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Software freelancing to freedom in 3 months

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

xy2_

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I'm Hugo. I'm 19, French, and I want to become a software engineer and data scientist.
I wish to use the skills I gain along the way to help people & businesses and add value.
For the next three months, I'll be freelancing doing software.

Why?
Recently, I was accepted to an software engineering school. The issue is that it's far away, so I'll have to relocate and pay for an apartment. The other issue is that I had 0€ to my name just a year ago. After a year of saving up and reselling on eBay, making many mistakes along the way which helped me learn, I've got about 2.5k, which is not enough to cover my stay for a year and all one-time expenses.

After some calculations, my living expenses will be around 400€/mo in the worst case, and I'll stay for 10 months, coming back home during the summer. So my goal would be to earn 4000€ to cover my expenses.

I talked about this with my mom, who suggested that I get a job as a cashier during this summer and the next two, in order to cover the rent for next year and not have to work during the school year. Now I love my mom, but working as a cashier for the next three months, in a job where I learn nothing sounds like a lot of BS .

So, instead I've taken it into my own hands to earn 4000€ during the next three months. My deadline is September 1, because that's when the school year starts.

How?
I've learned providing value is a nice way to earn money. Looking inwards, what can I offer that can add value to someone else?

I could start my eBay reselling business again. The problem is that it's low value - I'm not creating anything, just arbitraging prices and making money off the margins. It's also a very easy business, so profits are low.

I needed something more immediate, so I turned to my own skills. For the last two years I've worked both in and outside of school to acquire software engineering skills.
I decided to put them to use: doing freelancing as a short-term strategy, for the next three months. Afterwards, I'll assess my situation and adjust accordingly.

In the worst case, I execute everyday, learn many lessons, and get a sizable portfolio and skills that can be reused later down the road.
In the best case, I have strong earning potential and can pivot somewhere else, while knowing I can fallback on my skills when capital is tight.

What?
Right now, I'll be freelancing on Upwork. I'll stick to one very specific niche: data visualization with d3.js. The barrier to entry is high, because d3 is hard, and data visualization is tricky in general. I also know React, and the MERN stack, from a full stack course. I've done one data visualization for Upwork before in d3+React, which I'll be leveraging, and then build up my portfolio further to gain trust.

I have an remote internship that's required to complete my current school until June 26. During that time I will be working during the week after my internship, and fully during the weekend. After the internship, I'll have unbounded time to freelance.


I'll keep this thread updated during this time and share both my failures and successes. Feel free to comment as I progress.
 
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Kid

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It seems that you have pretty solid world view.

If you'll show your mother hard cold cash (from freelancing) she will probably look more favorable on your other future plans.

Good luck!
 

xy2_

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What? That course is both great and free?

EDIT: And it's not from Coursera or edX or Youtube. Those sites are great.
It's a great course which is up to date and helped me learn very quickly. They also have a object-oriented programming course with Java.
It seems that you have pretty solid world view.

If you'll show your mother hard cold cash (from freelancing) she will probably look more favorable on your other future plans.

Good luck!
Thank you for your comment. I'll make my vision a reality.

Catching up
I'm making this post now, but I started last Friday. Where do I stand?

Value bomb
My first order of business is finding clients and providing value for them.
The issue: I have only one $20 job on Upwork, no real experience in the niche, and one portfolio project. How can I make it out? How can I create long-term relationships with clients?

I've adopted a simple strategy: provide as much value up-front as possible: that's about all I have anyways. By doing so, I hope to find my first clients and help them as much as I can.

This means:
  1. Find clients with specific needs in my niche.
  2. Craft a custom-made proposal, offering a demo from their needs in the listing. Figure out obstacles along the way.
  3. Get the job and continue to deliver.
I gravitate towards listing where I can add high value (usually high-paying with complicated requirements). I aim for fixed-price value projects only, and send a demo to the client that satisfies what they described in the listing.

Why spend so much time on making a demo? Even if I fail, I get to add a well-made project to my portfolio. I figure adding portfolio entries from clients with real needs is half as good as getting the job and doing the thing.

My first listing33319
After finding out about the starmap library, made in d3.js, I thought this would be a good opportunity. I set out to work, made a demo and submitted it on Saturday. I got an answer and interviewed. The client inquired if a few features were possible, and we spoke about price. Since I'm not very skilled with woocommerce, I offered to do only the front-end and PDF generator at a reduced price.

