Breaking Freelance

The first target hit! 🤘🔥

I learned a lot in 2 months about writing, communicating with my readers and researching and diving deeper into a certain topic.

As I was writing this daily newsletter, I was thinking of where can this go potentially long term and what are additional things I could offer to my readers.

I woke up. Made a cup of coffee and wrote my first newsletter. The idea of this whole thing was not to prepare content in advance, but rather to write every morning over coffee using notes as inspiration and looking at feedback from the readers.

The first topic was: "#001 - the "Why" ❓⏰"
Why was I even doing this? It made sense to write about my motivation, my "why" in the first email I send, and It was not some deep inspirational sh*t or an eye-opening revelation. My why comes down to a few things, one of them being - I hate alarm clocks! 🤬

One of my earliest memories is waking up to go to kindergarten on a snowy cold dark morning. Of course, I understand why my parents had to do that, but I remember that "ughh!" feeling, and that feeling stayed with me through my entire education and early adulthood.

Waking up when you don't want to wake up, to go where you don't want to go, spend a day with people you (mostly) don't like, to do stuff you don't want to do... All according to someone else's schedule. That's how I felt until I dropped out of college at year 2 and got my "first job in IT".

When I started that job, I hoped that feeling will go away, but apart from "doing stuff you don't want to do", nothing changed. N O T H I N G. So eventually I quit, to start my own business with a dear friend of mine. It was the best and also the dumbest thing I could do at that point.

So... What changed?
I've abolished the dreaded alarm clock from my day-to-day life. 🎉 It has been one of my life goals, so I'll call that a win!

Does that mean that I now sleep in? Hell no! If anything, I wake up earlier - because I now do what I want to do, and I wake up to the sound of desire to work on my dreams and goals, instead of working on someone else's. And I just love my morning routine.

I did a social network "carpet bombing" announcing my upcoming daily newsletter (Yes - Daily! 😜) and posted to all the Facebook groups, and shared information across Slack, Discord and Twitter, asking people to sign up.

On the first day I got 150 subscribers and in the following week 100 more. That was a great base to start!

Since I started my career as a web designer over 16 years, It's something that I still do, even though I'm not doing any more web design client projects - I love building sites for my side projects, communities and for friends.

I've built v.1. of www.breakingfreelance.com in WordPress and my newsletter platform of choice was SendFox from AppSummo.

I do a lot of talks and workshops, travelling the world (pre-covid), and I've gathered a lot of notes in my interactions with younger professionals, especially during Q&A sessions after my talks about career and freelancing.

The majority of my experience started to take shape in the written form, and I started to form an idea of how I would write and communicate with my audience.

I was writing a community newsletter for a while, but I wanted to share more tips from experience, so I decided that I will write a book initially. And That takes a lot of time...

As I was putting down chapters of the book, I started thinking about my newsletter - and the immediate value it could have for readers prior to book being published.