#78 Freelancing as a UX designer
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To freelancing, there are always two levels. First being a backstage and second being a front stage. Backstage is all about creating, accumulating, enforcing the trust, building a network of people, really preparing the stage for you to actually start having clients. Whereas the front stage is really just doing the actual work, managing that work, invoicing that work, communicating with your clients. ♪

Hello UX friends and welcome to a new episode of Honest UX Talks. As always, I'm joined by Anfisa and today we're going to be tackling a topic that I think concerns everyone.

freelancing as a UX designer, how to set yourself up for success, what are some things that you need to pay attention to, what has been our own experience, and how do you even know if you want to do it. We're having this conversation because one of our listeners reached out to us. So before I go ahead and read the message that requested this conversation, I just want to take the moment to ask Anfisa how her past week was, what is she up to these days, and how's everything going?

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the next episode. My week was pretty good, actually, because I did what I think I promised in the last episode. So I did launch the CV template publicly online. It's going pretty well. I think there is more than 1,000 downloads already. Last time I checked,

And I also gave a talk at the local meetup here in Prague in a product company, which was really, really good. It was about niching in design. And that's the topic we'll probably pick up in the next episode. But actually, what I wanted to talk about is something that I've been really excited to share with everyone, with all of you guys listeners, because I have been working for a while on one big, huge project.

I was not very vocal about it. I was kind of keeping it a secret because I wasn't sure if it's going to be launched or it's not going to happen. So I think with my first course, I was very proactive, promoting, talking about it a lot. But this time I literally was like in a shadow doing it, seeing if I can manage it or not. And so the announcement is that I'm actually launching the cohort-based live course literally in just two weeks. So I'm going to be doing a lot of

It's very, very last minute and I wasn't sure it's going to happen, but we are launching it in cooperation with EDP List, which I'm pretty sure many of you guys know because it's probably the biggest mentoring platform for all of the IT people, designers. I love the platform. I love the initiative. It's free mentoring, free advice, a lot of help, a lot of smart and great people helping each other.

It's humbling for me to be able to collaborate with AdibiList and bring to life this course. This course is going to be called Into UX Jobs. So as you know, I do have a course called Into UX Design, and this is going to be all about jobs. Literally, if you're struggling today, if you've been impacted by the current layoff situation, and that's very unfortunate. A lot of people are searching for jobs, but a lot of jobs are on freeze.

That's the problem I really want to focus on and help you with the strategy and mindset and a lot of a lot of actionable templates to actually find a job and avoid that horrible situation when you constantly apply and for months or even years cannot find a job. So that's actually my goal. And we are going to launch this course in literally two weeks. By the moment you're listening, this episode is probably one and a half weeks.

until the end of registration. This course is going to be paid. I will attach all the links under the show notes. But if you want to know more about it, basically, this course is going to be super actionable. Again, it's live. It's only 20 people, very little group. We really want to have like a small community that we will be really able to talk to

I can help every single person. I will share with everyone five actionable templates, literally everything plug and play, ready to go, CV, reflection board, wide-boring challenge, case study web, and case study presentation templates. So literally everything you need to have and be equipped before starting your job search.

I also will talk a lot about theory, the mindset, the practical steps, share a lot of tips that were not shared anywhere publicly. And of course, we will have practical exercises like whiteboarding challenge workshop, and every single student will get personal feedback and support throughout this process. So yeah, only 20 places. If you're interested, definitely check it out if you are planning to search for a job this year. And unfortunately, I'm going to only run it once this year because then my priorities will shift.

But maybe I will run another cohort-based course next year. So yes, if you're interested in searching for a job this year, it's only once a year.

All right, that's it on my side. How about you, Joanna? How are you doing? I just want to comment on your announcement. I'm super excited this is happening. I know you've been working on it with a lot of passion and drive for a long time, so I'm super happy seeing the light of day. I think that people will want to know how they can be a part of it. So once you have more details, we could even link it in the show notes or just how can they apply. So I'll attach the link under the notes. Perfect.

