Reflections on my 2023 ($8k/month)

In April this year, I left my job. It was a good job, as a Senior Data Scientist, in a US company, working from Italy. I was paid well above the Italian average. I had stocks and bonuses, private medical insurance and various benefits I never used. Overall, I made more than €100k in 2022, and I was on course to make even more in 2023. I left it anyway. I feel like time is passing, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could be useful outside employment too. I also realized that I don’t have the energy to grow a side business and have a full-time job at the same time. Some people do, but I am not one of them.

Freelancing

Without a job and a salary, I started looking for freelancing opportunities. I already had some contacts from last year and started with an Italian client. Not much work, but it was a start. I kept applying to more jobs on Upwork, reshaped my LinkedIn profile and also paid for the Small Bets membership, to increase my chances to get some job opportunities and learn about building an online business.

In May, I got in touch with an Italian online school for Data Analysts and started to teach there until mid-July. It was a part-time gig, as I was only doing it for 3 days a week, 2 hours each. I worked a lot to prepare the lessons, much more than the hours I was paid for. In the end, this gig took a lot of my time (at least 2 full days a week) and paid less than €800 per month. Helping people to change their career trajectory was very rewarding, but financially it was a disaster. I will not do it again. Are all teachers paid this little? No wonder there are so many bad teachers around.

In July a friend of mine suggested me another gig with an Italian start-up. I started to work with them on some Data Analytics stuff. The rate is not amazing but the job and the team are great. I am still working with them. In August another opportunity came up, through the Small Bets community. More Data Science related, with another great team, a fair rate and a long-term commitment. In the meantime, I was also getting some more gigs on Upwork and was able to increase my rate and get more reviews there.

Over the last 8 months, I was in more than 50 between conversations and job proposals on Upwork. At the end of the day, only 6 of them turned into job offers. That makes it a 12% conversion rate, which doesn’t look that bad. Most of the rejections come from Upwork anyway, a tough platform.

I am satisfied with my freelance journey, but I think it should not take more than 50% of my time. Ideally, keeping at 2-3 days a week should leave me the time to pursue what I really want to do. Build an online business.

Books

I published 2 books on Soccer Betting and coding in 2020. Probably one of the decisions with the best ROI of my entire life. Those books keep selling today, slowly but steadily. I have sold more than 200 copies this year and I have spent maybe 3 days of work on it in the entire 2023. What did I do? A couple of updates to the landing page, just to play around and see if the conversion improved. And, the most important thing, setting up a discount code for the weeks leading to Black Friday. More than half of my Gumroad sales happened in those 2 weeks when I promoted the book with a discount code on a few places online. I made more than $1500 in 2023 from selling books. It’s an average monthly salary in many European countries. It’s not much, but it proves that I can still make money online, on my terms, selling something I created. That’s a very motivating realization.

I have published more details about it in an article in my blog.

I often write about my freelance experience in Data Science on Twitt...X.