Edith Allison

Edith is a full-stack developer based in Austria specializing in WooCommerce. Since joining Codeable in June, she has been a wonderful addition to our community of WordPress experts. She is a regular participant in the community Slack and recently wrote vital technical documentation to share with other experts.

Ricardo Filipo

Ricardo has been a Codeable expert since October 2021. He’s a full-stack developer and system architect, as well as a talented musician, based in the US. He is incredibly helpful to other experts on the platform and loves welcoming new experts into the community.

Alex Belov

Alex has been working as a designer and developer on the Codeable platform since 2015. He and his team have completed 2,839 projects! They typically work on full site builds and theme development, although they also have experience with many pagebuilders. Their services range from UX/UI design, to security, to copywriting.

Hassan Ali

Hassan is a full-stack developer based in Pakistan. He joined Codeable in 2020 and typically works on customizations, plugin development, and troubleshooting projects. In 2022, he received 118 5-star reviews from his clients! His profile boasts an impressive list of plugins he has developed as well.

Domen Turek

Domen joined the Codeable family in March and has already completed 149 projects. Typical projects for Domen include customizations, full site builds, and theme development. But he is also happy to work on improvements to existing sites. He is very supportive of new experts on the platform and an appreciated member of our community.

Thank you to all our experts for making 2022 a great year! We look forward to seeing what 2023 has in store for us. ✨

The post Highlighting some of our experts for their work in 2022 appeared first on Codeable.

If you are looking to hire talented women developers for your next project, please visit our developer directory where you can easily discover and quickly hire expert WordPress talent that is right for you.

Did you know that according to a recent survey hosted by UXtweak.com, women represent almost 25% of all WordPress users? It’s true. Additionally, according to a survey hosted by the United States Department of Commerce in 2021, women-owned firms make up almost 20% of all firms in the US?

Here at Codeable we are not strangers to the economic power that women hold. In fact, we frequently receive requests from clients who want to work with other talented women –  whether they are programmers, designers, or agency owners.

Can We Recommend Specific Women Developers According to Your Needs?

Here at Codeable we are more than happy to help recruit women developers for your next technical project.

Please send our support department a message using the chat icon at the bottom, right-hand side of your screen and mention that you are being referred by this blog article.

One of our support agents (who will typically respond within the hour) will assess your project needs and recommend several great women candidates for your project.

Serving Diversity through Community

Did you know that Codeable supports a community of over 700 senior WordPress developers who are ready to help your business succeed?

We understand that as our talent base grows, we will be continuously presented with opportunities to support various demographics and their communities. One of the ways we are approaching community with our women developers is through our Women of Codeable program.

What is Women of Codeable?

Women of Codeable is a program for our talented female experts. We offer private groups, chatrooms, as well as weekly hangout sessions for team bonding that builds long-lasting friendships.

If you are a woman in the WordPress space and you believe your skillset and client management experience places you into the top-tier of WordPress developers, then we invite you to apply to become a WordPress expert here at Codeable.

All of our women here have earned their position through their exceptional talent. They join the ranks of the top 3% of applicants who make it onto the Codeable platform.

The Women of Codeable

Take a look at a few of our outstanding and successful Codeable experts below. 

If you think one might be right for your project, click their hire button and you will be on your way to receiving a risk-free estimation to complete your WordPress project.

The post How Do I Find Women Developers in The WordPress Community? appeared first on Codeable.

In this new episode of Changing lives, we’ll meet with Elson Ponte a developer with a 10-year WordPress experience and co-founder of his agency called Sevenscope. Elson has specialized in different areas such as Site Migration, Maintenance, Speed optimization, Theme Development, Underscores, Custom Themes, Custom Post Type, just to name a few.

During the interview, he’ll share with us his insights and thoughts about:

• why he started to work as a freelance developer
• why and how he co-founded an agency with his current business partner
• what type of projects he works on
• how being a Codeable expert changed his life

Need help with your WordPress projects?

Hire Elson Ponte or just post your project and have one of our other experts take care of it immediately.

Want more stories from WordPress developers? Check them out here:

Changing lives #1: Spyros Vlachopoulos.
Changing lives #2: Nathan Reimnitz.
Changing lives #3: Alexandra Spalato.
Changing lives #4: Raleigh Leslie.
Changing lives #5: Alex Belov.
Changing lives #6: Bogdan Dragomir.
Changing lives #7: Ray Flores.
Changing lives #8: Zach Nicodemous.
Changing lives #9: Oliver Efremov.
Changing lives #10: Bruno Kos.
Changing lives #11: Surendra Shrestha.
Changing lives #12: Marius Vetrici.
Changing lives #13: Mitchell Callahan.
Changing lives #14: Puneet Sahalot.
Changing lives #15: Onur Demir.
Changing lives #16: Jonathan Bossenger.
Changing lives #17: Justin Frydman.
Changing lives #18: Robin Scott.
Changing lives #19: Mircea Sandu.

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a new episode of “Changing lives”!

Video Transcription

Matteo: Hi everyone this is Matteo, your host from Codeable. Today we’re going to meet with Elson Ponte, a great guy who has been working with WordPress for the past 10 years and also who is running his own agency. We’ll get to that in a while. So, let’s begin and let’s hear about his story has a WordPress professional, how it’s like to run your agency and how working as a Codeable expert in a way changed his life.

Hey Elson, thank you for joining us in this episode of Changing Lives, we really appreciate it!

Elson: Hi and thank you for receiving me!

Matteo: So to get the ball rolling why don’t you start by telling us which part of the world you’re from, where you are now and most importantly how long have you been a freelancer?

Elson: I’m a Portuguese, from Portugal, not Brazil. I live on a small island in the Atlantic and it’s the home of the football player Cristiano Ronaldo that’s best known for…

Matteo: Nobody knows that name :)…

Elson: It’s a great place to live and spent most of the year and it’s relaxing and everything is close by. So that’s basically about where I live. I started reusing WordPress when I was still in school and I just kept working on it for side projects. Then, I got some clients and while I was still studying, I started doing my first side projects. When I finished university I got to a company, started working and continued using WordPress along with other frameworks. I kept with WordPress because it’s basically what most of the clients need, they don’t need more than WordPress can offer because it’s a great, great thing. After that, I just took a leap and started my own agency and Codeable was a vital part of it.

Matteo: Yeah we’ll get to that, I know. But let me ask you this first: would you mind telling us what do you like about freelance work? Why did you ditch the 9-5 jobs and enter the freelancing world?

Elson: Freelancing allows you for a type of freedom 9-5 jobs don’t offer. If you started your regular job at 9 am and you’re going to want to start freelancing at 9:30 your boss doesn’t yell at you because you’re late. Of course, you still have customers and you have deadlines and it’s a lot of work don’t get me wrong. Most of the time it’s harder than regular 9-5 jobs, it’s harder because it’s a lot on your shoulders, you’re independent, you are liable for actions and you have to make the clients happy. But it’s still better.

Matteo: So much better, right?

Elson: Yeah, so it’s like you’re not against the wall sometimes you learn a couple of things and that’s business. I love it basically. I love it.

Matteo: Let me just go with another question which is pretty related to this one. Let me state something like scope creepers, tight deadlines, unpaid revisions, time and resource planning what does it take to be a good freelancer and do you think anybody can be?

Elson: Yeah!

Matteo: Some scary keywords just to set the scene up. Now, go…

Elson: It’s part of everyday life, of course, some projects get delayed, some projects get underestimated, other projects even in more rare occasions get very better… they take less time, but most of the time you have to take into consideration a risk. The risk projects will get late, clients will take more time than expected to answer and to make revisions. They even may have this small little thing that needs to be fixed that’s not on the scope. So yeah that’s a small thing.

Matteo: Just a “small thing”, you know…

Elson: But of course you have to use your own judgment. That’s what I do: if I see something that takes me like a minute, or two, I’ll just go ahead and do it so the client is happier. It’s a minute or two but of course, I won’t be doing it 10 times. If you add those up you’re wasting a lot of…

Matteo: That’s the math.