Since my demo was pretty bare-bones, I worked on it for the rest of the weekend and on Monday. At night I submitted an updated demo with the features he wanted to know were possible.
Afterwards, I got this response:
33321
Nothing's decided yet, though. Either way, I have two portfolio items now.
 
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Noo

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Thanks bro <3
 

WillHurtDontCare

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Every company that exists could benefit from data science, even the small ones. The problem (read: opportunity) is that many companies who could benefit from data science can't afford a full time data scientist. BUT, they could probably afford a small retainer where they give you Xper month for a few very important projects that take up only a small amount of your time - essentially a micro-service model (thank you @UnrealCreative for this idea).

You also don't need to be a fully accredited data scientist to make this happen. Help people put their data in a chart in a way that helps them make more money and you have yourself a profitable service.
 
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xy2_

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This week
Proposals: 3
Interviews: 2
Jobs: 0

I don't make enough proposals, I think. On the interviews I get, something is blocking me from advancing further. Is it my portfolio? I don't know, and right now I don't have enough data to know any further.

Freelancing status
I got rejected from the starmap job. However, I think it looks cool, and I've been working since last week to make it a reality and a cool portfolio piece.

I need to apply more, I think. I'll do one proposal per day from now on. Right now I've only been applying for jobs I have absolute confidence about, but maybe you don't need absolute confidence. Maybe you can even get away with not knowing much, as long as you can demonstrate you can solve the client's problem. But how do you do that? I still don't know. (What do I plan to do to get the knowledge I'm missing?)

Of the two interviews I got, I backed off one because I wasn't confident in my skills (way above my level) and the other found another freelancer. But I don't think I should have backed off. Was it really me not being skilled enough, or just fear?

Freelancing and internship
I start my day pretty early (at around 5AM for about a year now.) I try to get some freelance work done, but usually I don't get much done before 8:30 rolls up and I start work on the internship, for which I'm done at around 5:30 PM.

I could "cheat" and work less hours, but I don't really want to lie to the people who employed me. I would do 8 hours at the office otherwise, and doing anything else is dishonest, I think. What I can do however, is get started on the internship after I wake up and get ready, so I can work on freelancing for the rest of the day.

Speaking of the internship, there's been a disappointment. I learned that the tool I'm developing, a web site, is not going to be used. I'm making the tool only for one person's use, with unclear requirements. But that doesn't matter; I'm still going to do my best for my one 'client' and leave them amazed. I have three weeks left.
 

xy2_

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This week
Proposals: 7
Interviews: 2
Jobs: 0

I focused on doing at least one high-quality proposal a day, with a demo if I could, and working on the portfolio whenever I have time. I'm still looking for my first job.

I finished polishing one of my more promising demos and put it on my portfolio: now I have two portfolio pieces. I took the opportunity to rework my profile.

Right now I'm waiting on the second interview which looks promising, so we'll see.

I find that my biggest barriers are mental ones.

On the technical side, I'm learning a lot every day out of necessity, having to figure out both what the client needs and how to actually do it. There's been many times where I was scared because "I didn't know how to do it", but once I pushed through the fear I could find how to do so with a few hours of effort. I'll make an effort to put myself into more of these uncomfortable situations from here on.

On the client side, I've never sold my services before, so the many resources here and on the web gets me thinking and trying new things. I checked out @Lex DeVille 's threads as recommended above which helps a lot with both mindset and techniques. Also, thanks to @Andy Black for his many threads of value here.

The best part of this is taking action every time. I learn every time I misstep and fail. I haven't faced this much failure in a long time, and I'm sure there's much more to come. Every one of them just makes me better at the game.

Planning forward
  • I own a site which I made out of "doing what I liked" in tech. It's not very useful however and I'm thinking to rework it as a place to host my portfolio, and eventually get clients outside of Upwork.
  • I'm looking in the short future to make a good portfolio piece about some of my datavis ideas, and post it on data viz communities. This way I can test if the work i can do is of quality, and if so make a small impact in a bunch of people's days and get some traffic.
 

Andy Black

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xy2_

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This week
Proposals: 1
Interviews: 0
Jobs: 0

It's the last week of my internship. I had to write give my internship report and my presentation is for tommorow. So I didn't get much freelancing done.

I have no more internship after this week. So I can put basically all my time into freelancing, after my internship is through and done this Friday.

Interview
I continued on with the interview I considered promising. in the last post After asking a few questions about the client's needs, I made him a wireframe chart for him to see what the thing I would produce for him looks like.

