Introduction and about the author

Who is this book for?

First of all, I am writing for the reader who is thinking about leaving employment “for free bread.” The reader who is going to become a freelancer, self-employed, artisan. In general, a person who provides himself with clients and orders on his own.

It will be especially useful for people selling “complex services”. These are services that require additional work to evaluate (for example, diagnostics or requirements gathering and recording).

Since I worked for many years in the field of information technology (IT), IT specialists will find my knowledge especially useful and close.

I also write for those who have already started freelancing, but at some point “stalled”, do the same thing day after day and live “from client to client.”

Who else is this book for?

The book will also be useful to any reader who is improving their “soft skills.” This term hides many skills related to organizing work, communicating with other people, sales, the ability to learn and adapt to changing conditions.

Therefore, if you strive to be a responsible, obligatory, pleasant person to communicate with, then you will also find a lot of useful and interesting things for yourself in the book.

How is this book organized?

Each chapter covers a different topic. Some are closely connected with each other, while others live their own separate lives. I tried to write in such a way that a common thread of narrative could be traced through the chapters, but this was not always possible, since many of my life lessons were too far apart in time.

Any conclusions I share with the reader are based on my personal story. Don't treat them like rules. Carefully study the context, double-check the information and question everything.

I couldn't fit everything I wanted to cover into this book, and I plan to work on new chapters and edit old ones to add more visual examples.

I accompanied each chapter with “harmful advice” in the style of Grigory Bentsionovich Oster. If any of the advice seems not harmful to you at all, then treat such a chapter with greater attention.

About the author

To be as honest as possible with the readers, I asked my friend Anton Grigoriev to write about me. And we will get to know you better later, in the following chapters. After all, everything written here is based on my life and experience. I specifically tried not to embellish anything and to be as frank as possible both with the reader and with myself.

“Egor asked me to write a text about the author, well.

I have known the author for quite some time. We met at the university, together we participated in the development of a student portal with dossiers on teachers, spurs and other things useful to students. We wrote code, drew designs, wrote articles and news, and came up with new functionality like anonymous discussions. Then VKontakte appeared, and all the students gradually went there (anonymity turned out to be not so important).

After university, Egor began working as a website designer in a St. Petersburg studio, found a then progressive tool for designing and creating interactive prototypes called Axure, headed the design department, and then left the studio and continued to design as a freelancer.

I actually followed in his footsteps with a slight lag, and one day he and I founded Projectorat, a website and application design company. Speaking about the Projectorate, I usually clarify that legally we were two separate individual entrepreneurs with our clients, but we had a common approach to design and, partly, doing business. We were real freelancers (but, interestingly, we never looked for orders on freelance exchanges). At conferences, such speakers are usually signed as “freelance designer.”

We wrote a lot of articles, recorded training videos about design and Axure, I taught in various offline courses (Egor somehow disliked teaching). The projectorat became, as they say, known in narrow circles. This helped attract new clients.

When you work alone, you stew in your own juices, so novice designers are advised to quickly improve by looking for companies with cool art directors or design leads to learn from them. We learned through practice and from each other. I can’t speak for design, but in the field of creating interactive prototypes at Axure, we have become one of the coolest Russian-speaking specialists.

When we started, there were no courses and a lot of tutorials on YouTube. Enthusiasm and curiosity, a willingness to explore the most hidden corners of professional tools helped me learn. I remember one night we got on the phone and for a couple of hours tried to reproduce the loading of a custom image into the generated prototype, which we saw in one paid foreign kit. And in the end we found out that this was already beyond the capabilities of Axure - the author of the paid kit implemented this in pure JS.

We discussed clients, sometimes there were screw-ups in working with them (there are a couple of examples in the book), approaches to work and self-organization, taxes and document flow, we transferred clients to each other (for a percentage or just like that). More than 20 years of freelance experience in total, two creative guys with an analytical mind - at some point this book had to appear, because there was something to share.

One day, Egor stopped doing “commerce”—that’s what we call custom design—and focused on his project. On our next walk together, the idea arose that a book about freelancing could summarize all the experience gained and become such a bullet point. Three years have passed since that walk, and finally the idea materialized.

It was a pleasure for me to discuss the theses of individual chapters with Yegor, to become involved in the appearance of “bad advice” in the book, to help in editing the final copy, to argue about some approaches with which I do not agree 100%. (I wrote above that our approaches to doing business do not completely coincide.) I hope you will enjoy reading this book and find it useful.

Anton Grigoriev.

PS. I showed this text to my wife, and she suggested adding some kind of life story so that the author could be seen as a living person. Like, it brings you closer to the readers.

There are such stories, but, to tell the truth, I think Egor is a bit of a robot. He does not like noisy companies, but prefers walks and one-on-one conversations. In my opinion, he is too principled. He knows the Chinese language so well that he worked in China (I’m not even talking about English), he can juggle several objects and beat the clock with his feet for a long time, play the guitar and piano, compose music, write well and very competently, play CS:GO, draw well, control his speech so that there are no smacks and macks, take cool macro photographs of insects. In the end, he made sure that his little son was never afraid to wash his hair (I failed that) and in general grew up very smart and calm (the son, not Yegor).

But this does not mean that the book will be useful only to the same Egors. Don't be afraid of the “survivor's mistake.” The book is based on the author’s experience, thanks to which the approaches to business management described in it were developed. The path mentioned in the book is not the only possible path to well-paid self-employment. But the proposed approaches can contribute well to this”.