Every day a new hole. Every hole a new shape. I should start charging for the map.
Day X of freelancing.
New hole unlocked. 🕳️
This week's special: Shopify mobile adaptation.
Got 50% upfront. Did most of the work.
One page left. One weird bug still open. Not delivered yet.
Client: "let's pause for now"
Me: pause... in the middle? 🙃
Two days have passed.
I'm just here. Sitting on undelivered layouts. Unresolved CSS. And one page I couldn't finish because nobody sent me the login password.
I have a growing collection of these holes now.
Different shapes. Different causes. Same vibe. 🫠
BUT.
I did find one thing to comfort myself.
Their store backend password? Still unchanged. 😏
Not saying I'd do anything.
Just saying the middle isn't as powerless as it looks.
Anyway. Lessons learned:
→ 80% upfront next time
→ Get ALL passwords before starting
→ The middle is dangerous. But sometimes you're holding the keys.
Stay out of the middle, kids.
(Or at least make sure you're holding something.)
Painful lesson, but a real one.
A lot of freelance losses don’t happen from bad work, they happen from weak scope control, weak access control, and getting trapped in the middle of unclear projects.
Exactly. The work was fine. The scope was a ghost.
I kept thinking "just one more fix" — turns out "one more fix" is a subscription model I never agreed to.
Scope control, access control, payment control. Three locks. I had zero of them.
Next client gets a contract before they get a hello. 🔐
That’s usually how people learn it. Bad clients rarely announce themselves early, they show up through vague scope, delayed access, and endless “small fixes.” Once those three appear together, it’s already a contract problem, not a work problem.
You’ll be much stronger on the next one.