Behind the Screen; My Hustle Struggle

over 3 years ago

We all are hustlers in one way or the other. I have had my share of hustle struggles, some worked out well and some failed terribly. But one thing to learn is failure is not the end. There might just need to change a little, tweak some things or maybe re-strategize completely but the conclusion is you’ve got to stand back up when you fall.

Now before I go ahead rambling and sound like some motivational speaker, let me tell you what’s up. This is an entry for a contest by @hivehustlers

So, we decided we wanted to host a contest - we want to hear YOUR personal entrepreneurial stories, whether they were total home runs or complete wipeout failures. Raw, uncut, unfiltered - share your experience with the community. This is an amazing opportunity for us to all open up, connect, and learn from one another - and ultimately, GROW as HUSTLERS!

You can, of course, join the contest and tell us about your hustler story. You’d have to fast about it though as the deadline is today. Anyway, you can find the original contest post here.

So, moving on...

I have always wanted to be financially free, like a lot of people would want as well (if not everyone). To achieve this, I have always strived to source multiple and at least sustainable sources of income. I have found out that multiple continuous sources of income no matter how little amount to something big in the end as long as you know how to plan your finances.
I’m doing it again… haha. This is not a financial talk but my story… focus

Well, this drove me to many hustles you may say, most of which I will say are BEHIND THE SCREEN (my laptop screen that is). I’ll mention but a few in this post and some that failed terribly.

A Tech Start-up

Firstly, I wouldn’t say this one failed. It has just met a lot of serious hiccups along the way but I am confident it is going to pull through.

I have always been enthusiastic about tech and computer. I self-taught myself coding and I am a full-stack web developer. In 2018, I had an idea to start up a tech company. It was going to be a recycling company technically with an online point system where users… oh, you know I can’t spill out my ideas here😉

Anyway, I had a partner and we were working on this together, coding day after day and getting more enthusiastic with each passing hour coming up with new ideas. We had a working prototype in a month.

After this, issues started coming in. We showed the prototype we had to another developer. He identified some flaws we needed to correct and new features that ought to be there. We realized that we would also have issues with scalability and performance for something that huge. We had hastily used PHP and Laravel for the web app and not considered all these things before starting. We eventually had to dump everything and started coding again with MERN Stack. We had to find someone pretty good with React to join us since we both were not very fluent with React. Well, that took another two months to complete and another working prototype was ready.

It seemed like everything was going well, but of course, we forgot that a start-up doesn’t need only a viable product but also funding, a non-technical team, experience, a ready market and a lot of others. Funding… did I say funding already? Well, funding again, because that’s pretty important.
This slowed us down for a while, the excitement dropped but not died. We are picking back from where we left and are building slowly, talking to potential investors, collaborating with partner businesses and others.

In June 2019, we almost had a breakthrough with a potential mega investor who would provide almost half of all the funds we needed to start operations. That turned out badly in the end, very badly and our IP was almost stolen. Well moving from that point, we have been doing pretty weel. Growing slowly and steadily.
I just see these hurdles as lessons though; lessons to be learned and chances to grow.

Freelancing

As a programmer, I offer my services to people willing to pay for them. I run all kinds of wed development jobs, both on-site and remote. Starting this was very difficult especially in the beginning as I had to do a lot of these for free or close to free.

I started off on multiple freelancing sites like Fiverr, Upwork, PeoplePerHour and Freelancer.com. Getting a job off most of these sites was pretty difficult for a beginner as a lot of other freelancers were already on them who had better ratings since they had been there for longer or offered to do jobs at a much cheaper price.

Anyway, I got adviced to try out offering my services locally which turned out pretty well actually. I decided to create a website for my portfolio of some of the job I had already done and started offering my services locally. This turned out to be much better and soon enough, I started getting a few jobs here and there and kept building my portfolio as I went.

I am still currently building and actively looking for clients I can work with, developing myself and learning new things along the way. It has been an amazing learning experience and I see every new client like a puzzle I need to solve.

When I started off, I was always worried that I wouldn't be able to get good clients. But along the way, I discovered that great clients are literally everywhere; clients that are happy to pay more for quality. I was so bothered that freelancers are everywhere and it would be difficult for me to get jobs but a lot of the clients I met actually say their number-one challenge is finding good freelancers to hire!
A lot of them don’t even really care how much experience I have as long as I do good work.

The Blockchain

The blockchain has always been my favourite hustling ground and all my friends know this. I got fully introduced to cryptocurrencies and the blockchain in late 2017. We all know how the crypto world is. One wrong investment and the coin you thought was the next hot thing becomes the ultimate shitcoin. I have a bunch of stories about this, but I think I’ll save them for another day.