Perfect, because it's exciting. I think it's super useful. I feel like there was a missing piece in the market. A lot of articles, a lot of content about preparing for jobs, but how do you get the whole picture? How do you get the entire experience of getting ready, optimizing your job search and so on? And especially in these challenging times and in this very discouraging economic climate, I feel that people need this a lot. So I'm sorry to hear there are only 20 places. Yeah.

But I'm happy for the 20 people who will be part of this experience. And yeah, absolutely. Stay tuned, folks. And now back to how my week went. I'm also reshifting priorities. This has been a constant struggle in my life for the past couple of years, as our regular listeners know. I'm a person that wants to try out everything. I'm very experimental. I love saying yes to all the opportunities that come my way. I'm always in the growth mindset, learn mindset, fail mindset sometimes. And I'm just doing a lot of

things so as some of you know I've had I've always had my personal projects I've always had freelancing projects this has been I always have them probably will go more into that I've had a design school I've had a startup and a full-time job and child I'm doing a lot of things

Bottom line is that I'm really trying to reprioritize. When we were discussing my priorities for 2022, my keyword was focus. And now this year, my keyword is balance. So I'm always trying to improve the way I balance things. So I've put another project on hold

indefinitely last week. So it feels like now I'm creating more room to just be strategic, reflect, because if you have too many things on your plate, what happens is that you're always on the treadmill. You're just doing, doing, doing, doing, doing. There's no time for stepping back, reflecting, thinking. I mean, you could force it, but it becomes just a constant stream of having to do stuff that are waiting for your attention. So now I feel that I'm a bit more balanced.

I have some time. I'm going to be focusing more on creating content about how AI will change design careers and the design work we're doing. I will have some talks about the intersection of AI and design and how to design for AI, but also how to design with AI. So these are two of the, let's say, perspectives that I'm going to be tackling in the talks I'm working on. So I'm trying to do more of what I love now and just stay balanced and be efficient.

So that's my situation. Oh, and very exciting. The last thing I want to mention, and I'm super happy. So as you know, I'm working at UiPath and I've been working on an AI product. It's called Clipboard AI. It's essentially doing semantic copy paste. So it's changing the way we do our basic tasks. Really exciting to have this opportunity. And yeah,

We've launched it last week. We've opened a wait list, but the product is like, we're still testing it. We're doing some improvements. It will be available. And it's absolutely incredible to see like all the work and passion and heart you put into something and then seeing the light of day and being able to shape a completely new interaction. So I'm currently in the process of patenting. I'm going to be an inventor soon because I've just created something that were never there. I

I'm very happy about it. I'm very grateful that I have this opportunity to just literally be immersed in the AI space. I'm not forcing myself in. I'm there. I'm in like the wave is pulling me. So I'm very grateful for that.

A very long intro. Thanks for everyone's patience. I'm going to get back to the question that was submitted and we're trying to unpack today. So the question goes like this. How to start freelancing? I would like to freelance after work and on weekends to gain more experience, a body of work for my portfolio and earn extra cash. What's the best way to go about doing this?

Regarding fears, I guess I'm more worried about how to acquire new side gigs. I have absolutely no idea how I would do this. I worked as a teacher before working as a UX designer, would love to support edtech products. I'm very unsure how to reach out to these organizations and if and if they would be interested. I don't want to hassle people, just find opportunities where my skills can help products or projects, where my UX knowledge can help them for a few hours a week.

So I think we can all relate to this goal. I've personally always felt that I have a couple of hours extra on my hands magically somehow, and I want to put it into design work. And I've been there, but I want to start by asking Anfisa what has been her experience with freelancing, just so we set up the context from which we're sharing our perspectives on this.

Yeah, of course. We talked a little bit about our freelancing past, but I'll quickly recap it to not make it, I guess, too extended. My experience was actually quite big, but not as professional as I wish it would be. So I actually started my career almost from freelancing. So when I was a student yet, I was going to different hackathons and participated in different local IT events. And I

When I started going to the hackathons, I was pretty active there. I was going there maybe every other weekend. And honestly, literally from the first hackathon ever, I started having like client requests because I was living in Estonia. The IT scene is very, very active there. Like every second person had a startup or a small business and everybody needed design help. And so if you are proactive in those hackathons, you start building the network of people. They start to

And yeah, from the first hackathon ever, I immediately received maybe like two or three client requests. First, it was like small things, for example, pitch decks or leaflets or one pagers for like different investment rounds. But as I start collaborating with those different business owners, they start reaching me out around, you know, start building the actual products.