Elson: Yeah, it also depends on the customer. Actually, the customers I have been getting on Codeable are pretty much amazing when it comes to that. Some of them even expect me to do whatever it takes because Codeable does this teaching overhead that, when the clients arrive, they expect a certain type of behavior and service and they don’t expect for something like freebies. They expect great quality work. That leaves us in a good position. Even if the client gets off scope, just gently telling him “okay, this is out of scope. Can we do it in a separate task?” Usually, the client understands, that’s from my experience. Of course, every case is a different case and it all depends on the chemistry between client and provider.

Matteo: Yeah but it’s also as you said, it’s about one thing, it’s about educating your customer, one thing is maybe sometimes it makes sense to over-deliver those 5 minutes for an actual tiny thing to fix. If you want to keep the relationship with that client on a good level, sometimes as you said if you add those 5 minutes up for the tiny things, you’re going to waste hours at the end of the month.

Elson: Yeah, that’s it.

Matteo: I know another thing about, you’re not just a freelancer, you’re not just a one band man you also run your own agency, a small agency called Sevenscope, right?

Elson: Yeah, it’s a very recent endeavor and this was something that Codeable allowed me to do to give me some economic stability so I could launch my agency slowly.

Matteo: What do guys do there as your core business?

Elson: We just do WordPress and, as a core business, we target viral blogs, I mean blogs with big amounts of traffic that get visitors.

Matteo: Nice!

Elson: They just do original content and get visitors to come in. Then we do consulting. We have even a customer that has a couple million visitors a month and we did the consulting even from the first stage of the brand to the designs and then implementation… some small marketing techniques to grow and we accompanied it to scaling the servers and getting…

Matteo: Also server-side…

Elson: Getting most of the websites, yeah, even when it came to optimization of the revenue which ads networks to use, which ad blocks to use and then optimizing speed also the Google page rank and all that. It’s quite rewarding to see your project go from an idea, a client’s head into a full production large scale website.

Matteo: Yes I bet it is. Would you mind sharing with us what lead you to the decision and take the leap from being a one-man band into being a cofounder?

Elson: You know the story of the duck. So a duck can fly, it can swim, it can walk and do a lot of things but it doesn’t do it that great, he’s not a runner, he’s not a big flyer…

Matteo: Yeah…

Elson: What I did was essentially find someone that shared my passion for these types of projects and then we identified our strong suits. Mine was development and his was planning, content creation and all that. We divided tasks, we teamed up and started a small agency. Our quality started to grow. Our stress levels started going down because we depended on each other and we want to build something that lasts a long time. That’s basically the concept of the agency.

Matteo: Nice, nice story, yeah how were you able to scale from being a freelancer to an agency cofounder? What were the main challenges involved in the switch?

Elson: The main challenges were for us to build something we knew would be economically viable. So if we started from freelancers to a company it’s a different kind of economical endeavor. So, with a company you pay taxes in different ways, you have to get a different legal structure, you have to have an accountant maybe (we decided to go with that). We have like fixed costs perhaps on salaries and taxes and better utility expenses. It’s a leap you have to take in account if you have like a slow month in a couple of months or a slow couple months you have to have some money saved up for the bad times and being able to always spot what the client will want next, when it comes to learning new skills to providing something they need and value.

That’s the main challenge. So we do every day like 3 or 4 meetings, small meetings, standing up like in Scrum way. And we do balances of what we’ve done so far, we do weekly, we do daily and we do monthly. We do all types of balances and work hours versus profits. We also identify projects that went wrong and why so next time we would have a similar project we know the right route to go through and what to keep from.

We only take projects that suit our needs and not all projects that come up because that’s very important. You have to identify the projects, is it going to be something you’re going to achieve well to satisfy the customer. Those are some things when you have a small agency you have to take into account most of the time. Because it’s all in your head and it can’t fail… if it fails it cannot be disastrous.

Matteo: Yeah, right!

Elson: So prepare, always be prepared.

Matteo: Always be prepared; always assess your improvements and what you’ve done. As you said, on a daily basis, weekly basis, on a monthly basis and find your niche. So work with clients that understand your value, so you get paid.

Elson: Yes, at the end of the day…

Matteo: At the end of the day it’s this.

Elson: That’s what makes a good company or not.

Matteo: So back on track, what didn’t feel right or even seem wrong to you that made you look for something new in your business life like Codeable?

Elson: Okay when you work for someone else, first of all, as a company you can’t choose the types of projects you do, they just send you okay we have this project…

Matteo: You have to do this.

Elson: You have to deal with customer, if it’s a good customer or a bad one, you have to swallow frogs…

Matteo: Right!

Elson: And so it’s like something when you have your own agency and you can make your own decisions, I can just say “okay I don’t like to work with this type of person because it’s hard to work with them”. Or “Okay sorry, I can’t work on this project with you” and then I find another customer that may have a better connection and then we do projects. That was something that made me want to switch. Also, because we want to grow and build our own projects, we then have the option to take some time from like the consulting jobs, gigs and do our own stuff. And it’s also very amusing for us to be doing the things we like.

Matteo: Of course!

Elson: Some things we want that other people want us to do.

Matteo: Yeah, the motivation really pushes you.

Elson: It also comes down to where you see yourself in 2 years or 10 years. If you’re working for someone else chances are you’re either going to change the person you’re working for a better company or for a better job. Yeah, but if you work for yourself you can see yourself like where is this thing I’m going in 10 years. And that’s a very powerful way of thinking that elevates your ability to work to harder. It motivates you a lot.

Matteo: Yeah also your own personal picture yeah, really your future even if we don’t know how what future will bring us this way we’re more in control of it.

Elson: Exactly: control that’s it.

Matteo: That’s it, yeah! Let me ask you how did you hear about Codeable?

Elson: I did a lot of WordPress research for my last company’s job and I ended up finding some Codeable WordPress-related articles. I was like this platform has very good content. So I started just going around the page and see what you did and see what type of customers you did and then I was like “okay so this can be a good opportunity to explore”, then I eventually prepared my… I prepared a website specifically to showcase my work.

Matteo: Nice!

Elson: And then I just sent it over to the email to apply for a position to be able to be part of the community. What happened was the first month no answer, second month no answer. I was like okay so never mind let’s go over… I saw…

Matteo: Let’s move on… but one day.

Elson: Yes, they were full of reviews, maybe they didn’t have time to review them all so I’m like “Okay, I tried” and I continued with my life and doing some other work. Then this funny thing happened. I went to Web Summit last year because I like to be involved with all types of web things and the day before going to Web Summit, as I was preparing for the trip, I got an email saying “Okay you can do a test.”

Matteo: Yeah, because you went through the first step!

Elson: So, like okay perfect timing…

Matteo: Like you…

Elson: I remember I received the scope of the project. I was like at the airport preparing a new repo for the project and then I coded while waiting for the plane…

Matteo: Nice

Elson: I was going… I actually skip the first day of Web Summit to work on a demo project. And then I worked pretty much all night.

Matteo: Really?! Because you wanted to send it out.

Elson: I wanted to deliver something great. And then a couple of hours to Web Summit just took most of it, then came back, worked again and then I submit it… a couple days later I got an answer saying, “Okay so when are you available to have a chat?” So this while it was till out in a trip.

Matteo: Yeah!

Elson: Then, I talked to Raleigh he’s a great guy.

Matteo: Yeah, he is.

Elson: Did a code test, verbal test communications and that’s it. As I was coming back from Web Summit on the plane again and the airport I received feedback that I got in.

Matteo: You got in!

Elson: I got my data I was waiting for the plane again so I was getting my login data and keys to the vault like awesome.

Matteo: You went to Web Summit before as a non-Codeable expert, then you come back in as a Codeable expert.

Elson: Yeah that’s like I have to make this work and then I went t my colleague which is now my business partner saying okay let’s go to this and take the most out of it. And then a couple of months later we started the agency and now Codeable is one of the main focuses here in the agency.

Matteo: What a story. Nice!

Elson: Funny story

Matteo: Yes, it is indeed!

Elson: Yeah 🙂

Matteo: How long have you been a Codeable expert? Just to give me some ideas…

Elson: Web Summit was in November, so I think…

Matteo: Around that time…

Elson: Yeah at the end of the November I think was when I started in Codeable. A couple of weeks were hard to get customers because I had no expertise, no finished projects. You have to grind and sort the customers. And then it started picking up and it went well. So then end of November till now.

