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I Made $2695 in November 2020

Welcome to the second issue of Adem's Freelance Journey.

I know it's the middle of the month and most of you expected a new issue on the first of December.

There's a very simple explanation for this.

I'm lazy and got hooked on PUBG.

Now that my poor excuses are out of the way, here's the November breakdown of my freelance business.

TL;DR made $2695 for ~ 74 hours of work on three different projects. Have two other projects in the pipeline.

Projects

Client #1 ($1575 for 45 hours of work)

Very busy month for Client #1.

We landed a very big customer couple of months ago and needed to finish up some custom work by the end of November.

If you've spent more than a day in the software development you'll know this means we were at least a month short of time.

We're currently rolling it out to their test group and it's going very smoothly if I may say so.

In other news, Client #1 raised money from VCs.

So starting January or February I'll start charging them my regular rate of $50 an hour.

Client #2 ($420 for 12 hours of work)

Not a lot of work from Client #2.

To be fair, he's developing all the critical pieces of the product.

I'm hired just to help him out on some less sexy tasks.

Client #3 ($700 for ~16 hours of work)

I've wrapped up a project that I've been working on with Client #3.

He's delighted with my work and wants to keep working with me, so he re-hired me to keep maintaining his app for $50 an hour.

Future leads

With Client #3 rehiring me and Client #1 raising funds, I don't think I need to look for more clients.

I'll be taking some client calls just in case something cool pops up.

I've already talked with a couple of IndieHackers and I think there's a high possibility I'll end up working with some on their projects.

Conclusion

All in all, November was a pretty good month. Not my best but not terrible either.

The only thing that was bad is dealing with PayPal. I do 100% of my invoicing through PayPal.

It refused to send funds to my bank quoting that there's an issue with my bank. I called up my bank and they said it was an issue on the PayPal side.

Luckily, after two weeks, I've managed to get the money into my bank account.

It turns out I can only withdraw $1200 at a time (which is annoying because I need to pay $5 every time).

But the important thing is that it works I guess.

Support

If you like what you're reading and would like to help me out, sharing this post with your friends on Twitter would help me out so much : - )

Check out previous months.

If you want to read these updates as soon as I write them, you can sign up for my newsletter.

See ya again in a month,
Adem

  1. 3

    Hey Adem, great write up! What is the main source or clients for you? Also do you mind sharing what kind of projects are you working on with these clients? What kind of technologies do you use for client projects?

    1. 2

      Hey Mantas,

      Thanks a bunch for your kind words.

      My main source of clients is niche communities like Reddit, Hacker News, and IndieHackers.

      I've mentioned what kind of projects I'm working on with these clients in this post. Most are in the B2B SaaS space.

      I use primarily JavaScript (React, Vue, Node) and Python (Django and automation scripts).

  2. 1

    Nice. What do you do for freelancing though?

    1. 1

      Thanks.

      These post are monthly updates. Check out previous post for more info.

  3. 1

    Hi Adem,

    #1

    I googled AthosBlade and didn't find a website. Is that on purpose or am I looking for the wrong thing?

    I don't think you need something crazy fancy but a nice professional website would help. That way, at least people that are interested in using your services can answer some of their questions without having to talk to you.

    #2

    If you do have a domain, you might consider adding it to TrustPilot or Google My Business and asking your customers for 5 star reviews of your work.

    I think these are two things that most people expect to see when doing business, especially with a technical person. Even if you get the majority of your clients from Reddit, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, etc - I'm willing to bet these two things would help.

    1. 1

      Hello.

      I actually do have a website.

      You're probably correct. Here in Bosnia we have a proverb: "Master mason's house is always the worst one.".

      I haven't updated my portfolio in quite a while due to client work.

      I'll have it on my radar.

      Thanks for the input mate 👍

      1. 1

        Very nice! I like both the website and the projects. Do you have any experience with either the Bluetooth protocol or Wi-Fi?

        1. 1

          Thanks!

          Nah, I just do general full stack development.

          But if you're looking for someone to hire, I can do some digging in my network?

          1. 1

            Not necessarily. I've got two different companies working on it right now but I always like to keep my options open.

  4. 1

    Congrats! If I may, I recommend reading the books Million Dollar Consulting and Company of One. You'll get a lot of great insights from it. Best of luck!

    1. 1

      Thanks for recommedation.

      Added to my to-read list!

    1. 1

      Thanks, Mehmood (or is it Mahmood XD?).

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