"Freelancers want to make money. They don’t care if your business succeeds or not."
A good freelancer does care. Ignore the other ones.
Good freelancers want to be involved in decisions regarding their piece of work. They take interest in what you want to achieve and try to do the best for your project. They pour in an extra hour for a bit of polish that would hurt their pride otherwise.
Freelancing leaves a lot of flexibility and ways to cut deals.
To give you an example:
I had multiple prospect clients where I straight-out said "don't build that feature (now) and especially not for my price.". Quite a few ended up not doing (or delaying) the project and were very happy with the decision. All of these turned out to be lucrative events, because those clients pass you on to others with kind words. Find the ones that jump on your idea once you tell it to them and want to work with you. Enthusiasm is (relatively) hard to fake.
Also... I'll never do a fixed price project, unless you agree that: a) it is time-constrained, b) you won't change any of your wishes during the project.
I agree, a lot of this sounds like he just found bad freelancers. I have been contacted in multiple occasions by people who wanted to launch their own startup and wanted to hire me to write it, but it was clear that they didn't have all the business details ironed out. I advised them to get feedback first, then try for an MVP based on that feedback, and then come to me for implementation. They were all very happy with this, because it's good advice they hadn't considered, and it's free.
Also, working as a freelancer right now (although in a more long-term role), I definitely am concerned about code quality and the thing I'm making working well, because I'm the one who's working on it. Writing unmaintainable code on purpose is not only unethical, but it comes back to bite you in the ass when you have to maintain it. Thankfully, I have no shortage of work at the moment, so it wouldn't be my dream job to have to work on an unmaintainable mess, much less so when I created it.
I don't disagree with you that "good" freelancers should care, but that doesn't change the fact that (in my experience) most do not. That being said, most of my experiences were with "low price" freelancers, which probably has a high correlation with that fact.
Just to pick on the most obvious one:
"Freelancers want to make money. They don’t care if your business succeeds or not."
A good freelancer does care. Ignore the other ones. Good freelancers want to be involved in decisions regarding their piece of work. They take interest in what you want to achieve and try to do the best for your project. They pour in an extra hour for a bit of polish that would hurt their pride otherwise.
Freelancing leaves a lot of flexibility and ways to cut deals.
To give you an example: I had multiple prospect clients where I straight-out said "don't build that feature (now) and especially not for my price.". Quite a few ended up not doing (or delaying) the project and were very happy with the decision. All of these turned out to be lucrative events, because those clients pass you on to others with kind words. Find the ones that jump on your idea once you tell it to them and want to work with you. Enthusiasm is (relatively) hard to fake.
Also... I'll never do a fixed price project, unless you agree that: a) it is time-constrained, b) you won't change any of your wishes during the project.