Matteo: So roughly 6 months.

Elson: Yeah!

Matteo: Halfway mark for your first year at Codeable.

Elson: Yeah!

Matteo: First of all congrats. Second of all, since you started you just mentioned a client and at the beginning was a little bit rough, it was hard a little bit at the beginning because you did not have any street cred, any reviews, you were the new cool kid in town. What type of project do you see yourself strongest at? Quick projects, development, design because you guys do almost the full stack of services… so tell me.

Elson: Yeah, basically when I started doing websites my formal training is in Interactive Design so I did some graphic design and then when it came to doing websites people wanted the specific things. Some people just wanted to use a template and do something and then I realized that most of the customers I had, the local ones, didn’t need an over-bloated interface that was able to do a lot of different things they won’t use so… okay, I’ll just keep it simple, draw a simple interface and code it from there.

Eventually, I started… I didn’t start by using WordPress because I think at the time it was more than they needed, I started using Laravel with some basic specs. And then I eventually decided okay no more Laravel because the client eventually will need to add posts and will need to edit his content. So even if he doesn’t you better prepare a CMS for him incase in the future you want to add his own content you’ll safeguard our future together and WordPress all the way and from that point on. So the design was something our clients really started to like because, when I looked for example if I do a website for a restaurant, I go in and I know the building, I take some of my own pictures, I see what they have see the tiniest details.

Matteo: Yeah.

Elson: So if I see something they use in the decoration or next to the windows or something like that I just use that on the website. When the client arrives they recognize that signal like “oh, I get this”.

Matteo: That is a smart move man!

Elson: So I pick up the color schemes and the small details and design a clean interface and that small one detail, like one or two details and then I show it to the customer…

Matteo: 99% I guess they are going to love it.

Elson: Yeah, beautiful pictures something every client loves to have so we sub-hired out that part to a good photographer.

Matteo: So you neither the two of you shoot photos you… you work with another photographer?

Elson: Yeah it’s like the whole duck story! In the beginning we did the photos and they were acceptable we’re doing some color editing and it’s got good but then we met some great photographers and like I don’t know if the clients would like to go with them, we’ll try them to get the great photos because, at the end of our work, it will make the work better.

Matteo: Yes, sure!

Elson: The client will get a better service if we have a pro photographer only doing the photography. That’s why we started to focus on what are our strong suits and leave that part to the experts. It ended up being a very good strategy because clients eventually understood our vision and why we wanted someone great to do the photos and they essentially started accepting it.

This is like aside from Codeable. Codeable we have clients that are far ways so we don’t have that option. We can still do a design interface to implement customer interface into WordPress and build them a great product. We still don’t have the chance to do a project like that in Codeable but I’m hoping we’ll have one soon.

Matteo: If you look at your past freelancing life and then you fast-forward to today, how have things changed for you since joining Codeable? Are there any differences?

Elson: Yes, very very different. I mean, work now is more efficient so I can just determine more accurately… how many… how many hours it will take to do a certain type of task. Since I make myself and the team record how many minutes we did on pretty much anything, I can then go back…

Matteo: You keep track, then?

Elson: Yeah keep track… I use basic Scrum just to determine how many points a project took, how many points it took us in a week that basically gives us like a perspective on how much work we can do a week. Then, by using the time tracker, based on our initial estimation how was the result of the outcome, was it more time than expected, less time than expected.

Matteo: Yeah…

Elson: It allowed us to identify weak spots, improve on them and, yeah, become a better freelancer on top of that.

Matteo: Of course. We’re getting close to the end of this super nice talk but I have one last question for you, my friend. Were you able to do anything interesting you weren’t able to do before joining Codeable? An example that can fall under this is buying a motorcycle, booking a trip or actually flying to an exotic island or travel the world or buying, I don’t know, a super powerful latest Macbook Pro or anything a geek will ever desire? Did you do anything like that or are you planning to do anything like this?

Elson: I’m definitely planning. I still haven’t gotten the chance because now, as a business person, I’m trying to just keep the money in the business to protect ourselves from bad days, if they come into the company. I actually live on an exotic island you can consider it as…

Matteo: Yes, you can already mark one off the list!

Elson: Scratch that off the list. This is great because I was talking to my business partner and we’re saying that from now on till the Summer we have to make time to enjoy the island so we start our days earlier…

Matteo: Oh…

Elson: Then we go and enjoy a walk to the beach or something like that. We have amazing scenery and most of the times we spend our days in front of the computers working because that’s how life. We have to really enjoy it. Yeah, I do want to upgrade my wheels to get new Apple machines and… but yes a couple of months, if everything goes as expected, we’ll get there.

Matteo: Okay, nice so I see that you already… yeah, luckily for you, you live in an exotic island like that so really one item is already almost gone… you just need to walk out your office.

**Elson***: Yeah, literally I can just drive 10 minutes and be on the beach.

Matteo: Never been there but I’m planning to go.

Elson: Yeah, if you ever come by, just let me know.

Matteo: Of course, I’d love to! I think it’s enough for today, Elson. It was super interesting hearing your story; once again I’d like to thank you very much for spending your time with all of us. So wish you a great day and talk to you soon!

Elson: Thank you, bye!

Matteo: Bye!

The post Changing Lives: Elson Ponte appeared first on Codeable.

In this new episode of Changing lives, we’ll meet with Mircea Sandu, a full stack web developer with 8+ years of experience developing custom WordPress plugins. Mircea has specialized in several areas such as ACF, Custom API Integration, Custom Plugins, Plugin Customization, SearchWP, Sensei, Theme Development, WooCommerce Subscription, just to name a few.

During the interview, he’ll share with us his insights and thoughts about:

• why he started to work as a freelance developer
• what things and skills are required to be a good freelancer
• what types of project he likes to work on
• how being a Codeable expert changed his life

Need help with your WordPress projects?

Hire Mircea Sandu or just post your project and have one of our other experts take care of it immediately.

Want more stories from WordPress developers? Check them out here:

Changing lives #1: Spyros Vlachopoulos.
Changing lives #2: Nathan Reimnitz.
Changing lives #3: Alexandra Spalato.
Changing lives #4: Raleigh Leslie.
Changing lives #5: Alex Belov.
Changing lives #6: Bogdan Dragomir.
Changing lives #7: Ray Flores.
Changing lives #8: Zach Nicodemous.
Changing lives #9: Oliver Efremov.
Changing lives #10: Bruno Kos.
Changing lives #11: Surendra Shrestha.
Changing lives #12: Marius Vetrici.
Changing lives #13: Mitchell Callahan.
Changing lives #14: Puneet Sahalot.
Changing lives #15: Onur Demir.
Changing lives #16: Jonathan Bossenger.
Changing lives #17: Justin Frydman.
Changing lives #18: Robin Scott.

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a new episode of “Changing lives”!

Video Transcription

Matteo: Hi everyone this is Matteo from Codeable and in this new episode of Changing Lives we’re going to meet with Mircea Sandu, who will share with us his story and experience as a WordPress freelancer. But that’s not all: he will also give us an insider’s view of working as a Codeable expert, letting us know how this experience, in a way, changed his life. Hey Mircea, how’s it going? And thank you for joining us in this new episode of Changing Lives, we really appreciate it.

Mircea: Hi Matt, hi everybody, thanks. It’s great being here. What is your question?

Matteo: Let’s just start.

Mircea: Okay!

Matteo: So let me give you an easy one to start with. Why don’t you start by telling us in which part of the world you are right now, where you’re from and most importantly how long have you been a freelancer?

Mircea: Bucharest, Romania, born and raised here so never actually moved. I don’t know, I’ve been a proper freelancer since I started on Codeable. I never actually had a 9-5 job but I was part of a let’s call it a small local agency here. Before that, I did some small freelancing jobs but not so concentrated as I’m doing it now.

Matteo: Okay, and would you mind telling us what do you like about the freelancing world? I mean why did you choose to start working by yourself?

Mircea: I was always attracted to this freelancing side of the world. In a way, I was doing some sort of freelancing before but only in a team. The most important thing for me was gaining independence so as it all started when I was in high school I wanted to be free. Then I just kept at it and ended up here. So mostly it’s the freedom.