And so this is how it started. And then for, I believe, around five or six years, it was on and off really like my career track. So I've been working as a freelancer from around 2012 to 2019, again, with some breaks.

But in general, I always had some sort of freelance clients. And again, early stage, it was a little bit more into like early stage startups. So not much budgets, a lot of MVPs, scrappy approaches, building and breaking stuff. And later, maybe three years after, I think I became a bit more professional. Businesses started reaching out to me with a little bit more design maturity. So my business became

bit better in terms of how I approach it. I started structuring it better. I started pricing much better and also working with a bit more mature companies. So not just early stage startups, but actually established businesses, small businesses that are growing or scale-ups that need help with scaling and growth.

That was kind of my experience and then I stopped freelancing around 2019 because I started working full-time for big projects, enterprise clients. Yeah, basically this is how my journey was lasting. I think the last project I had was 2020 during the COVID and after that I actually shared the horror story during the, I believe, Halloween episode we had in October. So yeah, after that experience I kind of decided to wrap it and not work as a freelancer anymore. How about you, Ioana?

I think my experience speaks directly to the question we received and we're trying to answer. I've always had a full-time job, except for when I was on my maternity leave where I didn't have a full-time job, but like professionally, I had a personal full-time job. But I've always had a full-time job and then I've always been doing freelancing as a side gig. I was never a full-time freelancer.

I don't plan on doing that anytime soon. My experience has always been just complementing the work I'm doing in my full-time role with different projects, industries, exploring, experimenting on the side. And it all began, I was working in my full-time role at ING Bank. My title was UX Architect. I missed that title. It felt so pretentious. So,

So I was a UX architect at ING and I realized that I'm very immersed in the same industry, just one industry, just banking. I was in banking for 10 years, holding different roles. So I was genuinely curious about how it feels to design for other problems.

other problem spaces, other products, other kinds of industries, teams, and so on. So I realized that I want to do something with all the free time I had available. And I found TopTog, which is a platform for freelancing. They say they have the top 3% of world talent because they have a very rigorous process of accepting you on the, I think it

literally was like six stages. Interviews, showing my portfolio with at least 4K studies and having to do a 10-day challenge and stuff like that. It was a lot of work just to get on the platform. But it was really interesting that once I got on the platform, somehow, I don't know why magically,

clients started to appear on LinkedIn, on other places. So I didn't really get the chance to freelance on TopTal, but it happened at sort of the same time. UX goodies wasn't a thing back then. So I wasn't getting clients through UX goodies, but somehow my LinkedIn seemed to help me open that door. And I started freelancing for a Boston startup in the healthcare industry. I started getting immersed in the healthcare industry, the US health

system is very interesting to unpack. So it was a challenge, a completely new world. And that's how it began. And then ever since that moment, I've always had one, two freelancing gigs. Sometimes it's a couple of months. Sometimes it's more than a year. Sometimes it's just helping them do a UX audit.

And it's just two weeks of work. And so I'm experimenting with ways of freelancing and different freelancing challenges. Yeah, I've accumulated a lot of experience on balancing everything. So I can definitely speak about that more. Now that we understand the kind of background we both have in respect to freelancing, the first question I want to unpack in the freelancing space is what's your idea of the best way of setting yourself up?

How do you get started? What's the first thing you need to do? What are some of the ingredients or things that need to be there for you to be successful as a freelancer? Yeah, well, it's a broad question, I believe. And I think we'll try to start maybe high level and then we can start diving deep into details. I think in general, definitely the first recommendation is always to not quit your day job or whatever is your daily routine.

main income source of work and first focus on preparations for the freelance. You don't want to quit everything and just kind of go into the wilds expecting clients to embrace you and look for you with open arms because that's not happening. I think maybe the freelancing scene will be more and more active moving forward, again, because of the current tech crisis. So my thinking is that

Many tech companies will start searching for freelancers to actually have extra hands for their projects with the help. But yes, generally speaking, I really don't recommend to quit everything and start freelancing right away because the clients will not come your way with an open arms. It is challenging, to be honest, especially to find the first client. My story was a little bit about

offline networking, right? So just going out there, meeting people, and then they start reaching out, especially if you live in a place with an active IT or tech community. And now the scene is moving a little bit more towards online. I think especially after the COVID, a lot of the clients are reaching out, literally the global network.