Then I got this reponse:
33692

At this point I was thinking we'd be set. We discussed what I would deliver - I offered to deploy the chart on his website, develop until the chart fits his needs and what he had in mind, and then offer a year of support. Finally the time comes for pricing.

However, I have no idea how to price things. So I look it up, both what similar project cost (on Upwork and outside Upwork) and what they offered based on their price. I also adjusted the price to what the client was used to paying, however it was still higher than any of their previous offers.

The client isn't happy and asks me if I could do something lower. At this point I tell him that my price is fixed. However, did I price too high? Was the client too used to low pricing? Should I have taken the project even for a low price just to get my first dataviz job on Upwork? I don't know. Maybe I should have.

Another interview, but not the kind I expected
I mentionned before that I have a site right now. I only use it to do technical writing - it was in order to gain some online presence. I did three articles, with a lot of effort in each (about 4 to 8 weeks of research and writing for each) and surprisingly got on frontpage of Reddit and HackerNews with them.

Why is this relevant? A few days ago, I get an email in my inbox, from a "Content Marketing Manager". She found one of my articles and made me an offer to contribute to [company]'s blog as a technical writer.

But I declined the job. I want to try one focus in one niche: freelancing as a datavis consultant. Taking the job would probably fill my goal quickly. However I think it would break my focus and that's not something I want to do.
 

Andy Black

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The client isn't happy and asks me if I could do something lower.
Just a tip. They're not a client until the money is in your account.
 

LordGanon

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What?
Right now, I'll be freelancing on Upwork. I'll stick to one very specific niche: data visualization with d3.js. The barrier to entry is high, because d3 is hard, and data visualization is tricky in general. I also know React, and the MERN stack, from a full stack course. I've done one data visualization for Upwork before in d3+React, which I'll be leveraging, and then build up my portfolio further to gain trust.

Hey Hugo!

Thanks for the link to that course. I taught myself the essentials of web development a few years back with www.freecodecamp.com (they also had d3 tutorials at that time, haven't looked into it for a while).

I thought about hopping back in because I have a few ideas for web apps and wanted to learn React (and honestly, while working on online marketing I was getting somewhat pissed because I had to pay so much for tools which are probably fairly easy to program yourself with the API).

Didn't care so much for d3, though, as I did for game development. I created a few games with phaser.js and thought about porting them to Android, but...really, it's better to just stick to native programming than to try to get them to run on a phone. Although things could have changed by now.
 

xy2_

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This week
Proposals: 6
Interviews: 3
Jobs: 1

A few weeks ago, I had no experience and not a single sale in my life. This week I got a job!

Waiting for feedback was probably the most tense I've ever been in my life. Am I really good enough? Turns out I am:

33817
I learned a bunch of things leading up to this first job, but I'll just put my main takeaway:

Basically, just take action now. I didn't wait until the end of my internship, or until school started, or a thousand other BS excuses. I think that once you start and keep doing the thing everyday, then strangely enough things start happening and changing.

Even though you fail all the time, you learn a little bit more everyday. And then one day you don't fail and succeed.

Anyways, my internship is done now. So expect some more things in this thread for the remaining months of my challenge.
 

xy2_

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This week
Proposals: 10
Interviews: 5
Jobs: 1

I got another sale this week!

This was from the clients who told me I "read his mind". He contacted me again after a bit to know how long the project would take, and if I would take up his project, at the price I quoted him. I accepted.

For the rest of the week, I've given as much value as I could to this single client. He seems very impressed, so I'm going to bring up the idea of a retainer (thanks @WillHurtDontCare). I can do this with my other clients too, after proving the value I offer for their business on their job (or subsequent jobs).

I also have two interviews with prospects which are looking promising. Is it people that are taking me more seriously now that I have a job (and soon two) under my belt, or is it I who takes myself more seriously?

At this pace, I keep learning every day. I learn to refine my skills everyday, which is a thing I can fall back to anytime when my situation gets dangerous. But I also learn soft skills: how to talk to people and how to sell. I've been reading in the meantime on these two subjects:, with "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" and "How to Win Friends and Influence People".

Every day I keep learning from this awesome forum and the awesome people who post here. Thank you so much, seriously.
 
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xy2_

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This week
Proposals: 11
Interviews: 4
Jobs: 2

I had a significant failure today. One of my jobs was refactoring someone's "bad" code to make things work. I managed to do things, but I felt it wasn't up to my standards (and likely to theirs, too). I told the client quickly and refunded them.