Matteo: The freedom of setting up your agenda yes, your schedule and your clients you’re working with…

Mircea: Yeah! The thing is I’ve always been attracted to building websites so it started when I was very young and it came in a way very natural to me… I mean, building things for the internet; it’s easier to work on the internet, easier than other jobs.

Matteo: Yes, and even if we’re at the beginning of this interview, I’m going to ask you a super tough question right away. Are you ready?

Mircea: Okay!

Matteo: What does it take to be a good freelancer and do you think anybody can be one? For example, off the top of my head, I think maybe dealing with clients requests you know that my fall off the scope of a project or you know having tight deadlines or having continuous requested like revisions or planning your time and resources things like this might look like challenges. Tell us about it: what does it take to be a good freelancer?

Mircea: I think yeah being a good freelancer most importantly you mentioned, I mean the most important thing is being able to self-modulate. So…

Matteo: Interesting!

Mircea: Yeah getting motivation from yourself because in most of the situations there won’t be someone to motivate you to get working. Even if you work with clients all the time which makes it… I mean you get pressure in a way to finish things, you always have to keep on getting new clients, getting new jobs and that’s very important. Keeping a constant flow of work. And also in part with this, you have to have a good time management. You have to be able to assign effort constantly in a way that makes sense.

Matteo: Yes, totally agree. What made you look for something in your freelancing life like Codeable? Was there a specific reason? Like you didn’t like your previous clients or your previous jobs or the way you were working before? Tell us about it, what made you look for something in your freelancing life like Codeable?

Mircea: The main thing I think I was working very long hours before and being very stressed. So one morning I said “okay I’m going to try and make a change” so I thought about finding some remote work at that point. Also, I tried it before but now it was a different approach, it was more mature and with more experience. Then I found Codeable and, at the time, I didn’t really understand how great it is… but I applied and I wasn’t really sure I had a chance of getting in.

Matteo: Do you remember how did you hear about Codeable?

Mircea: I think I found a posting on a job board or something like that.

Matteo: Okay, and do you remember how long you’ve been a Codeable expert? It’s been a while but I don’t know…

Mircea: It’s less than 2 years. It will be 2 years in June.

Matteo: Yeah you’re with us for quite some time so congrats! One more question a little bit deeper in your path here at Codeable which is what type of project are do you see yourself strongest at? I mean do you see yourself strongest with quick projects maybe those types of things that can be done in a day or a more complex one that maybe might keep you busy for I don’t know one week, what else?

Mircea: Yeah, I mean one week is not that long but usually… the project I like the most is building a self-supporting plugin so to speak. So building mostly a backend functionality which is helpful and if it’s a whole new functionality so not really supported… I mean not really an extension of an existing plugin it’s even better; so those are the products I like most and find most challenging. Usually, those are like a couple of weeks long.

Matteo: Usually, okay and how many projects have you worked on and completed?

Mircea: I think right now I’m over 210 tasks on Codeable.

Matteo: Wow, so over 200 congrats!

Mircea: Yes!

Matteo: Congrats. How are things going here at Codeable?

Mircea: It’s great, it’s been life changing for me, I’ve been able to plan better for everything and I think that’s the most important part! That’s what keeps me going and that has convinced me to become a fulltime freelancer on Codeable. For a long period, I’ve had very few clients outside of Codeable, it’s great. Yeah, I think the most important thing is predictability for me.

Matteo: Okay.

Mircea: I was able to plan better and have better work-life balance while keeping my freedom and working on projects which I like.

Matteo: Wow that sounds amazing. Okay, let me just take a little step back to a wider question, which is if you look at your past freelancing life and then you fast forward to today how have things changed for you since joining Codeable? I mean are they any different?

Mircea: Things have changed… I mean I’m able to plan my day better now.

Matteo: You mean incoming work or something?

Mircea: Also incoming work but also because I don’t have to spend that much time running for clients. So it allowed me to work and to have a better schedule and work regular hours – so to speak which sometimes are really good; that’s a great deal. And also I’ve been more relaxed financially because the income is safer, in a way, so that’s great. I’ve grown a lot technically. So I’ve learned a lot of things. I’ve been in contact with great projects, which I don’t think I’ve had before, and I was able to see problems and situations which I haven’t met before from websites with big traffic and many products (like eCommerce) or like a lot of sales or subscriptions stuff. All was challenging and a great experience to learn.

Matteo: Yeah okay that sounds amazing and it’s really awesome. So I guess you must be quite happy about your freelancing life that you’re building on. Let me ask you one last thing. I know some experts like you, after working with us for some time, have been able to travel more (my favorite), invest in their business like buying better software and better laptop or better gear generally speaking, and somebody was able to put down some deposit, some good savings on the side. How about you: did you do anything like that or planning to do anything like this?

Mircea: Yeah, well I’m currently saving and planning to purchase a house.

Matteo: Ohh, that’s a huge one.

Mircea: Not a house an apartment.

Matteo: Yes, it’s a huge achievement in a man’s life, right?!

Mircea: Yeah that’s the main plan now and I was also able to buy a new car last year.

Matteo: Oh interesting.

Mircea: It was long overdue.

Matteo: Well that’s lovely. Think that’s enough for today. Mircea it was super interesting hearing your story, thank you for sharing it with me, with us and once again I would like to thank you very much for spending your time with all of us, so wish you a good day and talk to you soon, cheers.

Mircea: Thanks a lot, bye.

The post Changing Lives: Mircea Sandu appeared first on Codeable.

In this new episode of Changing lives, we’ll meet with Robin Scott, an experienced WordPress developer who’s also one of the founders of Silicon Dales, an agency focused on WordPress, WooCommerce, and a variety of other services.

Robin has specialized in several areas such as Custom Plugins, Gravity Forms, Hosting Transfer, Maintenance, and WooCommerce, just to name a few.

During the interview, he’ll share with us his insights and thoughts about:

• why he became a freelancer
• what he likes about being a freelance developer
• why he decided to team up with other freelancers and launch his company
• how being a Codeable expert changed his life

Need help with your WordPress projects?

Hire Robin Scott or just post your project and have one of our other experts take care of it immediately.

Want more stories from WordPress developers? Check them out here:

Changing lives #1: Spyros Vlachopoulos.
Changing lives #2: Nathan Reimnitz.
Changing lives #3: Alexandra Spalato.
Changing lives #4: Raleigh Leslie.
Changing lives #5: Alex Belov.
Changing lives #6: Bogdan Dragomir.
Changing lives #7: Ray Flores.
Changing lives #8: Zach Nicodemous.
Changing lives #9: Oliver Efremov.
Changing lives #10: Bruno Kos.
Changing lives #11: Surendra Shrestha.
Changing lives #12: Marius Vetrici.
Changing lives #13: Mitchell Callahan.
Changing lives #14: Puneet Sahalot.
Changing lives #15: Onur Demir.
Changing lives #16: Jonathan Bossenger.
Changing lives #17: Justin Frydman.

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a new episode of “Changing lives”!

Video Transcription

Matteo: Hi everyone this is Matteo and in this new episode of Changing Lives we’re going to meet with Robin Scott, who will share with us his story and of course his experiences. As you might already know, that’s not all about it for today. In fact Robin will tell us a bit more about working as a Codeable expert too, letting us know how these experience in a way changed his life. Hey Robin thank you for joining us in this episode, we really appreciate it.

Robin: Hi Matteo, really good to talk to you and thanks for having me!

Matteo: Yeah-yeah, so to get everything started why don’t you tell us which part of the world you’re right now, where you’re from, but most importantly how long have you been a freelancer?

Robin: So I live in England in the north of England in the Yorkshire Dales, really a quiet place called Swaledale; it’s quiet most of the year and then it’s really popular with tourists in the summertime: it’s like a lot of people come on holiday here. So I started out as a freelancer and I started basically as like a sole trader in 2005, when I actually was at university, and I was doing a law degree. I had been basically doing code using coding computers since I was a kid. I incorporated the business in 2010. But I’ve been working with WordPress for about 12 years. Yes since 2005.

