by Varun Mayya
Pyjama Profit
The Millennial’s Guide to a Sustainable Freelance Career
PYJAMA PROFIT
The Millennial‘s Guide to a Sustainable Freelance Career
Varun Mayya, Abhinav Chhikara
BLOOMSBURY INDIA
Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd
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First published in India 2018
This edition published 2018
Copyright ©Varun Mayya, Abhinav Chhikara, 2018
Illustrations ©, Varun Mayya, Abhinav Chhikara, 2018
Varun Mayya and Abhinav Chhikara has asserted their right under the Indian Copyright Act to be identified as Author of this work
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers
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ISBN: 978-9-3871-4685-3
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To the internet, without which we’d be working 9 to 5
CONTENTS
Preface:Pyjama Profit
Why we wrote this book
What this book is not
Chapter 1:Our Story
Prologue
Swinging for the big leagues
Our own separate ways
Chapter 2:The Freelance Economy
Freelancing is the future
Why freelance works, regardless of your country
The Pyjama Economy
The economy and you
Chapter 3:Learning Your Core Skill
Finding your value
The life cycle of a skill
The Pyjama Categories
Admin support
Marketing
Content writing
Design
Web development
Game development and 3D modelling
Product management
App and back-end development
How do I pick?
Chapter 4:Communicating Your Value
Why is value communication important?
How much should I charge?
Chapter 5:The Platform Game
Where do I land my first project?
Your player profile
Your superpowers
Bidding and proposals
Making a charismatic bid
Game rewards
Communication is key
When do you stop playing?
When things go bad
Chapter 6:The Freelancer’s Mindset
Setting targets
Common questions
Chapter 7:Your Personal Brand
Authority
First steps
Personal brand
What, where and how
The 48h guide to a personal website
Chapter 8:The Art of the Cold Email
Cold to warm
Prospecting
Finding emails
Sending personalized emails
Converting replies to calls
Finding opportunity on a call
Closing a freelance contract
Chapter 9:Tackling Tax
What in the world is tax and why should I care?
Chapter 10: Managing Your Finances
Building your support infrastructure
Chapter 11: Managing Stress and Ambiguity
Don’t take it too seriously
Overcoming anxiety
Chapter 12: Robots Will Take Your Job
Artificial intelligence(AI)
Should I be scared?
How the Pyjama Economy helps
Freelancer to Entrepreneur: The Jobspire Story
Part One: Manipal
Part Two: Delhi
Part Three: Bengaluru
The other alternative – building a smaller product start-up
About the Author
Preface
Pyjama Profit
“It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It’s also a very clear path to happiness.”
—SHERYL SANDBERG
Why we wrote this book
To give you some background, I have worked in recruiting for over three years now, and the biggest factors that I’ve seen contribute to employability is technical skill and presentation. As a team, we’ve also seen an unprecedented shift in employer mindsets all over the world, and temporary staffing is at an all-time high.
When I was in college, I accidentally came across my first freelance project. It was a small website a friend of mine needed to be designed, but it threw me on a curiosity fueled path that opened big doors for me. I knew nothing about websites back then—I was a student who liked video games and did not know how to code. Both code and the internet were very daunting back then and it was the need to complete the project that required me to self-learn the coding languages needed to put together a website. In fact, I never wrote another line of code for at least a year after that—the entrepreneurial bug had hit me. Abhinav (my co-founder at the time, and co-author of this book) and I and had started a t-shirt and merchandise company along with a few other friends in college. It was only a year later that we came full circle and started freelancing again.
We’ve seen thousands of developers, filmmakers, designers and digital marketers cap themselves by working in a 9-to-5 job— most of them blatantly ignorant of the wide variety of opportunities out there. Personally, it confused me that most of the advice given to young graduates was terrible. I understand the need for a 30-year-old with several years of experience in a particular space to stay bound to an industry and a company. But it surprised me that several 20-somethings were doing the same thing—essentially capping themselves to a salary bracket and a skill set.
After making several thousands of dollars on the circuit and having worked for some amazing clients in remote teams across the world, a few of us got together to team up and build something in the recruitment space, while Abhinav went on to join Housing.com.