So yeah, the networking environment has changed a lot. And now I think the whole reaching out process, meeting clients are actually happening online mainly. Offline it's still possible, especially if you still live in the tech community spaces. But yeah, maybe like in London or in Hong Kong, it's very active. But yeah, if you're living anywhere remotely, then online way is the way for you to go. And it's very, very good right now because a lot of companies are searching for people

online. Talking about high level approach and how to get started, I feel that generally there are just two ways. You can either rely on the luck to find your first client or you can actually start building trust. And for me, starting freelancing is starting always from trust, right?

You kind of build your own either presence or own credibility, your own sort of what can you do? Why should people reach out to you? You really need to establish the trust because people who don't know you, literally freelancing, as for me, is all about building the connections and building the trust.

And if you're just somebody posting online without connecting with businesses, not going or participating in the events, not being proactive in terms of building the community or network of people, then it's very, very hard because you literally have to reach out in the kind of cold reach out, right? You have to knock the doors and stuff like that. So yeah.

It's better to have some online presence so people start reaching out to you. And it's also more targeted because this way you actually expose yourself and tell them, here's what I'm good at. And people who need what you offer can find you online easier. So building trust is the first key principle for me.

Typically, there are three paths to searching for the clients. Obviously, I mentioned already two of them, right? So real world network, offline network, online network. So again, like through social media, through LinkedIn. And then the third one that Ioana partly mentioned, like TopTal or any other freelancing platform. In terms of freelancing platform, it's also a huge topic because there are so many freelancing platforms. I personally started, I think I had one client from Ellens and I believe Ellens today is an Upwork client.

which was a long time ago, more than 10 years ago. And then I did also find one client in the platform called People Per Hour. I don't even know if it's still an active platform, but the competition was lower there. So it was really easy to kind of find the first client there. And so there is this third direction, right? Freelance platforms. But in either of those, building trust is still an essential component. For freelancing platforms, everything you do will be converted in your reputation, in your reviews. And so trust is a key part of it.

Real-life work network, again, actually being proactive, building the network of people who like you, who believe in you, who want to work with you, who want to cooperate with you. And online network, again, being proactive, showing the expertise, showing what you know, attracting the clients with the targeted portfolio. So yeah, it actually sounds like a lot of work, I believe. Either work or either path you took, online, real world, or freelance platforms will need some preparation that you actually have to do as a homework.

My personal approach was always to focus on the real world or online networks because with the freelancing platforms, I quickly realized that the competition is fierce there. The commissions are crazy there and it's also very, very hard work. So yeah, I just didn't find it rewarding enough to apply through the platforms. But a lot of people still find their niche there. It's just that in the beginning, you really, really put a lot of effort. That didn't work well for me. I really wanted to have a

relationships with my clients and have partnerships. So that's the reason why I started investing more in the online networking and offline networking. And I think also another principle that I want to recommend, and again, this is very high level. We will go into details, I believe, in the next questions. But another principle I also wanted to recommend is to always start from giving value. Every time you are interested in building the network of people and people who trust you, it's really all about giving the value first.

So before asking for something in return and saying like, please work with me, I just need some clients, right? That sounds very desperate. You don't want that to happen. So I think it's always helpful to start from just being proactive and giving first. Helping businesses, being open, giving advice, sharing expertise, sharing tips, whatever you do, right? Or even like giving freebies to the client so they can work on themselves if they cannot afford working with freelancers right now.

