Newsletter #65 - Keep Pushing!

This morning I was reading a blog about how to find freelance clients

The writer shares his advice after he’s been doing it for the last 2-3 years

It’s inspirational but doesn’t tell the real story

Writing in hindsight distorts the reality, challenges and problems at that time

It would be more interesting to read the notes throughout the process

That’s why I write this newsletter

To track the real, raw situation

Expert

So what’s my real, raw situation

It’s still based on two goals:

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1. Getting freelance roles to pay the bills on short term

2. Develop products to pay the bills (and private jet) on the long term

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The first leg is proving harder than expected

I can list a bunch of reasons but that won’t help

Instead I focus on actions:

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I will keep trying to sell myself as a generalist jack of all trades, although it leads to low response rates

Selling myself as a project manager leads to slightly higher response rates, so I’m continuing down this path

And I’m trying some roles on the interface between engineering and project management, like “solution engineer” or “product engineer”

The best opportunity is probably still trying to build a local network

This is also the slowest and conflicts with family life (most networking is done outside of working hours)

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And frankly, maybe the challenge to find roles is a blessing in disguise, it forces me to keep pushing to find a way to create an income, independent of an employer

Let’s see how that turns out
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The only certainty is:

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I must keep pushing until something works!

Building

On the second leg - building products - I’m launching a simple Twitter analytics tool this week

My expectations are not too high, though hoping to get a few initial users

Wrap up

That’s it for now!

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Written from the Hacker Building in Amsterdam, probably one of the coolest tech coworkings in Amsterdam, if not the world!

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