or ‘the industry.’  Or the 89,422 other people  on Google who do what you do. You are not working in the vastness of the universe.  You are serving your ten true fans.

When you sit down at the desk on Monday morning, all you have to think about is your people.  How are they doing?  What do they need?’  It’s your personal micro-economy.  Not the economy.

Ten true fans.

What if you haven’t amassed a huge body of work to show clients?

Re-do something that bugs you. Alan Siegel re-imagined the typical credit card agreement. Opened some eyes with it, too.

Or what if your portfolio is 82% skunk work that you’d rather keep under the bed?

No problem.

Dazzle them with makeovers.  Redesigns.  Rewrites.

It’s actually a more interesting way to convey your skills, your voice, your sensibilities.

Befores and afters

Find some website home pages, or marketing copy, or photos, or interfaces, or whatever it is you make.

Then re-cast them as YOU would do them.

Pick examples that bug you. Or examples from the types of clients you want to work with.

Attack some visual cliches. Fix common UI errors. Translate some high-profile corporatespeak into English.  Or rethink the package or logo as you see them.

Put the examples side by side in a downloadable e-book, or .pdf. Or post them on your site.  Three, four or five are plenty.

Show the before, show the after. The format is more engaging than a portfolio. There’s a story line, a voice. Clients seem to be endlessly fascinated by this.

You don’t have to redo entire sites, or rewrite all the product copy. Snippets and pieces are fine.  Maybe explain why you changed what you did.

The trick can even get you some good press, too.  Last year, interface designer Dustin Curtis generated huge buzz by posting a redesign of the United Airlines home page on his blog. (The UX architect from the airlines actually got fired for responding to the post, however.)

Naturally, don’t pretend you did these makeovers for those companies. You’re just trying to show your chops and viewpoint.

Oh, and if you’re tempted to do a makeover of a client’s stuff, and send it to them in hopes of landing some business:  resist the temptation.

The stunt usually backfires. (I have the soot stains to prove it.)

Redo somebody else’s stuff.