I've talked a lot about the ups and downs of freelancing, how to compete online and where we've been. One thing I haven't done yet is tell our story; how we became online freelancers. I think there a lot of you would love to do something like this but have something holding you back. I'm going to tell our story and I hope it is inspirational to you if you are considering moving to freelancing. With that said, let's begin at the beginning...
Agi and I met in the UK. We both worked for Mars (the chocolate people). We both had good jobs, we were making money and we had pretty good lives. However, we felt that there was something missing.
After we had been together for a couple of years we started talking about taking a chance and going on an adventure. We wanted to settle down and have kids eventually but we didn't want to miss out on seeing more of the world before doing so.
We had both done a lot of travelling before and had a number of friends living overseas. I lived in Japan for 2 years when I was younger and loved it. Agi is Polish but had been living in the UK for the past 7 years. We were both up for the idea of living overseas.
Three of my good friends were living in Bangkok at the time. We had both visited Thailand before and really liked it. We decided to roll the dice and move to Thailand. No concrete plans, no certainties. We quit our jobs, sold most of our belongings and bought one way plane tickets to Thailand.
Now, neither of us had freelanced before and we actually had no intention of doing so. The plan was to use our social network (the real one - the people we knew there, not Facebook) and internet job boards to find traditional 9 to 5 jobs. . Obviously things worked out differently, otherwise we wouldn't have made this website!
Once we arrived in Thailand we caught up with all of our friends and then left our stuff with them and went travelling for a few months because... why not? If you've quit your jobs and moved to a new country you should take advantage of it before committing to a new job, right? We travelled through Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia. This article isn't about that so I won't go into detail but here are some of my favourite photos from that trip:
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When we got back to Thailand. We started applying for jobs. We applied for jobs all day long, day after day... and we got nothing. Not a whiff of a job. Agi found an unpaid internship with a fashion agency which was supposed to lead to a paying position. That didn't work out. I had an interview with a company my friend worked at but didn't get the job.
One of my friends had been working as a freelance software developer for years and I loved the idea of being able to work from anywhere. I never thought I would be able to do something like that because I wasn't a graphic designer or software developer or similar... I was wrong as it turned out and I've written about the unexpected opportunities online before.
We were loving living in Thailand but our savings were starting to get low. I decided to take a look at Odesk (now Upwork) to see if there were some simple jobs I could do. The plan was to find something that would earn enough money to keep us going while we continued to look for proper jobs. You'll have to come back next week for part 2 to learn what I found... (cliffhanger or what!?)