I got my second job complete and up on the client's site. It's real proof I can use to build credibility, which I'm leveraging now on my profile and in my proposals when it's relevant.

I often run into a limit on this niche in Upwork - it's well paid, but there are not a lot of jobs. So I've begun looking outside of Upwork for people I can help. I've found an interesting project this way that I could do, and I'm going to let it evolve and see if I can get the job.

I realise I haven't talked about my goal, so here's some info:
- I have one job complete and in my account, at $100 (my first job).
- I have $450 pending after completion of my two remaining jobs.
This makes for $550 in revenue total. Upwork takes 24% off those, leaving me at about $418.

If I aim for the same types of jobs, it's likely I won't reach my goal by the end of this summer. What I think is that I either need more sales or bigger sales, and I think the latter is more likely in this domain.
 

LordGanon

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Jobs: 2

I had a significant failure today. One of my jobs was refactoring someone's "bad" code to make things work. I managed to do things, but I felt it wasn't up to my standards (and likely to theirs, too). I told the client quickly and refunded them.

I often run into a limit on this niche in Upwork - it's well paid, but there are not a lot of jobs. So I've begun looking outside of Upwork for people I can help. I've found an interesting project this way that I could do, and I'm going to let it evolve and see if I can get the job.

First of all: I wouldn't consider this a fail. Being honest with yourself and with your customer actually shows a lot of humbleness and self-reflection. That's much better than pretending to be able to do something you're not.

You should look into LinkedIn. Most of my friends who work as software freelancers get their jobs there.
 

xy2_

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Interviews: 2
Jobs: 1

I got Rising Talent on Upwork. That's pretty cool!34130

Somewhat-unrelated-but-not-really, I found a suitable place after a lot of research. I'll be moving out in a little more than a month, as I need to be here by September to start the uni year.

On the freelance front, I've started to reject prospects much more often, and start aiming for jobs where I can bring much more value and a more complete offering. I took a good look at what I had going right now and cancelled most of my offers (where I was almost sure to get the prospect).

This way, I found a job that's of much higher value. But am I fit for it? I looked at my portfolio and what I could improve, too. One disadvantage of having my work as my portfolio is that I have to comply with its constraints. My weakest piece was made in a day, and it shows. I'm going to replace it with a piece of my own initiative that shows my skill better in a full visualization experience.

I feel like if I do and accept the same things, I'll get the same results. I'm scared of going outside of what I know - low paying but low risk jobs into bigger projects. At this point, though, I'm more scared of being on my own in a little more than a month, with no money and in a demanding school. I can take the next step, just like doing freelancing at all was uncomfortable just a bit ago.
 
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xy2_

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You should look into LinkedIn. Most of my friends who work as software freelancers get their jobs there.

I'll definitely look into it, thank you for the advice. I can help people and add value there, just like I do elsewhere.
 

xy2_

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This week
Proposals: 13
Interviews: 3
Jobs: 1

I got proposed recurring work this week by different clients. Unfortunately, I had to turn down most of them because it didn't really fit what I was aiming for.

I also found a client that really needs what I offer. I found her on Upwork and I knew I had to get the job. I wanted to experiment with taking video on proposals, so I recorded a short intro that I included at the end talking about what I do and how I could help her (with the same video sent on her email, that I'd found through her site.)

Luckily I got the job, which I just finished today. It looks like I can work this one into a more permanent arrangement which would help her a lot, as a big angle of what she does is related to what I can offer her. I'll go and contact her and see how it goes.

I've been getting more active on LinkedIn, but I need to figure out how it works :happy: Right now I've been sending some connections requests, but no real lead so far.

I think that putting effort into the proposals really works. Maybe it's something mental, but I find the ones that get real answers are the ones I put the most effort on, writing detailed replies. Maybe I could do the same thing here and shoot short videos for my proposals.
 

xy2_

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This week
Proposals: 9
Interviews: 1
Jobs: 1

I got my biggest job yet. I'm pretty stoked about it.

It looks like the client I was talking about last week is pretty stoked too. I have to follow up.

One of my clients contacted me for more work. This is the first time I get reoccurring work, so it feels nice to see that I can help people, and provide enough value that they come back to me without me doing any work. It's like I provide a ton of value upfront; I just give to the world and it comes around. Maybe @Andy Black's philosophy works?