So given the value, not expecting anything in return, and you will see magic happening afterwards because people will start recommending you, people will start reaching out to you, network of people who know you will start saying, oh, I know this great designer. If you need a freelancer, et cetera, et cetera. That is at least my approach. How about you, Ioana? What was your way to start? Ioana Krivokuća

I really feel that networking is key. My own experience has been that. As you can imagine, having an online presence also helps. So I believe that not all designers should focus on building an online presence. I feel that it's something valuable, but it also has to match your personality, your career goals, your lifestyle, right? So some people just don't enjoy writing on social media and sharing stuff. I'm one of the people who enjoy that, and it really helped me, right? So being present, just like you said, focusing on, in a way, it's networking. But I would

still split it, right? So building an online presence is establishing trust, establishing credibility. For example, let's say in the case of our listener, they're into edtech. So you might want to just start posting about edtech, UX case studies, interesting design challenges, interesting project studies, stuff like that. So just position yourself as someone who understands the problem space or the thing that you want to do, right? So position yourself as someone who understands helping startups, working as a freelancer,

using frameworks, whatever you feel you want to do more with potential clients. Essentially, what this means is telling people what you do. And so make sure to tell people what you do, be it face-to-face and live networking events or whatever kind of real-life setup or online where, of course, you're reaching a much broader audience.

And then the thing that I want to add to setting yourself up for success, this is not something I'm very good at personally, but all the successful freelancers I see around me, they're very well organized and they build structures. So if you don't have a full-time job where you could like go in the office, start working, get out of the office and working, have a lunch break, talk with people, everybody's working full-time jobs. I'm talking about in office, right? Full-time jobs that give you a structure. It's a similar challenge for remote jobs.

So you still have to learn to organize yourself and build structures. But especially as a freelancer, it can get very lonely. It can get pretty disorganized. You could rely solely on your mood. Like, I don't want to work today. I'm going to work tomorrow. But sometimes you need to work today. So I would say even from the very, very beginning, start building structures, a schedule, build focus time slots, etc.

put everything in your calendar. And then there's also like the logistic setting up. How am I going to invoice people? Am I going to start a company where I'm getting all this money? How am I going to like pay taxes? You also have to look into those aspects. There are some products that help you with that. I've just stumbled upon one. It's called Hopscotch. If everybody wants to look it up, there are some freelancing. I think Contra is another one that helps like setting up freelancing businesses and so on. So

There are some products that can help you with that, but that's definitely something that can be skipped, right? You have to be legally able to do freelancing work and then handle all the financial aspects and payments, invoices, stuff like that. That's also a reality of being a freelancer. Yeah, I think those are the things that come to my mind.

So maybe one of the last spaces we can unpack before we move into our top three insights for aspiring freelancers is going deeper into the question that we receive. In the case of our listener, they say that they don't want to be found out by their employer. They don't want to be exposed. They don't want to do the entire social media effort.

because they don't want to go public with their effort of adding work in their free time job. So how can one navigate that? So let's say you don't want to do social media to get new clients, but how do you get them in 2023? So that's the first part of the question. And then it ties into another thing that I wanted to look into, which is what are some things that might go bad? Like what are the things that freelancers should be careful about?

about when they're considering this or starting this, the pitfalls, the dangers. You've mentioned already that we have our horror story episode, if anybody wants to listen to it. I think it's Halloween something. Yeah. So how can someone find clients if they can't do the social media thing right now? What are your thoughts about that? Yeah, definitely. And I like that you came back to the question of our listener, just to make it more specific.

I think generally talking, it's all about still networking to me, but it doesn't need to be a public networking or visible networking or like the social media screaming networking. You don't have to be specifically like an expert online that everybody can reach out to. It's easier because I think this way you're more visible and more noticeable. However, it's still very possible. And I know a lot of people don't prefer just being very out there. So they actually start building just like the private network of friends, actually.

So for the listener, the way to go would be to either, of course, go into the freelancing platforms and start building their trust there. But it's definitely more time consuming. If he's only available on the weekends, then maybe it's just harder and it will take

much longer to first be able to kind of land consistently clients with the good budgets. For that reason, I feel like at least for me, what also worked, which I didn't mention, which was another channel, is to have designer friends, especially successful freelancer friends.