Matteo: Yeah, so more than a decade. Nice! Would you mind telling us what do you like about being part of the freelancing world? Why did you choose to work by yourself instead of working a 9-5 job?

Robin: I mean for a while… for quite a long time the plan was to be a lawyer, be a commercial lawyer and I actually spent a year after university in Australia and I’ve worked.

Matteo: Nice!

Robin: Worked in a commercial law department, at the same time doing a web based business, doing client work, doing websites. I realized quite quickly that I prefer to do that rather than working my way up a corporate ladder and working in commercial litigation. I mean as a sort of a commercial lawyer or somebody in that world, I always expected to work 9-5 and I still do. I even yesterday finished quite late and started falling. There is still a lot of flexibility in having your own business and being able to work internationally.

Matteo: Yeah!

Robin: I can work with an American client in the evening and I can spend time with my family in the morning and vice versa, work with a client in Australia really early in the morning and just find an hour in the middle of the day to pick my daughter up from nursery or whatever. That flexibility actually is quite good but while working all the time, as well it’s sort of two things at the same time.

Matteo: Okay yes flexibility is good but sometimes it just covers the most part of your days and evenings as well. Even if we’re at the beginning of this interview I’m going to ask a super tough question right away, are you ready?

Robin: Yeah!

Matteo: Okay. What does it take to be a good freelancer? Do you think anyone can be one? To clarify a bit this kind of question, I find maybe dealing with clients requests that might fall off the scope of a project, tight deadlines, revisions, planning your time and planning your resources, and all the like, a continuous challenge for someone getting close, someone that would like to start freelancing. Tell us about it what does it take to be a good freelancer?

Robin: What does it take to be good? There are two things. There is preparing a good contract is important so basically, everyone’s expectations have to be really clear before any work starts, timelines, prices, deliverables all that has to be clear. You can avoid a lot of disappointment on both sides if people know exactly what’s going to be delivered and how long it’s going to take. Probably more than that is communication. Obviously, it ties into that communication, good freelancers are organized and they are professional and consistent communicators.

It’s important to know your job and be really good at the code. So you’ve got to know what you’re doing. If you going to log into somebody’s website and start making changes you’ve got to be able to communicate with people. Particularly they don’t understand what you’re doing to their websites, so you’ve got to make it really clear to people. I think that’s probably the most important thing for being a good freelancer and a good contractor is if you can communicate clearly what you’re about to do and what you’ve just done. I think everybody is going to be happy with the job that you’ve done. I would say that’s number one for me.

Matteo: Yeah probably because many people aren’t developers so they lack a lot of technologies, you know, tech knowledge around development. This is a fair point and a really good one, yeah I completely agree with you. But I also know another thing about you and your professional story. I know that you’re not just a one man band, a solo freelancer. You also run your own agency Silicon Dales correct?

Robin: Yes.

Matteo: Would you mind sharing your experience in that. How were able to scale from a freelancer to an agency owner? How did you come up with this idea? Anything, what are the challenges involved in making this switch from being a freelancer and running an agency. Anything would be super useful.

Robin: “Agency” is probably sort of a grand term. It’s 4 people working together. Since 2007 the same people have been working together. So I actually met two of the people… I had already been working with when I was in Australia. We started working together so when the company was set up in 2010, it was just a natural thing to include – you know – these guys. The reason for that is I think you know sort of ties into what I do with the open source as well. People are better when they come together and work together. It’s sort of in the freelance world, it sounds a bit strange because the idea is you’ve got individual developers but nobody can be an expert at everything. John, who works with us, he’s a big SEO guy, he does a lot of offsite/onsite SEO Search Engine Optimization, Google penalty recoveries, etc.. I don’t do any of that or understand how it works. It’s really good to have people who are experts. That’s what I really like about Codeable as well, people who know exactly that they’re doing and they’re having specific expertise. We specifically have increasingly focused on WooCommerce. We do a lot of WooCommerce work which Silicon Dales. A week ago, in fact, we have become gold accredited by WooCommerce.

Matteo: Wow yeah (Clapping)!

Robin: I think there is 12 or 15 gold accredited WooCommerce businesses in the world, and we’re one of them.

Matteo: Wow!

Robin: Look it up I may be wrong, it’s right about 15 I think. That’s really on for us to have a specific expertise. I think that one of the challenges is to find your niche basically to go from being a person who does anything on a WordPress website to doing specific things that have enough of a market to pay the bills basically. That’s the challenge because 5 years ago we would pick up anything – you know – any project that was going. Now actually we’re very specific about projects that we’d do. It leads to better results basically. So that’s definitely the main challenge is finding your expertise and not trying to really cover everything that somebody might want.

Matteo: Thank you for sharing this, and congrats again on your certificate on WooCommerce! So let me just take a step back and get back on track on the main question. What made you look for something new in your freelancing life, like Codeable? Was there a specific reason or you just gave it a shot? I don’t know, what else?

Robin: Yeah, to totally describe the process of how I discovered Codeable and got into Codeable I mentioned WooCommerce just there. When we initially became, went onto the new WooCommerce program after Automattic had bought WooCommerce. They changed the partner program; expert program is called… for the better, they added a lot of extra oversight basically to the system and made it a bit better. WooCommerce referred people who are looking for work doing. They referred me to either experts or to Codeable. I thought I’d better check Codeable out and see what it’s about; probably about just over a year ago now. I put in an application, kind of forgot about it and started getting these tests from Codeable, testing whether the quality of what I could do. I eventually obviously got accepted onto the program. I think it was about May or June 2016. But yeah it took…

Matteo: So almost 1 year…

Robin: Yeah, just about a year.

Matteo: Great!

Robin: So it’s… that’s what sort of happened was I kind of noticed that Codeable… a lot of WooCommerce work was going through Codeable. I thought actually I needed to be on there. I need to make sure that, basically, I’m not missing good WooCommerce work that I’d be really good at doing so it’s…

Matteo: Makes sense.

Robin: It’s proven, it’s worked really well since then.

Matteo: What type of projects do you see yourself strongest at? Quick ones or more complex ones that may keep you busy for a week?

Robin: Yeah, it’s kind of a mix. It’s generally like about a year ago we would’ve said we didn’t do so many small tweaks, we would tend to focus on larger projects. So 6 months last, a year in fact, was spent working mainly for one client. However there is a big need out there for relatively small tweaks to finish a project where it’s a WooCommerce website, it’s been made by a design agency that knows their stuff but there is a WooCommerce element they have a bit of trouble with. Increasingly that’s what we’re doing more and more of. And that’s what I’m doing more and more through Codeable working with agencies to troubleshoot or basically assist with that final 5% percent that actually makes all the difference but they can handle the rest of it. They’re good with WordPress, they are good with WooCommerce, perhaps they have a gateway that’s failing or…

Matteo: Some fine-tuning at the end, or something like that.

Robin: Exactly that… so I think we’re increasingly focusing on working with agencies or large businesses that… either an IT person dedicated or a pretty good person in that business who know that stuff but they aren’t necessarily… they don’t work in WooCommerce every day so they’re lacking that expertise that I have basically.

Matteo: Yeah, and how many projects have you work on or complete?

Robin: I’m going to have to check.

Matteo: Just a rough number.

Robin: I think it’s about 70 now.

Matteo: 70 yeah nice number, congrats!

Robin: Yeah very quickly, because up until November I was working most of the time on one project.

Matteo: You catch up quickly!

Robin: Yeah, which was outside of Codeable and then very very quickly once that was finished I got a new office which helped a great deal. There are a couple of desks here too, working in this office. I’m surrounded by screens right now. So it’s really sort of… it’s accelerated since then. In January, I finished 25 tasks… 20. The reason I know these numbers incidentally is the new plug-in for Codeable developers that shows all our stats being made by a few guys…

Matteo: Developer guys?

Robin: Absolutely, brilliant. I know exactly how many projects I’ve done in January, February, and March now. I can be specific about that. The graph is moving up as well quite quickly.

Matteo: Nice, nice, nice so how are things going here at Codeable?