The rest of the time, I worked on the portfolio project. It's pretty hard - I'm doing some crazy stuff that I couldn't find online anywhere else. I'll spend more time on it because I think it can really elevate what I can offer.

On LinkedIn, I still haven't figured it out. The biggest results I've had are giving - I put my completed work on LinkedIn, and it gets a few comments, and sometimes from people, I don't even know. I've had people add me this way, but none seem like clients.
 
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xy2_

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This week
Proposals: 18
Interviews: 3
Jobs: 0

Today I want to take a step back. My main problem so far has been finding people. While I continue working with my current clients, it's been hard to find new ones. The problem is that I rely too much on Upwork to give me leads. Usually, my day is going for proposals on Upwork, then doing the client work.

Why do I need Upwork to help people? It's a nice and easy source of leads. However, I shouldn't rely on it so heavily. I got hired for a major visualization product last week, so I have decent social proof backing me. I don't think I need anything else, but I do need to take action.

I'm taking a more direct approach and talking to businesses directly. Even if I fail a thousand times, I can cast a much wider net than the limited one on the Upwork platform.

What I have right now isn't where I want to be. It's my actions alone that will let me go there.
 

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Hi @xy2_
I am planning to do a similar thing, what you did but first completing my backlogs(12 weeks) in my thread 1001 days of execution.
after that I will start freelancing in app development and AI, I am planning to leverage youtube, LinkedIn, medium, insta, medium(I get few projects just because there is demand and I am easy to find on Linkedin but refused as I was to busy with the work) before I get started so I could prevent this.
Why do I need Upwork to help people? It's a nice and easy source of leads. However, I shouldn't rely on it so heavily. I got hired for a major visualization product last week, so I have decent social proof backing me. I don't think I need anything else, but I do need to take action.
I suggest you put content to allow people to find you and trust you.

P.S. there is some hidden gems in your approach, like do the work before starting a job, will try to use it after 12 weeks when I start my next immediate goal.:)
 

Raja

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Hi @xy2_
I am planning to do a similar thing, what you did but first completing my backlogs(12 weeks) in my thread 1001 days of execution.
after that I will start freelancing in app development and AI, I am planning to leverage youtube, LinkedIn, medium, insta, medium(I get few projects just because there is demand and I am easy to find on Linkedin but refused as I was to busy with the work) before I get started so I could prevent this.

I suggest you put content to allow people to find you and trust you.

P.S. there is some hidden gems in your approach, like do the work before starting a job, will try to use it after 12 weeks when I start my next immediate goal.:)
Basically I am proposing the idea similar to content marketing, many people are doing it.
One of the who got a client is having a thread named "120 videos in 120 days"
 
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xy2_

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This week
Proposals: 15
Interviews: 10
Jobs: 1

This week is the week I'm moving out. So I expected not to have much time, but I still made as much time as I could on cold outreach.

Right now, though, my website is very bad. I can still reach people without a good website and I think it would be a multiplier if I got something that's more serious and that illustrates my offer clearly. That's the main problem I encountered when trying to contact people.

Finally, I think I'm going to ditch the weekly format and instead start updating when I have something valuable that got me to the next level. The most valuable things I'll do won't take a week - they're going to be done over the course of months if not years, so I think I may be limiting myself subconsciously.

Instead, I'll update on breakthroughs I make as I solve problems and find things that helped me get to the next level, as well as on the major roadblocks I'll have along the way. I hope this will be more useful for folks who are reading this thread.
 

xy2_

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Uni starts tomorrow. So I thought I'd give an update on my goal at the start of the thread.

In the last three months, I've earned a total of $550. Right now I have three jobs which I think will be done by the coming week, netting $1,410. Even considering these, I've not hit halfway of my goal of $4,000.

What I learned

I think the most important one is to not give up. I'm not anything special and I doubt I'm smarter than other people.

In fact, there were too many moments where I thought that this wasn't for me or that I couldn't do it. So many times I asked myself "Why am I even here?". But I want to become free, so I'll never give up.

In the end, I still don't quite know what I'm doing. I'll figure it out along the way.

Moving forward

My goal moving on will be to help as many people as I can. I think that maybe I was focusing on the money instead of the people, and that definitely showed in some situation, and maybe in this thread too.

Planning onwards

There's one thing that's always re-occuring with the technology I work in: people don't understand in. In fact, the first result on google is an old, unmaintained website with outdated and misleading examples.

