My Back Story

A rough timeline of important milestones on my freelancing journey...

2003

Wrote my first HTML code

It was for my neopets.com store.

2007

Built my very first website

It was for my high school heavy metal band — I built it in Microsoft FrontPage, lol.

2008

Did my first website for a client

I believe I charged $150 for it.

2009

Started my website business

I didn't even want to be a coder or do WP at first. I just wanted to make more $ from my college dorm than I could make from answering questions on ChaCha.

2010

Dropped out of university to run my business full-time

I had no idea what I was doing. I still to this day curse Past Zach for naming his business "Websites for Less."

2010-2011

StrugglingAF as an agency

I did all the stuff they say you're "supposed" to. I got an office. Employees. Even bought a house. But I was overworked, had terrible clients, and was always super broke. Also racked up $20k in debt to the IRS that I couldn't afford to pay. Fun!

2011

StrugglingAF as a solo freelancer

When my primary employee left with 1 week's notice and my personal workload doubled, I ended up having a mental breakdown and decided to scale down the agency, staff, etc. and just go freelance. I still had crappy clients and was broke and burnt out. Also got to experience lots of overdraft fees and a growing stack of increasingly-urgent IRS letters about that $20k they wanted.

2012

Got a dev job

After being burnt out and hating my work life for long enough, I eventually decided to get a job. Turns out it was the best decision I ever made for my business.

2013

Building a solid business as a side hustle

With the job covering my bills, suddenly I wasn't constantly spinning my wheels chasing the next crappy client, and could build a better business with higher quality clients.

2014

Escape velocity + quit my job

I did some work for a then-fledgling internet marketer friend of mine, Rick Mulready, who was in a mastermind with me. He sent me some great referrals, one of whom was Entrepreneur on Fire. This was my lucky break, and things started snowballing. I quit my job in July, almost exactly 2 years after I got it.

2015

Small contractor-based agency + more mental breakdowns + becoming a digital nomad

I was making more money than I'd ever made, and had reached all my financial goals. But I was still unhappy and had low self-worth. A new mental breakdown and journey of self-discovery ensued. I left the USA in July 2015 to travel the world.

2016

Running my agency from abroad + spending too much $ traveling + eventual disillusionment with digital nomad life

All that money I made in 2015? I spent most of it traveling. Because here's the thing about going to a new country every few days or weeks or whatever: it's not cheap! And it struck me that my "journey of self discovery" had mostly become a frivolous distraction. Was I some special Elizabeth Gilbert snowflake on his own "Eat, Pray, Love" quest, or was I just some asshole with a gigantic carbon footprint from all these flights I was taking?

2017

Scaling back to solo freelance

I decided that the extra time, money, and stress of managing a team and having to oversee all their work wasn't worth it. It struck me that I could keep running a small team and need to take on several projects a month to pay the bills and earn what I wanted... *orrrr* I could just work alone and only need one project per month to earn the same amount.

2017-2021

Freelancing part time + trying to find my passion + growing SaaS products as a technical co-founder

At this point I had been freelancing for quite a while and was kinda bored. I thought perhaps I should try to "find my passion." I explored a lot of different projects and tried to start several SaaS companies. I invested hundreds of hours building various SaaS products that never went anywhere. It struck me what what I really needed to do next was not rely on business partners to market things, and instead to learn how to build my own audience.

Early 2022

Appreciating what I have + disillusionment with the concept of finding your passion + committing to what I know

I have ADHD, and also learned I am an enneagram type 7. With these in mind, it struck me that perhaps there's no *one* passion out there for me, and that for me, passion maybe just = novelty. (Which is tricky, because nothing's new and exciting forever!) A friend recommended reading So Good They Can't Ignore You and it was exactly what I needed to hear. I decided that instead of trying to "find my passion" I could instead appreciate all the great things freelancing has done for me and distill my experience to help others create lives of freedom and financial comfort.

Now

Freelancing ~12 hrs/week; spending the rest of my time on my own projects

I signed on with a client of mine to run all of their marketing and product launches on an ongoing basis, and have stopped taking on new client website projects. (I still support past clients when they need updates, etc.) I now have the time freedom to be able to spend the mornings working on client work, and the rest of the day however I like. Be it exploring my new-ish expat home city of Tbilisi, doing music production for ZSwine, or creating helpful videos, blog posts, etc. to help people find success in freelancing.

Next Steps...

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