How makers stay productive

Glad to hear the situation is under control and you're in remission! Stay strong Wassim.

Financial freedom is hard to come by. I don't think there's any fast way to financial safety aside from investing and saving (or getting very lucky indie hacking/entrepreneuring).

I think you'd love to hear about the leanfire/fire communities on reddit - they're essentially about FIRE (financial independence, retire early). It's all about a minimalistic and frugal lifestyle.

https://www.reddit.com/r/leanfire/

I'm sorry to hear that, but glad you're feeling better.:)

I recommend Toptal. It's the biggest platform to connect top companies with top devs/designers in the world. They have a hard screening process to get in, but you can read about it in the internet and go through the process again every 3 months in case you don't pass.

Once you get in, you have many projects available depending on the tech stack you work on.

Hope it helps!

Hope is all well for you Wassim. There is alot of things now. Step by step, hopefully all goes in place. I ask god to make all your affairs ease. Sorry to hear about the health.

Fastest way to get cash is to get support from local gov, agencies like social worker/welfare. Explain to them why this is affecting your health, finance and business.

Also source out local contact for "work from home" contract job in your region. For current side projects, u can do it as freelance from time to time.

Some of the source you mention like fiverr, upwork is ok but If you need a good deal for a monthly work kind i can suggest you offer productised service create a simple site, offer a monthly rate like $399 a month or $599 a month on your dev/design work. Depends on how you price them.

Once done, you can share on social media, community like makerlog, ph, ih, twitter etc. Work on the SEO so it will look more visible too.

If you need work and need it fast -- don't think anything beats local. Look up all local businesses if you have to. Start one by one and check if they need a new app or a new website or better seo or whatever you think you can help them with. Then go on LinkedIn and find people from that place. Contact them. If you cannot then I would send my inquiry via company email. Heck if you can physically call them / visit them would be better… but given the current lockdown situation I would assume calling is good. Post your ad on Craigslist or whatever local website is. Once this is exhausted then I would go to Upwork or Fiverr… reason being is that while you can make money on Upwork or Fiverr you can make way more when dealing as a local business.

Freelance dev / UI work (in my opinion) is super hard to get "fast", the reason is that it's not about how good you are, it's about trust / relationships and that can take a long time to build. The other issue is that dev/UI typically aren't "critical" needs, so now you have to 1. Start a relationship, 2. Grow that relationship, 3. Show them your skills, 4. Build their trust, 5. Convince them that they need the service, 6. Make a sale. Starting all of this from zero is not quick.

This also means your target audience is likely businesses, which limits you even more on connecting with the right person. Your "average" person isn't going to seek you out because they simply don't need it.

I'm being a bit of a Debbie-downer, sorry about that. I'm just coming from my own experience, it sounds like we are very similar in skillsets and ambitions.

Personally, I "gave up" and started a house painting company to make money and now keep UI/Dev as my fun side job. I have made far more money with a fraction of the effort in the past year, than I have any other year trying to do freelance design/dev. I'm far happier too.

So my advice is… find a labor skill you are great at that a wide group of people need and need frequently, and do that part-time to generate the bulk of your income and be your own boss (being your own boss is really your goal, design/dev is just one route to that goal). Join a few local networking lead groups (to primarily market your labor job) and start meeting lots and lots of people and building those relationships. Then keep your ears open for ui/dev opportunities and up-sell that to start building a portfolio and a handful of, hopefully, on-going clients.

Build a great website for your labor job to really show off your skills, to show how good you are at SEO, to show accountability and reliability, etc. (i.e. Be your own client)

As your doing your labor job, start finding someone who can replace you in that job, so you can hire them as an employee and hand off 90% of the work to them while you take part of the profit. This is how you make money while being able to focus most of your energy elsewhere (ie. design/dev). Don't make that switch though until you are able to consistently get clients for design/dev and you find yourself being too busy running both.

Then you have your cake and you get to eat it too.

This is basically what I'm doing, only I'm doing it until my side-projects make a livable income, then I'll transition to that for 90% of my day and 10% will go towards managing my painting company.

That's my 2 cents.