How do I know this? I've been on StackOverflow every day for the past two months or so helping. Not only did it allow me to reach people, but it also honed my skills and allowed me to see the most common problems for people who use this.

This is a nice opportunity to put out content and reach people as @suryapratap suggests. Good content lives for a long time and it can reach people forever. So going forward, my system would look like this:

1. Freelance for cashflow when needed.
2. Go on sites where users of my technology go, like StackOverflow.
3. Use content from my answers, common questions, popular questions, and general blind spots in knowledge to gather questions to answer.
4. Lay it down and start writing content, with at least one piece out a day.
5. After a bit, provide quick start guides, common frameworks (how to build X chart, etc) - kind of like mini-courses. Provide all this value for free and consistently.
 

Raja

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This is a nice opportunity to put out content and reach people as @suryapratap suggests. Good content lives for a long time and it can reach people forever.
thanks for the mention.

I have one more thing to add, don't stick to one channel, use at least 5 to 7 channels, see what's working and double down on that(does not mean skip on other).

P.S. I am systemizing some part of my process so I don't trade time for money in equal proportion(having templates and outsourcing), I have not started freelancing for now (will in 8 weeks )because I want some sense of security right now so I am focusing on getting a job just as I leave college. I can always do side hustle or leave the job if side hustle is going well.
 
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xy2_

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Just today, I completed another job on Upwork, bringing me to $4k in earnings.
Capture.PNG
I've also landed my first "large" job a few months back. I'm developing a custom dashboard app in the medical sector. We started work back in October and it's still ongoing today, so it's not counted in the total earnings above. Here are my takeaways.

Limiting Beliefs: A lot of them.
- "I have to earn X$ by X time, or I'll fail!" I didn't hit my goal by the promised time. I was dejected for a long time, unfortunately. I thought that once I would have hit the end of my three months, I wouldn't be able to work anymore due to school. But going further, I think that I set this goal to be able to say "Well, I tried my best, but I didn't hit my goal. Time to give up!" and give up like I used to do. This is all BS of course.

- "I can't freelance because school is too demanding!" I wake up at 5 AM, freelance in the morning, go to school and listen as hard as I can, then get back to work. I sleep when my work is done. To pull this off I had to cut off most distractions in my life. I don't go out at all. I got rid of my fancy phone for two phones: one for alarms and setting timers, and a very basic one for checking mail/chat that I power on later on in the day. The time was there all along; I just have to take advantage of it.

- "This is too hard!" As I said above, I have a tendency to stick with something for a month or two, then give up. I always looked for ways to shortcut the process of doing the hard work, or the boring work that's not fulfilling. Since I was "smart", I could get straight to the fun parts and forget everything else.

But I had to face the real work I've had to do for my clients. Most of it was boring, and a lot of it was hard. I sacrificed sleep on many nights, sometimes on issues that were so simple in hindsight that it frustrated me. Despite that, I never gave up.

Nowadays I just wake up, look at what I have to do, and go. I finish when I can't go on, and pace myself accordingly. It doesn't matter if the work is a few 5-minute changes or will take up the entire day. I just do my process.

I read here that's it's much easier to go at 100% than 90% or even 95%. After putting it into motion I agree. There's no more uncertainty about whether I did my best or not.

Mindset: I'm in what feels like the best shape of my life, both mentally and physically. There's an outstanding bad habit I'm getting rid of. Otherwise, even the baby steps I've taken here have changed me significantly. I smile a lot more. I'm a lot more fulfilled in general. At school, I've gotten to know a lot more people, simply because I'm reaching out more often and being the one to initiate. My world has gotten a lot more abundant and a lot more fun as well.

Results: I approach business from the point of helping the people I come across. I want every client I have to be crazy about me. So far, I've gotten good reviews from every client and repeat work from almost everyone. My current client has given me a proposal for an internship as well as an apprenticeship.

Sacrifice: I've given up a lot of things to make it work. Half the people I know think I'm insane. My sacrifices fuel my work and go beyond my own self.

My tip to past me:
Don't give up. Say "I'll do it anyway."

I'm sure there are a lot more things I encounter as I move forward, and so much I don't even know. Business is so hard, and I've just been trying to get my act together and clean up my mess. I hope that I can grow further, keep helping people, and get paid.
 

Sega Saph

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Hey man. Really interesting thread! What happened for the last times? What is your wins and losses? Did you move from your mother's house? Do you still work as a freelancer? Thank you
 

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