How I Accidentally Became a Freelancer Web Dev

It’s been more than a year since I last updated my startup journey, so I decided to take this chance to revisit it again. Over the past year, I’ve built a few Telegram bots, and two of them are now subscription-based. But I don’t really want to jump straight into that yet since I want this to feel more like a journey. So let’s rewind a bit, back to 2022–2024. In my previous post, I talked about getting back into a shirt business. But of course, during this period, I also tried a lot of new things. Having studied software engineering, I decided to put my skills to use and venture into freelance web design.

This actually started more by accident.

At that time, I was working part-time in a café, and I heard that one of my colleagues was looking to start his own house-moving business. I saw this as a chance to try out my skills, so I offered to build him a website (for free).

When that happened, I helped him build the site using HTML templates (since it was free, I wanted to build it fast). Somehow, this led to his business partner whom was also another friend of mine engaging me to help revamp their website as well. Since I was already working on the revamp, I eventually decided to charge my friend, just to be fair. From there, I tried to venture a little more into this path and went on to build a few more websites for other businesses (about two more). These projects were mostly for experimentation. I wanted to make things easy for the business owners to edit on their own, so I used Google Sites, helped them set up Google Business profiles, and even email, all for about $500. Once I got the hang of it, it was pretty good and easy money, I would say. But after a while, I didn’t really chase it or actively reach out to more businesses. During this same period, I was also experimenting with other ideas such as trying to create templates to sell on Etsy, including desktop wallpapers, and even a board game, which I’ll talk more about in the next post.