Nobody sat me down and said "okay here's how you run a business." I just kind of started doing it and hoped for the best.
I was in my early twenties when I decided that working for someone else wasn't it. Not because I had some grand vision or a business plan or savings. I had a laptop, Adobe account, and the confidence of someone who doesn't know what they don't know yet. Which, looking back, was probably a good thing. If I knew how hard it was going to be, I still would have started.
The first clients: My first clients were people I knew. Friends of friends, local businesses, someone's cousin who needed a logo. The pay was bad. The briefs were worse. "Make it pop" was an actual thing someone said to me with a straight face. But I did the work because I needed the portfolio more than I needed the money. And honestly, those early projects taught me more than any course ever could.
The money part nobody talks about: Freelancing sounds cool until you realize nobody is depositing a salary into your account every month. Some months are great. Some months are "maybe I should just stick to being a Primary school teacher only" You learn to save when it's good and panic quietly when it's not. You also learn that chasing invoices is a real part of the job that nobody warned you about.
The alone part: There's no team. No office. No one to complain to at lunch about the client who changed their mind for the fifth time. It's just you, your desk, and your own thoughts. Some days that's great. Some days you talk to your screen and pretend it's a coworker. I'm not proud of it but I'm not going to lie about it either.
The part where it starts working: At some point, things shift. You stop saying yes to everything and start picking projects you actually want. You raise your prices and people still say yes. You get a client that trusts you. And then another one. And suddenly you realize you actually built something. Not a startup, not an empire. Just a small, honest thing that pays your bills and lets you do work you're proud of.
The part where you still don't know what you're doing: I still Google things like "how to write an invoice" and "do I need a contract for this." I still undercharge sometimes and overwork most of the time. I still don't have a five-year plan. But the studio is running, the clients keep coming, and I'm designing things I actually like. So I guess it's working.
If you're in your twenties thinking about going freelance, here's my advice: just start. You'll figure it out. You'll mess up. You'll underprice a project and cry about it later. But you'll also build something that's yours, and that feeling is worth all the weird tax forms in the world.
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