I have had a pretty busy June, with quite a lot of work on the freelancing side and my two projects. I managed to launch both Data Internships and Stoic Quotes on Product Hunt. I kept improving the websites, experimented with LLM topic recognition for quotes and managed to set up the basics of SEO (with Google Search Console). Traffic is still low but it should pick up now that I have good backlinks and hopefully good content.

Teaching has taken a lot of my time. Usually, I need an entire day to prepare a 2 hours lesson. This means that 3 days of my week are gone. The other 2 days of the week I work for my other client and try to carve out time for my personal projects.

Freelancing still didn’t bring enough last month, so I have also spent some time looking for other opportunities. One thing I didn’t expect is how long it takes to land a client, even in case he is interested. I thought Upwork was an exception but I found out that this is true also for other channels. Sometimes they do not even reply to emails, sometimes they simply ghost you. It looks like job searching more or less. Need to take this into account going forward.

Let’s look at the number for this month, I feel like I have more or less the same as last month.

Less than last month after all. I think I need to get some more long-term clients together with the current one. This should improve the situation or at least make it stable once I stop teaching. I could keep the teaching job but, as I wrote before, it is not only very tiring but also poorly organized, which makes it quite stressful to manage. I will probably continue doing it from time to time, but the pay is below my usual rate and I will not let it eat half of my week.

I have seen a tweet recently by Danny Postma. He freelanced 2 days a week while building his startup. In the long term, with some revenue from my projects, it would be my perfect arrangement. In the short term, if I freelance for 16 hours a week, even at my current rate, it makes 2600€/month. I am not sure about Danny but after taxes (in Italy) that makes 1500€/month. It is very hard to live with that money. Maybe the solution is to increase my rate, but I believe I will just have to work more than 2 days a week.