Robin: Really good, I’ve been impressed by the quality of the clients but also the sort of community I think there is about 250, there might even be 300 other developers and they are really good. The lack of competition is sometimes strange because we’re all embedded in the tasks but it’s a different process, different things. It actually took me a while to get used to it to be honest. The idea being that everybody is trying to do a good job and actually not competing with each other and actually trying to… many respects quite often what will happen is people will help other basically so they’ll say actually I haven’t got time for this sounds like you’ve got this covered but I’ll do X, Y, and Z. I’ll have a look at this plug-in and actually helping other developers. People improve for that collaboration and improve through that community that exists among Codeable developers and I’m really impressed by that.

Matteo: The community is strong. You also have a Slack channel and I see you talk shop, you talk about funny stuff so, to me, it looks like it’s friends talking about work!

Robin: Quite often arguing about approach and arguing about which plug-in is best or whatever but it’s a genuine sort of a community.

Matteo: Yeah, it is.

Robin: I think people improve through that. I think a lot of the times you’ll think this is the best way to do it and someone will opt in with a different solution and you say actually that’s a better way of doing it, whatever. I think that’s really beneficial. Even in my business we all operate remotely. Generally, I work with one person half a day every day just because it makes the meetings easier. The rest of the time it’s Skype and it’s talking to clients all the time. I think if I was a developer that only worked on my own it would be beneficial to have the other developers who are out there and discuss. It is private as well you know, you’re not (sort of) having a conversation on Twitter or whatever it is actually, it’s private conversations between developers. It’s good and I think it improves everybody who is involved for being on there.

Matteo: Yeah I agree, completely agree. So next question, if you look at your past freelancing life and you fast-forward to today, how have things changed for you since joining Codeable? Are they indifferent?

Robin: Yeah, I think it’s slightly different if I come from just working for clients on my own I think the difference would’ve been bigger but it’s still different. The process, the way that leads a process, the way that the conversation happens is different on Codeable. Mainly the payments system is the big change. A lot of time I spend in my business is for preparing people to have invoice systems, trying to collect deposit payments, trying to get people to understand how payments are going to happen and then, of course, chasing and following up payments where they don’t necessarily come in on time and occasionally having to send a solicitors letter or having to collect some money.

Matteo: Yeah.

Robin: That tends to be part of client work, but with Codeable that side of things is covered. So that is a big change really from outside world, and if the money side of things is organized and it means you can concentrate more on the actual work.

Matteo: That sounds helpful, of course. Let me ask you one last thing. I know some other experts like you after working with us for some time have been able to travel more… (yay, my favorite). Invest in their business with better software or gear, or somebody also has been able to set money aside, you know some savings. How about you did you do anything like that? Are you planning to do anything like this?

Robin: Yes I spoke to you a few weeks ago and I was thinking about this question and it’s a different answer now it’s a different answer.

Matteo: Ohh I’m curious…

Robin: It’s not because of Codeable, but basically my wife and I are having another baby so yeah. It’s not… I’m not going to say it’s because of you guys but it’s definitely – you know – we’ve already got one and money definitely helps with that.

Matteo: Of course, congrats wow.

Robin: (Laughing)

Matteo: That’s great. Well Robin, I think that’s enough for today. A great, killer ending to this interview and thank you for sharing all your story with us and, once again, I’d like to thank you for spending your time with me and all of us. Wish you a great day and talk to you soon.

Robin: Yeah, thank you bye!

Matteo: Take care!

Robin: You too!

Matteo: Bye 🙂

The post Changing Lives: Robin Scott appeared first on Codeable.

In this new episode of Changing lives, we’ll meet with Justin Frydman, a full stack web developer and systems administrator with 20 years of experience. Justin has specialized in many areas such as Website Optimization, Server/VPS Optimization and Tuning, Plugin Customization/Custom Plugin Development, just to name a few.

During the interview, he’ll share with us his insights and thoughts about:

• why he became a freelancer
• what elements someone who wants to start freelancing should be paying attention to
• how it feels to be a part of a community of WordPress professionals for a remote developer
• how being a Codeable expert changed his life

Need help with your WordPress projects?

Hire Justin Frydman or just post your project and have one of our other experts take care of it immediately.

Want more stories from WordPress developers? Check them out here:

Changing lives #1: Spyros Vlachopoulos.
Changing lives #2: Nathan Reimnitz.
Changing lives #3: Alexandra Spalato.
Changing lives #4: Raleigh Leslie.
Changing lives #5: Alex Belov.
Changing lives #6: Bogdan Dragomir.
Changing lives #7: Ray Flores.
Changing lives #8: Zach Nicodemous.
Changing lives #9: Oliver Efremov.
Changing lives #10: Bruno Kos.
Changing lives #11: Surendra Shrestha.
Changing lives #12: Marius Vetrici.
Changing lives #13: Mitchell Callahan.
Changing lives #14: Puneet Sahalot.
Changing lives #15: Onur Demir.
Changing lives #16: Jonathan Bossenger.

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a new episode of “Changing lives”!

Video Transcription

Matteo: Hi everyone this is Matteo from Codeable and today we’re going to meet with Justin Frydman who will share with us his story but he will also tell us more about his experience as a WordPress freelancer. But that’s not all: he will also tell us a bit more about working as a Codeable expert, letting us know how this experience in a way changed his life.

Hey Justin, thank you for joining us in this new episode of Changing Lives! We really appreciate it.

Justin: Thanks Matteo… really, really happy to be here, very, very excited to do this segment.

Matteo: Awesome, let’s get started.

Justin: Let’s do it.

Matteo: So why don’t you tell us which part of the world you’re in right now, where you’re from and most importantly how long you’ve been a freelancer?

Justin: No problem. So I’m in cloudy Vancouver Canada, which is for those of you who don’t know, just a couple hours drive north of Seattle on the West Coast. I’m originally from Calgary Alberta, which is just a city outside of the Rocky Mountains East of here. I also lived for a year in Australia and a couple years in Germany in between there. And why I became a freelancer so many reasons.

Matteo: Before going to that, how long have you been one?

Justin: How long have I been a freelancer? I would say my first freelance project was when I was in high school where I built the website for the elementary school on the street, from us yeah ,they didn’t have one and this is way back in the day when we’re using GeoCities and thing like that. You guys remember that?

Matteo: Yeah I remember that!

Justin: Yeah in between that I had salary jobs, big companies, small companies but I’ve been freelancing full-time since around 2010, so 7 years.

Matteo: Around 7 years, okay appreciate it. So let’s go into more detail. Would you mind telling us what do you like about being a freelancer? Why did you choose to start working by yourself, gamble on yourself, other than end up in 9-5 jobs?

Justin: I was always doing side projects anyway but it just kind of came about when I was living in Germany and I was there on a school visa learning Germany. I had a couple companies back home that were interested in giving me work so I just got started freelancing for them from there to earn a living. Aside from that, I mean I mostly was sort of a contractor freelance to agencies. I wasn’t doing a lot of direct to client work, I was mostly working with a project manager or another developer from another agency to do their overflow of work or just do projects for them. So yeah, I mean after a while it was pretty nice but then I ran into some of the same problems as a salary job where you can’t really pick your projects, you’re not playing to your strengths and you’re doing some of the work you’re not super passionate about.

Matteo: Okay.

Justin: That’s a similar problem you run into when you’re in a salary job, you can’t really say “Hey I don’t want to do this” or “This isn’t the best for it”.

Matteo: Of course.

Justin: The same thing with the agency contracting because they’re basically like here is the work we need you to do and you’re like “okay, I need to get paid so I’ll do it…” regardless if it’s strong suit for me or not.

Matteo: Okay thank you, thank you for that. We’re at the beginning of this interview, I know this is a super tough question. Are you ready?

Justin: I’m ready.

Matteo: What does it take to be a good freelancer and do you think anybody can be one? To justify my question dealing with clients, dealing with tight deadlines, budgeting or planning your time and resources isn’t natural for many. What do you think? What does it take to be a good freelancer?

Justin: First you can try…

Matteo: Yeah sure.

Justin: But to be a successful one, you have to be better than that. Aside from being able to do the work like you said, there are a lot of other elements to being a good freelancer. So the way I think about it is you have to wear many hats like you’re in a startup and you have to wear them all well.