Because those people often, they either don't have time, so they start having like, oh, extra projects, extra clients. And of course, they want to refer someone. They don't want to just be not helpful to those reaching out clients. So what they do is like, oh, okay, I know this other great designer. And I can just ask him or her if they are available and if they can pick it up. So that's what I've seen happening. I have a few friends who are freelancing. And while I was still freelancing...

they would often drop me like, hey, here is the project. Are you interested? Here's this topic. Are you interested? Are you interested in this space? So that's what worked out pretty well for me, as I said, but it's not consistent. You can't rely on this. And you also don't have to build a network of

design friends just in order to expect to start having clients, right? So it's really more about being just slightly more proactive, but at least within the internal communities, which means either being again online in the Slack channels, either online communities,

participating in any of the groups online with like freelancing networks. I know that a lot of even like social media creators, they create those bootcamps and groups of people where at the end of the bootcamp or program, you become friends and you kind of start sharing the network with each other, sharing even the struggles, sharing the life in terms of freelancing. And so it became like a ritual that people just asking each other, oh, I have a client, do you want to pick it up?

So for me, that would be a very easy way to start doing it. However, you can still try to find the networks even offline, right? In your local area, if that's present. I personally use the app called Meetup and there you would always find local small communities. It's not big communities. It's usually 20 people around that. They sometimes meet for a beer or, I don't know, coffee and then discuss their problems and then they can start building those connections. And also, yeah, you can even ask for like local scene, local freelancers in Howisit.

Is it suitable for your needs? And then if they can help you with this to get started with it. Yeah, again, like internal people network, that's the way I would approach it. However, another point I wanted to add before we actually wrap this question up and I pass the mic to you. Again, I like to cluster things and kind of sort things in terms of how to approach it. So another thing I didn't mention and I wanted to make sure I talk about it. So be careful with the freelancing because it's a lot of work.

That's something we didn't mention yet. It's not as simple as clients just coming your way, throwing the work at you. You do your job, you price it, you get an invoice and that's it. No, it's like you want to mention. It's a lot of preparation, having structures, having templates, having processes established, having pitch decks, having sales calls, talks even, how you structure it. It's all a part of it.

And for me to even build this system of being a freelancer, effective freelancer who doesn't waste time, took a while, I would say. It took me a few years, probably. So I'll be honest. I was not professional. I didn't look into some sort of educational programs to help me kickstart it. I definitely did mistakes. But it took me really a while to establish everything and work out a lot of problems that we will talk about in the next question.

Now, if I look back and structure how I approached it to freelancing, there are always two levels, let's say. First being a backstage and second being a front stage. And when I talk about those two levels, backstage is all about creating, accumulating and forcing the trust

building a network of people, really preparing the stage for you to actually start having clients. Whereas the front stage is really just doing the actual work, managing that work, invoicing that work, communicating with your clients, right? So it's really the front stage of your work.

Whereas the backstage, it's still a lot of work. I would even say maybe sometimes 50% of your work because you still have to prepare all those templates and pitch decks. And even again, having this accountant who would help you with all the accounting work that you still have to prepare, right? You need to know all the details and nuances of how to work, how it works in your local scene, stuff like that.

Even small things. What is the invoicing tool I'm going to use? It's still a question you have to answer and prepare everything in advance. And then imagine clients reaching out to you and you don't know how to price it. That's another question, right? So there is just a lot of homework you'd have to do before starting doing it.

You're going to jump right into it and go into the wild and experience a huge sort of like overwhelm with, oh my God, how do I figure it out? But I do recommend to maybe just do your homework, prepare, research, make sure you have everything sorted before you even start working with the clients. I mean, building the network is also homework, to be honest. Anyways, that's all on my side. How about you, Ioana? What would you do?

I really loved the things you've touched on. I'm that freelancer that kind of gives projects to other people because I have to say a lot of no's and I'm trying to help people have someone help them with their design needs. I really feel that it's a very smart piece of advice, right? So

surround yourself, but not necessarily surround yourself. It shouldn't be an obsession, right? Just using people to give you projects, just like you said, but reach out to other designers, have a network of designers that are doing freelancing. You can also always ask them for some piece of advice, some support, just feel less lonely.

