How I Never Managed to Get a Steady Income as a Freelancer | by Josef Cruz | January 2025

Freelance

How I became delusional about self-employment.

Exactly 3 years ago, I started freelancing. Before that, I already had a little experience in the form of 1 or 2 sites built on a WordPress template. So I quickly chose a niche.

There were also no particular problems finding clients. The main flow came from independent trading and recommendations from past customers. I was producing similar websites on WordPress without even understanding programming or layout. My knowledge in these areas ended with “make one word a link and slightly adjust the CSS”.

Despite this, almost all customers left satisfied, I could earn quite well and I did not feel a lack of money. But I felt like I didn’t want to continue doing projects of questionable quality. I needed to develop as a specialist in one direction, so I chose design and found a good specialist as a development partner.

As a designer, I grew quite quickly, the projects reached another level, but, truth be told, they still weren’t very good. For the client, the price of the work increased, but since the budget was shared between me and the developer, I earned less. At that time, I didn’t care much; the quality of the projects…