You know when you’re speaking with clients online, you have to have the best communication you can possibly have, I’d say that’s 90% of the work almost is communicating, dealing with expectations, getting a clear picture of the project all these things. Hat number one is sort of the sales project manager hat you’re wearing and you’re like “Hey you know what is your project exactly. Here is some solutions I think we can do and then you’re like let’s work together” so you put on the developer hat next and you actually do the work. From there you put on the Q&A hat and test the work and after that, you put on sort of the client support hat and deliver your work and be there to answer any questions, explain the detail of what you did. All in all, you have to wear all those hats really well to make a unified…

Matteo: Solution…

Justin: Solution, yeah exactly! That’s what I think it takes and I’ve been learning a lot since I’ve been on Codeable. Like I said, I was mostly working with agencies so doing direct client work has been a newer experience for me and I’m really loving it. So learning a lot there.

Matteo: Yeah, we’ll get there.

Justin: Yeah, for sure.

Matteo: Okay, yeah I get that wearing so many hats could be a challenge for somebody.

Justin: Yeah!

Matteo: But it’s… it’s also, you know, something that every day you feel challenged so maybe you really need to step up your game.

Justin: I’m learning every day and I’m really stepping it up. I’m learning new things from the colleagues at Codeable… but, I mean, it comes down to some common sense, like treating people really great, treating people the way you want to be treated. Yep, finding clients that are passionate about their projects as you are and really stuff will work them self out. Everybody is really on the same page and I really like it so…

Matteo: Couldn’t agree with you more.

Justin: It’s awesome!

Matteo: What made you look for something in your freelancing life like Codeable? Was there a specific reason like you didn’t like your previous jobs? The way you were working before? Were you “missing out” on something in your professional life?

Justin: Yeah, like I said, I was remote freelancing for agencies right and, through that, I was never ever really getting any community. So I didn’t have really many people to talk shop with and knowledge share and grow and things like that. When I found Codeable I heard there was a community
on background here like people help each other. I’m home here by myself, you know, my wife is at work, I need to you know shoot the stuff with other people as well.

The other major thing was, like I said, I had no control over the projects I kind of was so it was still kind of a salary job, it was out of requirements out of the agency like here is the next project for you, I was like okay. This isn’t the kind of projects I totally want to do but I’m going to do it, I need to get paid and things like that, but at Codeable I’m able to pick and choose the projects and the people I’d like to work with so I can really play to my strengths rather than my weaknesses and I can also look at new things that are being posted and learn those things on the side and try to improve my personal things like that.

That was the main reason I just wanted control over the process, the deadlines, the client expectations those were all just fed to me before now I can actually control those things and really give that full experience which I think was lacking at some my previous client areas.

Matteo: Since you brought it up, what type of project do you see yourself strongest at? I mean quick projects like those that can be done probably in a day or more complex ones that might keep you busy, I don’t know, for a week?

Justin: I’m doing both somehow. I initially started out doing as many small jobs as I could possibly get because I still have a lot of existing work so I could only pick up the one to two-hour jobs and I really enjoyed them. I love the website optimization jobs… It’s a real passion to make people’s sites fast and how appreciative they are when you’re done because they can see the difference when you’re…

Matteo: Yeah, the result.

Justin: It’s really nice to have results-driven work when you’re like here is your before stats and after and regardless of the metrics they are their site they can see how much faster it is. I really love those because people get to know… having a fast website is very important these days. I love tinkering with it and love getting it as fast as I possibly can.

Matteo: Nice!

Justin: On the other hand, I’m also working on a huge job right now like a monthly job I picked up through a great client by optimizing his website . He’s like “Can you do this? I sure can!”. I just moved on from that. I’ve been working on that and that’s been going on since November. Yeah, I’m doing all and, in between, I’ll pick up a few small jobs here and there a few of my repeat clients if they need something and break up some different work into smaller tasks, yeah.

Matteo: Do you remember how many projects you worked on and completed a rough number maybe?

Justin: I think I’m at 106 now.

Matteo: Nice!

Justin: I just recently broke 100 and I’m really happy about that.

Matteo: Yeah great!

Justin: Thank you, I’m excited about that!

Matteo: Of course it’s a huge achievement. How long have you been a Codeable expert?

Justin: I got my certification in August 2016; so that’s around 5 months ago. Like I said, I was really still completing other work and other obligations I had other contracts. I was just picking up a few small tasks here and there and just trying to build up my numbers and try to meet clients and get to know community but taking it slow. After things started going, it snowballed like crazy and there is just no stopping it, just getting preferred and repeat work.

Matteo: Awesome!

Justin: Yeah it’s incredible, I can’t say enough about it! As long as you put the work in… you know it’s a little slow to get started if you’re sort of new to the system. But everybody goes at their own pace so take your own time and it just starts happening. Just work on your own experience with clients and work on delivering the Codeable promise and quality work and the rest just seems to happen.

Matteo: So let me ask you this… you partially already mentioned something about this already but how are things going on here at Codeable? You were talking about community; you were talking some other improvements or like things that you love to have found here at Codeable. Do you have anything you would like to share with us?

Justin: I would just like to say that the community and the staff are just incredible. I talked with you know yeah David, Chris and Raleigh these guys are just awesome. We talk on a daily basis, Per catches up with me at least once every 2 weeks to say I’m doing a great job. I find that awesome. It’s really nice how many of us here like 200 and something now?

Matteo: Around 255.

Justin: Right, Per still finds the time to private message me and say “Hey you’re doing great” you know always looking out and I really think that’s amazing. On top of that, we have this Slack community: I’ve made some true friends on there. I’ve had really great advice from people like Nate, Raleigh and just that sharing atmosphere has been a mind changer.

And the paid for it sort of thing at Codeable exists. So I have done the same thing: I see some new guys coming in and struggling a bit. I’ll private message them and I’ll say “Hey don’t worry about it, here is how things kind of work, give any questions I’m here I’ll help you out as well”.

Matteo: You’ve almost mentored them like in the beginning.

Justin: Yeah, because I got mentored in the beginning and I got advice on things like “Hey, I’m not a great sales guy. I’m so confident in my work but how do I express that to people?” which I’ve now figured out. You know, I figured that part out but the startup was really weird for me right.

Matteo: Yeah of course!

Justin: Look at all these great tasks posted every day and you’re like “I can do that, I can do that but how can I be the one to do that?” Tough question, you know. We’ve figured it out it’s only been 5 months so… it’s crazy how fast things move.

Matteo: Thank you for sharing that Justin!

Justin: Yeah!

Matteo: Let me just take a step back to a wider topic. If you look at your past freelancing life, the one you were talking about before working with agencies mostly, and then you fast-forward to today when you’re more in charge of your path. How have things changed for you since you joined Codeable? Are they any different?

Justin: They are very different. First of all, I work a lot more…

Matteo: If you wanted to work more that’s the perfect sentence.

Justin: Yeah, I’m getting lots of quality projects now, ones that are more suited to my needs and more suited to my strengths. Even though I have a wide sort of skill sets there are certain things I like doing more than others. But I definitely love the PSD to WordPress jobs and I love fixing people’s plugins troubleshooting websites; those are the really great projects in my mind but they are also the most difficult ones to estimate. I just can’t predict how long fixing a bug will take on someone’s site. But I think the thing that’s changed the most is just that I’ve met some really great friends, Codeable has put me in front of these amazing clients.

I have amazing repeat clients already which are just incredible. You can really find those clients that fit your personality, it’s somewhat trial and error, but it happens you just get up there and do projects and then you build rapport with people and there is a whole bunch you like to work with and they like to work with you.

Matteo: That’s great!

Justin: Like I said, the thing that was lacking the most for me was…

Matteo: The community…

Justin: Community… so now I have people that I talk with on the daily basis! We’ll talk about technical problems, maybe we’ll talk about client projects, you know this thing that I was definitely lacking before and this thing that lacks for any sort of remote freelancing that doesn’t have … colleagues to do this but now you have that virtual colleague environment and it makes a huge difference.

Matteo: Yeah!

Justin: Yeah!

Matteo: We’re almost there. I guess you must be quite happy about this new freelancing life. Let me ask you one last thing. I know other experts like you, who have been working with us for quite some time, have been able to travel more (which is my favorite thing), were able to improve their business with, I don’t know, better software, gear or even put down a new deposit for a new house. How about you: did you do anything like that? Are you planning to do anything like this?

