EPT
No this is not a girl thread.
Because this became so long (unintentional, sorry), tl;dr is I possibly landed my first web design client, and if I didn't I at least justified the last month of work I've been doing.
So I've been unemployed for about four and a half months now. I wasn't fired, I didn't quit, it was a simple case of the office was closing and the only way I could stay with the company was if I moved to Tasmania. Seeing as how I had no intention of getting seriously into geological exploration and analysis (I'm a design student who can program vba macros haha) I decided against this course of action. Oh and living in Tasmania would suck. Royally.
This was both good and bad news. Bad news because I'd just been given a pay rise and more permanent employment and good news because I've found that every time I get out of a job and struggle to get a new one, by the time I get to my new job my life tends to change significantly, and change is good. Especially good is the timing, it meant I had the last few weeks of semester with no obligations except uni. Naturally I decided to slack off for the first semester in 2 years and did only just above average in my last semester of coursework uni. Not the smartest move but I was pretty confident I'd get into the honours program regardless (I did, but the professor who will be supervising me was a bit disappointed. Tough luck.)
Fast forward to the beginning of December. I've finished uni, I've spent a month partying and bludging, putting on weight (Thankyou fitness initiative thread) and in general spending my money. Without employment or any stream of income. And no idea of how I'm going to pay the costs of living over the next year or so, let alone moving out.
Side information: I at this stage had about $2500~ and a 5 day holiday coming up in early-mid february with a 2 day road trip both sides and a tae kwon do training camp in late january to early february. Holiday paid for, training camp not. Without going into details this left me about 500 of spending money between early december and February 8th. If I wanted to come home on February 14th with no money, this was ok.
For the first half of december I was ok with procrastinating a little longer, but on the 15th I took a look at my lifestyle and realised it can't go on or I'm not going to achieve what I want to achieve in life. Plus I'll come home from my holiday with no money and that's not fun.
I've been focusing a lot of my studies towards web design and interface design over the past 2 years, both in and out of university. So naturally my goal has been for quite a while to start my own web design business. The issue is getting clients. There are a lot of people who can build websites. As a budding web designer, I have to convince company x that I can do a much better job at building a website than boss y's son on his hacked version of dreamweaver, and that they should pay me for it. On top of this, I need to let company x know that I exist, and I don't have any money for advertising.
So my bright idea on about december 15th was to write a scraper program that would read business data from the yellow pages and store it in a database. And then I would have a list of businesses who have websites and emails, have emails only, and have neither. I had no idea how to do this at the time but after about a week and a half of on and off work I had a very rudimentary scraper that did what I wanted.
I also got to work finishing the website that I'd been working on since I lost my last job (Had never been truly serious about it till now).
By the time I finish the scraper and my website (http://www.shadystudios.com.au btw) I still have no idea if this is going to work, if my emails will be labelled as spam and my server ips banned from sending emails ever again, if businesses will even bother reading the emails, what I'm going to write to entice them (I'm no marketing student) etc etc.
I'm also still in the habit of overengineering things, so after writing my scraper program I then proceeded to write an entire client management backend for my website. Tracks businesses that have been contacted, how they've been contacted, their website status and quality, a variety of thigns that really I didn't need because at this stage, I really needed to get at least 1 job finished by february and 1 job doesn't need a complicated client management system.
So a few days ago I stopped myself from tinkering on that and went to send out my emails.
Wait a second did I ever check if my site renders properly in ie6?
Shit. It doesn't. Ok I'll fix it.
Shit. This is going to take hours and I have no idea where to start it's completely fucked. (Note to zxk3, ie8.js doesn't support background-position: and background-repeat: for transparent pngs)
Sigh I'm going to have to rebuild it.
So yesterday and today I've been rebuilding it to render 1:1 in all browsers. And finally, after a month of preparatory work I finally started sending out emails to businesses whose emails I'd collected. Specifically to those who had an email and no website (I have to stagger the emails or 1) my webhost will cut my service and 2) I get labelled as spam).
I was hoping that out of 500 emails, I'd get 1 positive response.
Tonight, 2 hours after sending my first batch, I got my first response. I sent it out about 2 hours before close of business, and keep in mind I'm targetting small businesses so I wasn't expecting any responses till tomorrow and really wasn't going to try and hope for anything positive in the first 200 emails, let alone before next week.
"We are a medium size concrete construction company,
we are very interested in getting a web site to promote
our company.
Could someone please contact me -"
This whole thing worked beyond anything I expected. Even if I don't end up building these guys a website, I now know that my message is getting through, and people are biting.
And it means I can work for myself for the rest of my life.
This makes me incredibly happy. Heading towards financial independence, plus it's looking like I can afford to splurge a bit while I'm on holiday. And I get to work for myself. I am 100% against working for other people (as a means of main income, I'm not against helping people etc etc.) because it's basically a trade-off of time for money. The effort you expend during that time isn't really taken into account. This way if I work harder I get more done in less time and maximise my time:money tradeoff. Yay.
I'll look forward to the anthrax etc. One of the first things I'm going to do is get a PO box. And yeah, gumnut road, my suburb is really weird for street names, a large majority of streets are based on plant names.
