Quitting freelancing to build products
Antonio Tropiano pulled the trigger
Antonio Tropiano and I quit around the same time (April 2023), and we’ve grown together in our freelancing this past year. It’s been rewarding to see each other grow. We’ve also experienced being wrapped up by freelancing (finding clients, making sales calls, doing the work, etc.) and not having time to work on our own stuff on the side.
I’ve been thinking of pausing some of my client work but never pulled the trigger. Antonio was braver than I am, and he decided to stop his client work to focus on building products and hopefully finding the golden goose!
You can find him on Twitter and also follow his journey on his blog.
Let’s get started with the interview!
Quitting freelancing
Kenny Alami: I totally relate to your decision to put freelancing on pause for a few months and work on your own projects. Freelancing can take more time than we expect. It’s exciting to make it work outside full-time employment, but it wears off when we’re working on other people’s projects instead of our own. We’re basically still a cog in someone else's machine, just an independent cog.
So, my question for you is, how did you decide to quit freelancing for a few months? Why not put freelancing on the back burner for, let’s say, 10-15 hours per week and build products on the side? Most importantly, how did it feel to make this bold move?
Antonio Tropiano: As you said, it's quite a big time commitment to freelance.
In my case, I was closing a contract in January and another one in February, so keeping freelancing for 2 days a week would mean looking for other clients, which is extra work on top of that. So, it made sense to pause and focus 100% on my projects.
Also, I don't like to split my energy among 2 things. I feel like it's difficult to switch context even if you dedicate only one entire day to clients work, there are always some messages coming randomly during the week. As you may already know, I don't really think side projects work. After 8 hours of working, you have very little energy, especially if you are not a 20-year-old single man working in Bali. I tried, and I burned out, so I don't recommend it.
Finally, it's better not to have a big safety net for extra motivation. I trick myself into feeling like I'm forced to make it work.
It's surely scary to make this move, but it was scarier to start freelancing. That's the big jump that gave me the confidence that I can make money on my own. Building a business is risky, but if it doesn't work, I can still go back to freelancing.
Chasing clients & constant marketing
Kenny: Like you, I realized how long it can take to find new clients. It’s a lot of volume to find someone ready to go.
Was there anything else in your journey you didn’t expect and changed the way you go about things?
Antonio: One thing I didn't expect is how difficult it can be to get paid.
I like Upwork and Deel because of the security that comes with it. You will get paid no matter what.
Outside of those platforms, I have had to chase my clients half of the time, and it adds a lot of overhead on top of work.
Another thing I noticed is that you are constantly marketing yourself. You need to be good at it and put some effort into posting on LinkedIn, polishing your profile, and writing articles. These activities are essential to getting inbound opportunities, which are the ones with the highest ROI.
Iterating toward the home run
Kenny: As we mentioned, you’re going to step away from freelancing for a couple of months to develop your own products aggressively.
What’s your plan for the products you’ll be developing and releasing? How do you select the ideas, gauge their viability and demand, and what are you thinking about for distribution and maximize their success?
Antonio: I have a list of ideas I've collected over the last months, and I'm going to try them all until I hit a working one.
I have prioritized them with these criteria:
Painkiller
High demand
Big market
Monetizable
Enjoyable to build
Not a marketplace
Difficult to find one that is all those things, but I have a few promising candidates.
I have just launched XTopics, a tool that helped me find interesting topics to talk about on X. This is the first experiment. I will focus on it for some time, and let's see if I can get some paid users in the next 2-3 weeks. If so, I will push. If not, I will let it go on autopilot and start building something else.
Distribution will depend on the project. I will try the classic Product Hunt, Twitter, and Reddit. I will also leverage my mailing list of 200 aspiring Data Scientists, if I can build something that can be interesting for them.
I'm going to experiment a lot, it's probably the only way to find out what works for you, because every situation is different and each business has its own acquisition channel. The only way to find out is to try them all, see what works and double down.
Back to you! Would you also quit freelancing or your job to build products for a while? Let me know in the comments or reply to this email!
3 juicy links of the week
I leaned too hard on gig sites to build up my agency and
A good lesson that a) your assumptions need to be validated. It’s not because you have a plan that the plan will come true (far from it usually), and b) it’s not because you made 10k this month that you’ll make 10k this month doing the same thing. Maybe you got lucky, maybe everything went well in the business, but next month could be different.
A masterclass on personal positioning
I’ve worked with a bunch of businesses that would take whoever would give them money. I’ve come to think a bit about that. I’ve met people who position themselves as generalists and take on smaller jobs with whoever. But that’s their positioning. Although, it would make more sense for people who have experience and a lot of projects under their belt to refine their positioning. The businesses I worked with usually have a lot of context switching and some bigger learning curve when they onboard a client in an industry they never worked with before.
30 years of business knowledge in 2hrs 26mins
I just started watching this video and really like the first 10 minutes. It makes sense to me to focus on ideas related to my background rather than the next random idea I find on YouTube or Google. The validation by starting the smallest project appeals to me too. It doesn’t make sense to me anymore to do something that involves spending a lot of money or time in the hope of making more later. I’d rather spend a little bit upfront and see if there’s traction (or if I enjoy it!)
If you want more, here’s what I got for you
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Thanks Kenny!
It was a pleasure to have this conversation and answer your interesting questions.
Kenny, how do you do your interviews? Are they originally video calls that you then transcribe? Or live chat text? Or async (such as email)?
I was thinking of maybe doing more interviews, but I prefer how yours sound. Thanks.