Jobspire, born out of that belief, went on to raise VC money and hire some of the brightest young minds in India. Now, we’re armed with two years of hard recruitment data, having seen more than 4 million people visit our platform for a job and thousands of resumes uploaded. We thought it was time to put everything we knew into a book—to help youngsters and new grads understand that there are better paths in a country full of opportunities.
We envision this book to be a data-backed manual that every millennial in the country turns to when making his/her first career decision. A manual that is ready for the freelancing revolution on the horizon.
What this book is not
We wanted to have a section that clearly defines what this book is not:
This book is NOT an abstract rant about the freelance industry. We offer a perspective that might not be familiar to you by including insights into our own personal learnings and earnings. We wanted to be open and upfront about what we made, and provide clear insights on how you can achieve the same, if not better income.
This book is NOT a replacement for hard work. We merely show you our paths and how we were able to learn what we learnt, and present ourselves the way we did. We made a ton of mistakes along the way, and hopefully this book will help you sidestep some of them. It still requires hard work and a dedicated approach for doing freelance.
If you’re willing to put in the work, learn your core skill and apply what you’ve learnt, you should be able to see similar results. We’ve also kept the book as concise as possible, so you can head straight to work after this read.
We’d like to thank everyone mentioned in this book for helping us navigate the journey and for providing feedback on the early manuscript. A special thanks to Gaana Srinivas for helping us edit and refine the concepts in the book.
Chapter 1
Our Story
“If I’m going to tell a real story, I’m going to start with my name”.
—KENDRICK LAMAR
Prologue
“Varun,” my colleague said, pulling me out of my half-slumber.
“That’s ₹30,000 in total”.
Abhinav was counting crumpled notes of various denominations. We were five of us, sitting around a table under a shady red light in A-206, my apartment in Manipal. We called ourselves “SIZR”, and our expertise back then was making t-shirts for our classmates. We would make custom t-shirts for each class in our batch, and we made a nice little profit of ₹15 a shirt. We had a supplier in Chennai who would print these t-shirts for us, and we would sell it at ₹300 a pop.
Everything from the logistics of taking orders to delivering door to door at the Manipal Institute of Technology hostels was handled by us. We never took a dime from any profits we made. Instead, we tried to pool the money to rent out a small 300 sqft. place for us to work from, and to pre-book future orders. We tried everything from making jersey-like class t-shirts with individual names on the back, to putting strontium aluminate (a substance with high photo-luminance) on t-shirts to try and make them glow in the dark (it worked!).
A year into it though, we weren’t able to handle the sheer number of orders we were getting. Printing t-shirts takes an immense amount of effort per order. We were struggling with our five-member team to complete orders and ensure timely delivery. With exams around the corners, we weren’t able to keep our customers happy.
We decided to abandon the idea of making t-shirts and spent every single rupee we made from the business buying ourselves courses in web design (I was interested in designing websites) and digital marketing. I have to this day maintained that my parents spent on my schooling, while I spent on my education.
Six months later, we were making websites, flyers and doing all sorts of digital odd jobs for friends and family. We were being paid anywhere between ₹700 to ₹2,000 per website ($10 to $30). We worked not for the money but because it was fun building things for others.
Swinging for the big leagues
One day, I stumbled upon oDesk (now called Upwork), an online platform for freelancers. I looked through some of the projects available, and the terminology used in most of those projects scared me. What in the world was “Bootstrap”, “Foundation”, “Laravel” and the 100+ other complicated words used by job posters in the web design section? I looked around for a simple web design project and found one that was listed with a budget of $100. The project description was simply “design a website for a Malaysian eye clinic”. It was a weekend, and in a frenzy I decided to hit the apply button before I changed my mind.
oDesk immediately asked me to write a “cover letter”. I didn’t know what to write and at that point I was frightened by anything that involved money over the internet. So, being as honest as I could be, I wrote:
Dear Clinic Owner(Real name redacted),
I am a 19 year old who has been designing small time websites in HTML and CSS over the past year. I do not have the experience you stated as a requirement on the project, but I am willing to learn.
I believe I have an eye for design and have fairly decent communication skills.
Cheers,
Varun
(sic.)
Then I waited for three days.
On the fourth day, I received a reply, with my client telling me to connect with him on Skype.
