My First Year in Freelancing
June 24, 2025 at 1:45 pm
Category: Freelancing
It’s now just over a year since I started freelancing in February 2024 after my redundany in January of that year. Freelancing didn’t happen because of redundancy, it was due to the job I started at the end of gardening leave that just didn’t work out – there were faults at both ends. After that I considered restarting freelancing. I did do a period of it a decade ago but I don’t recall that going as well as this time around.
I did start to try and get some work via Upwork but as I was new to the platform, I had no reviews or stats which makes starting on those platforms quite difficult. Sending proposals got me nowhere. Around the same time, I built my second Elementor widget to get me back some confidence after the failure from the new job that fell through and the period I had before my redundancy with my Dad being quite ill and the no so great experience with the company that made me redundant.
I signed on with Universal Credit and my other half suggested that I try networking. I’m not the most social, so it was a new experience. That slowly built my confidence in speaking with new people outside my interests as I do attend the Indie Game Developer meetups but I felt this was a little different contextually. Networking is great to meet new people and get out of the same 4 walls. One of the early networking events I attended, Propser2, lead me on to Business for Breakfast as I was invited by a member at that event and in a later event, with Manchester Hospitality Network, some one tried to get me onboard with BNI but I was already wedded to B2B at this point.
During finding contracting work and failures with proposals on Upwork, a video had popped up in my YouTube channel regarding tips on being successful with Upwork. It was talking about how to make the profile more attractive to potential clients searching for your skillsets. I took a chance and it paid off. In May I got an invitation for an Upwork contract working with Twig on a platform called Salla Marketplace. It was similar to Shopify so it felt quite familiar territory, the only difference was that the language was in Arabic. This wasn’t too much of an issue as there was ability to convert the text to english and the code was english too. The good thing about this was that I’d now broken the Upwork barrier and I could start to hopefully win more contracts. On the Universal Credit side, I moved to the self employment program where they would support me for about a year and only have me report in physically every 3 months as well as report my income and expenses.
I did get called up from recruiters for contract roles and this was a mixed bag. I’ve had 2 online interviews and one face-to-face. The latter I did well on despite it being a Lead Web Developer role (the recruiter informed me that it was just a Web Developer role) and the former? In both cases there were red flags. One wanted a Junior Developer with minimal supervision and the interviewer who dealt with that asked if I knew anything about WordPress hooks but didn’t seem like the answer I gave him, and asked the question again – probably probing for the one hook he was looking for. Looking back, this looked like a case of Mid Developer on Junior pay. The other online interview had someone who wanted their warehouse website to be the next AO but done “really fast”. That gave me some alarm bells, especially considering most don’t look into CRO and the website itself I had never heard of, so there’s the SEO to consider. I had prepped a quick look into the CRO on the old site to showcase my skills, even though they had a new design they wanted to implement but the manager didn’t seem to care. The feedback I got was that they thought I wasn’t good enough for a contractor but would be happy getting me on permanently. This was a bit weird considering the recruiter has suggested it would be good to do as a contract for the first few months and if I liked it, then I could (if I wanted) move into a perm role. I did look into the manager’s work history on LinkedIn and discovered that the person had jumped between different management roles and had not reached 2 years experience in most of them. So I was not willing to get burned through the manager’s pet project and I rejected the offer.
As the months went on, I was getting occasional invitiations on Upwork and had different experiences – mostly with WordPress. I still have those clients now. A couple have moved off Upwork and I deal with them directly as the usual way I work is to get the project done, get a review and ask if they want to be moved off Upwork. The latest contract I have is for a Dutch web hosting company, and the reason for the delay in this post. The perks included free tickets to events such as WordCamp and expenses paid by the company at those events. So pretty soon I was standing in Manchester Airport, early in the morning with a flight due to Basel in Switzerland. I knew the trip was coming but as I was busy I pushed it out of my mind but it didn’t hit me until I was stood there. How did I get to this point? This type of expenses paid trip story you read about from top 1% developers getting shipped out to locations, and those who lucked out. Never did I expect it to happen to me. As for the trip itself, it was very enjoyable and it was good to meet up with the company founder in real life. And if this never happens again, I can at least say that I had that experience.
This has been a rollercoaster of a year (and a half). I’ve learned a few things and there’s still lots to learn. I haven’t covered everything in this post but for those I’ve missed off, I just want to say a big thank you for the support. Here’s to another year of freelancing, cheers!
No Comments
Social Media & Freelance Links