venting, you can listen to their problems, learn from them and so on. So that's super valuable. And then another thing is that I would say what's most challenging about freelancing is really being transparent with your clients, like the entire process of what needs to happen. It's just like you said, and I was hinting at

added earlier as well. It's not easy. It's pretty complicated. There are a lot of things that need to work in the backstage. So the front stage looks good and the results, right? You want to focus on the outcomes. But what I've been doing in the beginning instinctively, but then it became an educated effort is that I'm always telling people where I'm at in the process, what's next, what's the entire plan, where we're going towards creating this ongoing

ongoing transparency with your clients because you're not in a full-time role where the structures work and you just have to do your work and then it gets communicated somehow sometimes by itself right and then teams and design teams you have the critique sessions you don't have to plan anything

Some clients are very laissez-faire, like they let you do your stuff and then they come back in three months and ask you, OK, what do we have? But other clients really need that reassurance. So you're also going to be doing a lot of emotional management of your clients and trying to help them stay in a trust space when it comes to your collaboration. So that's also something you might want to factor in. And.

And getting back to the question more specifically, how do I get started if I don't want to expose myself on social media? I think the only other way is directly. So one-on-one relationships, right? You can do it physically if you have the opportunity in your region. Maybe there are events. Maybe you want to go to your industry-specific events. So in the case of this person, they're into edtech. Maybe they don't have to go to UX meetups because they're not going to find clients at UX meetups.

they're going to find the design friends we were talking about. But maybe they want to go to ed tech events and they want to have conversations with people. And maybe like Anfisa was suggesting, give them something that's valuable. Like, hey, here's a framework that might help you. Or here's an article that was very interesting. And

change the way I see edtech or whatever. So just reach out to your tribe if you're keen on a specific industry. And in case you don't have that specific industry, you could just reflect on what you would enjoy working on and start from there, right? So maybe you don't know yet that you want to specialize in this area or whatever, but you can start thinking about it and maybe some things will pop up. Maybe you're passionate about health. Maybe you're passionate about banking. So you're going to attend those types of events

I'm a bit reluctant to telling people to reach out with what they offer because sometimes it can be very spammy. And I think most people in decision making roles, they get a lot of messages. I'm a freelancer. I'm an agency. I'm this, I'm that. I can do this for you. I can help you with that. And

I don't want to encourage people to create more noise, but if you're intentional, if it's meaningful, if it really gives them some value, then you could also start this, let's say, sales funnel where you reach out to the people who might need design work, smaller companies. Maybe you don't want to go to, I don't know, KPMG or whatever big company because they have their own systems. Maybe you want to tackle the players in the market that get less attention, right? The players in your industry. So just create a list of companies in the,

at tech sector, and then try to reach out to them to see what they're currently struggling with, make some friends, have some meaningful conversations, and essentially learn about how you can position yourself and what's the need that you can fill in. So I think those are the things that come to my mind. I would say we've explored quite a bit of things here. Do we want to jump into the conclusions and insights? I don't know if I have like structured three takeaways, but let me try to brainstorm out loud.

I think the key takeaway, as we discussed it, is really, again, keep in mind that trust is very important for any freelancers. It's either about building trust with the design network, with the client network, or even establishing an online expertise that people can start noticing you and reaching out to you. So that's like a silver lining around the conversation. The way to find clients could be either very proactive and

like online and visible or it could be really just internal if you don't want to be exposed too much especially if you have a full-time job I do have it and I also understand it very well I don't know if I would want to clearly talk about my freelance inside gigs if I were to have it but I think yeah there are multiple ways to be also active as a freelancer and still not being super noticeable online but still be an effective freelancer with a pretty good decent income in network of clients

And we did mention a couple of ways to do it, right? Either reaching out kind of directly, but I think it's maybe the insight here is that it depends what kind of person you are. Either you are like this very marketing person, you like to structure your marketing approach. And then maybe in that case, you just need a marketing strategy, right? Like Ioana said, maybe it could be a cold reach out with emails, with LinkedIn messages, whatever.

with identifying people you want to be associated with, with starting that sort of pitch online and connecting with the people, finding a way to get to their doors and talking to them. But yeah, for that, you kind of need to be this marketing entrepreneur, I would even say. I don't think that's the case of our listener. So I believe that