After a one-hour conversation in which I told him I knew just the basics of website design, he finally told me that he liked my guts and offered me the project. I received a notification which I accepted.
“100$ for a website; how hard could it be?” I asked myself.
Two months later, I was still not done. The client kept asking for small changes. To me, each feature requested was something I didn’t know anything about. I had to Google how to implement a particular thing, then read up on the examples and finally fiddle with codes myself until things clicked and the feature was live. On day seventy, I finally got paid—₹6,300 was credited to my bank account and I spent the entire thing on a Javascript course. I had found a way to make money online, and not the way you see in advertisements on torrent websites.
I learnt how to make money the legit way. Pic above: Ads on torrent sites trying to convince you that it’s easy to make money posting and clicking on links.
I announced my $100 success to Kartik and the rest of the team and they were surprised, but also intimidated with the idea of working for someone else for money while still in college. Regardless, my “reckless” little team got cracking on oDesk, learning different skills. Abhinav decided to take graphic design and UI/UX projects, while Kartik took on more code-related projects. I took on a good mix of the two. After two years and working with multiple remote teams, all of us were familiar with very similar kinds of internet technology.
The funny thing is, internet technology also follows a selection process (like evolution follows natural selection). When some technology goes out of date, coders and designers switch to newer technology so employers are forced to upgrade too. If not for this quirk, we’d all have stuck to age-old technology and I’d never be able to land a freelance gig. Now I’m not saying there are no other benefits to upgrading technology, but if not for developers learning new skills, PHP (an old web development language) would still be the only language around.
All of us formed our own opinions on various things about the industry and our combined network was not just vast, it was also global. We were sharing projects, collaborating on some and going solo on the rest. The more confident our individual skill in doing something, the higher the likelihood we’d do it alone. Group projects were a good way for us to divide risk and learn things together.
Doing all of this while still in college was also burning us out. We were not sleeping too well, but our bank accounts were filled to the brim. The average SIZR billing rate rose to $100–$150 an hour, quite a distance from the $100 I made over two months. As we were in college at that time, we didn’t really save any money. I spent on courses and hardware, Kartik spent on books and Abhinav spent on travelling and getting his music app off the ground. Pravar, another friend who was part of SIZR, used the money to make more t-shirts for himself and Sandesh used his money on consoles and console games.
I have a firm belief that human beings gain confidence either by experience, or by learning very intimately from someone who has had that experience. We designed this book to not just be a good read but a roller-coaster experience based on our journey. When I encourage people to start freelancing, I remember saying some of these things: “You can have a better life.” “It’s not difficult to learn how to code.” “You can work from home and make a better salary.” “Yes, if you work hard enough and build a personal brand, it’s probably more stable than a job.”
In early 2013, I learnt a very good way to convince people to get started with freelancing.
Whenever I wanted someone to take up freelancing, I would carry my laptop, log in to my PayPal account, and show him or her my work history. That was all it took to get someone started on their freelancing journey.
The goal of this book is to prove that making money in your pyjamas is not just possible but that it’s easier than you think.
Our own separate ways
After two years of freelancing, all of us loved working when we were together as a team, in a single room, even though we were working on our own projects. We had made nearly ₹30 lakh together (around $70k) by the end of the year, working a couple hours a day, including weekends. However, during the summer break that teamwork shattered and so did our motivation. We were sitting on the money we’d made and we were not able to spend anymore. We had no real needs and no family to support. So, instead of saving, we started working less. During summer break, Pravar and Sandesh had completely stopped freelancing to focus on biotechnology and film-making, respectively. The rest of us were still working on the odd project here and there. At this point, we were getting projects with ease, but the motivation to actually take one up and work on it was dwindling.
We all moved on to bigger things.
Kartik, Sandesh and I started Jobspire, a fun recruitment platform (which has seen more than 4 million people use it since we built it) and Abhinav moved on to start Lisn, a music app. Abhinav was also up to a lot of cool things—a start-up he worked with saw a small exit, he wrote a book on motion design and co-founded a music chat start-up that blew up. His new-found design skills enabled him to pursue a lot of random things to figure out what excited him. It was the end of a great journey for us but the beginning of a new, more challenging one.