Just building a network of people who are already freelancing and being associated with them somehow and being able to help them first, giving value first is the better way to go. And also you can just be in the right places, especially if your local community is proactive. So maybe participating in the hackathons,

or going to local co-working spaces, especially if our listener is saying they're working on the weekends and they can find local co-workings that are active on the weekends. That could also be a way. To be honest, I found a few clients also by sitting in the co-working and I didn't sit in a cubicle. I actually sat at the open area, like this area where people have meetings and

And I mainly worked there, so I could easily start like this very easy conversation with them by drinking coffee, by asking, hey, how are you doing today? So it was kind of easy for me to break the ice and meet local businesses and start helping them. And the last takeaway that Ioana mentioned is creativity.

kind of preparing in advance. So being structured, doing your homework, understanding how to set up the backstage and without it all being established, without having those templates, without having the pitch decks, the proposal for the project, understanding your process, understanding what value can you provide and maybe even like figuring out how are you going to charge them? How are you going to work with like accountant around the freelancing project and stuff like that?

Without that, don't jump into freelancing because it's going to be very, very messy for you. You will focus on the management much more than on the work. And then it's going to be harder for you to do a great job. That means that the client will not return, not going to be maybe happy with your work. And then, of course, they will not also recommend you to other maybe local business owners. So that's something you don't want to happen. You want to have clear backstage established and then start working with the front stage.

That's all in terms of my takeaways. How about you, Ioana? Well, I'm going to be very brief because I think you touched on a lot of essential points. I feel that the only other thing that I would add is that you can start small. So we're talking about a lot of things that might put pressure on folks listening. So you need a lot of structures. You need to handle 100 things. It's like a business in itself. You need an accountant. You need legal stuff.

And you do need that. But you could also start small, right? So you could just experiment with maybe even volunteering on your first project. I'm not encouraging free work, but maybe you don't want to commit to something that you're not sure you can deliver. And so you want to start with low stake things just to...

understand how you feel, experiment with it, how much time it would take. Do you really enjoy it? Do you want more of that? So start with a low stake project as much as possible. And if you want to feel comfortable that you don't know if you can guarantee a positive outcome, you could do it for free or for maybe friends and family or in a setup that you feel safe to fail in. Right. And it's like essentially a dry run of your freelancing business. You could definitely consider that. So it takes a bit off the pressure.

Because we make it sound very heavy and it is. I mean, it's your personal brand. It's your reputation. You really have to be able to deliver on the promises and not just be a very good sales pitcher. And then the design solution is not good. You want to deliver on whatever it is you're selling. So it's important. But at the same time, you can definitely just start

experimenting, over-prepared and go with the flow, right? So just start playing around with this opportunity. And then the only other thing I want to add is that what was interesting for me personally, and the biggest reason for which I would say go for it to anyone who's looking at exploring freelancing on the side with their full-time role or whatever it is their main gig is, it's

is that you learn that somehow it informs your full-time role. So for me, what was the most interesting insight in my experience was that I became more creative in my full-time role. I had more energy. I had just the opportunity, the option to context

switch just to switch problems work on another problem when I'm getting stuck with my problems from the full-time job right so just being able to move between these two spaces or three or however many your personality needs is very valuable from a creativity standpoint from a drive energy and and just pleasure standpoint right so for me it was very helpful and it essentially helped

me become a better designer in my full-time role. So if you're worrying that your performance in your full-time gigs will be affected, it could happen if you're doing too many things on the side, but it could also be that it's going to just enhance the way you're doing your work in your full-time role, give you new ideas, give you a refreshed perspective. So that's also something valuable to consider when you're making this decision.

Okay, so with this, I would say let's wrap it up. Thanks to everyone who listened to this episode. If you want us to follow up on any of the points we've touched on, go deeper into some of the problems or any other kind of topic you want us to unpack, send us your ideas on Instagram, Honest UX Talks, or just directly to us.

You can find an anonymous link under the show notes. It will be an Airtable forum. Or you can, again, just submit the topics under the Spotify. If you're using Spotify, they have stickers. And that in those stickers, you can submit a question and we will pin it and maybe pick it up for the next episodes. That's it. Thanks to everyone who joined and see you in the next episode. Bye, everyone. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.