Justin: Honestly, not really.

Matteo: Okay.

Justin: To be fair, I’m a pretty frugal person. I’m not looking to spend a bunch of money when my wife and I do spend a lot of money it is usually just on traveling. I think if anything we would sort of the next trip will be a little more blown out and a little more, we’ll get a better hotel than usual like that and relax because she works hard too. I think it will just be a little more enjoying the time we have enjoying that as much as possible and making new experiences and seeing new countries that’s one of my favorite things to do for sure. What more can you ask for?

Matteo: Yeah, when you can travel and see the world and do the things you like, what more do you want?

Justin: Yeah!

Matteo: That’s fantastic!

Justin: Yeah!

Matteo: Justin it was super amazing hearing your story and thank you for sharing it with us. I would like to thank you very much for spending your time with me and all of us. I wish you a great day and talk you real soon.

Justin: Thanks a lot Matteo! Thanks a lot for doing this. Take care.

Matteo: Take care

The post Changing Lives: Justin Frydman appeared first on Codeable.

In this new episode of Changing lives, we’ll meet with Jonathan Bossenger, a full stack WordPress developer who has specialized in many areas like Custom Plugins, Plugin & Theme Customization, Javascript, MySQL, just to name a few.

During the interview, he’ll share with us his insights and thoughts about:

• why he decided to be a freelancer self-employed professional developer
• how to be a better self-employed freelancer
• how to apply for Codeable
• how being a Codeable expert changed his life

Need help with your WordPress projects?

Hire Jonathan Bossenger or just post your project and have one of our other experts take care of it immediately.

Want more stories from WordPress developers? Check them out here:

Changing lives #1: Spyros Vlachopoulos.
Changing lives #2: Nathan Reimnitz.
Changing lives #3: Alexandra Spalato.
Changing lives #4: Raleigh Leslie.
Changing lives #5: Alex Belov.
Changing lives #6: Bogdan Dragomir.
Changing lives #7: Ray Flores.
Changing lives #8: Zach Nicodemous.
Changing lives #9: Oliver Efremov.
Changing lives #10: Bruno Kos.
Changing lives #11: Surendra Shrestha.
Changing lives #12: Marius Vetrici.
Changing lives #13: Mitchell Callahan.
Changing lives #14: Puneet Sahalot.
Changing lives #15: Onur Demir.

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a new episode of “Changing lives”!

Video Transcription

Matteo: Hi everyone this is Matteo from Codeable and in this new episode of Changing Lives we’re going to meet with Jonathan Bossenger who will share with us his story and experience as a freelancer. He will also tell us more about his experiences as a Codeable expert, letting us know how this experience, in a way, changed his life. Hey Jonathan, thank you for joining us in this new episode of Changing Lives, we really appreciate it.

Jonathan: Hey Matteo thank you very much, this is a great opportunity for me and I’m looking forward to the chat.

Matteo: Ohh I’m really looking forward to learning more about you and your story. So to get the ball rolling, why don’t you start off by sharing with us which part of the world you are right now, where you’re from and most importantly how long you’ve been a freelancer.

Jonathan: I’m born and bred in Cape Town South Africa. I’ve literally left the country once I’m not very well-traveled. I grew up in Cape Town and spent most of my time in Cape Town and surroundings. I’m a father of 2 little boys; so that makes life very interesting. The main reason I became a freelancer was because of my specific work scenarios. My wife, when I met her, she was part of a family business that she ran with her father, mother, and sister. When her father and mother decided they wanted to retire, they wanted one of the daughters to take over the business and she choose to took over and it put me in this position where I wanted to help her in the business but I felt I couldn’t work a full-time job. So I then started looking at the concept of freelancing and working for myself. I’ve been doing it in interesting ways for the last 5 years. There have been some interesting ups and downs but that is kind of what has brought me to where I am today.

Matteo: I didn’t get for how long have you been a freelancer?

Jonathan: I’m going to start off by saying I don’t like the word “freelancer” just from a personal view, I don’t know why. You can keep using it, I’ll never use the word. I’ve been what I call “self-employed” for 5 years now. But it hasn’t actually been 100% self-employment. When I first started looking at getting my own clients, I contacted a company whom I had interactions with in the previous year and they were interested in bringing me on board for a part-time contract basis. For the last 4 years of the 5 years, I was working on site there. And then what happened was my boys were born; I started getting more involved in the family business. My juggling at the time between the two companies was getting very difficult. Officially the beginning of last year was when I was 100% full time self-employed or as I said, freelancer.

Matteo: Since you brought it up could you elaborate why the “freelancer” word isn’t something that you like to use? I heard that you’re just using self-employed right?

Jonathan: Yes.

Matteo: Do you mind elaborating a little bit?

Jonathan: It’s really about the clients that I met and I don’t know if it’s a local thing in Cape Town, South Africa, as a country or whether this happens internationally but I find when I meet with new clients and the word “freelancer” comes up. They have worked on a previous project and hired a freelancer. The freelancer delivered something and when things went wrong the freelancer was nowhere to be found. It’s almost like the term “freelancer” has been associated with somebody who will just pitch up, do the work and you’ll never see them again when you need them. And I decided that I was not going to refer to myself as a freelancer because I’m the kind of guy that pitch up, do the work and if in a week’s time there is a problem you can still contact me and I’ll help you fix that problem, or a month later you need to do some updates, I’ll see what I can do to help you. There seems to be… and as I said I don’t know if it’s a Cape Town thing, I don’t know what it’s like internationally, I should speak to other freelancers but in Cape Town, it’s these guys want to just come in, make a quick buck and then move onto the next project. Just keep making quick bucks and moving onto the next projects and never giving any kind of feedback or any kind of support to persons. And most of the time, from my experience at least, the support has to happen because of how poor their work is. So they’ll quickly package something together, it will work when they show it to the client it will work for a couple of months and, the minute the site hits some kind of strain or traffic, it falls over and you can’t find them anywhere. That’s the reason I’ve chosen to not use the term freelancer.

Matteo: Okay, I totally see your point and I agree of course. And, so even if we’re at the beginning of this interview, I’m going to ask you like a super tough question right away. You ready?

Jonathan: Sure!

Matteo: Okay, what does it take to be a good self-employed professional and do you think anybody can be one?

Jonathan: Wow, so… because I’ve only been 100% self-employed for a year I don’t think I can fully answer the first part of that question because I don’t think I’ve yet cracked 100% success in my own frames. What I can say though is I’ve definitely spent the last year learning from my own mistakes. And when I started as 100% self-employed freelancer I tried to market myself as something that I’m not and I’ve tried various different avenues. If you go to my blog you’ll see there are two blog posts I literally had a public meltdown and I kind of just threw my emotions on my blog that I hate what I’m doing and don’t want to do this anymore; whatever the case is. I think the key thing I’ve learned at least, and this is what I think is taking me on the path to success, is that you should stick to what works for you. So find your niche; be it for me coding. For me it’s writing PHP code, JavaScript code, maybe a little CSS, not designing, not building, not suggesting plugins because that’s not where my experience is.

Focus on finding the clients that need what you have to give. And focus on building relationships with those clients because you might feel like or at least what I’ve learnt is I felt like my experience and what I’ve brought to the table because of how great WordPress is and because of how many plugins there are and because of how amazing the themes are my experience wouldn’t be necessary. I learned very quickly that there are you know 25% of the internet running on WordPress. There are millions, millions of users that have hundreds of different requirements. Not every plugin is going to work for every user exactly the way they want it to. I learned that if I focus on what I… where my strength is I can deliver an amazing product within a reasonable frame of time.

My client is happy because they’re not paying 3x what they would because I have to now go learn something new and charge them for it. That then puts me in a position when I’m working with clients I know what to… what I can expect to give them. They know what they can expect from me, the relationship is just so much better: they’re happy to pay me; I’m happy to work with them. Every day just becomes successful. So, for me, the big thing was for me to focus on that part or thing. If you’re good at site building and everything else great but if you don’t have a wide experience to focus on what you’re good at… They always talk about… sorry, I’m rambling.

Matteo: No, no I’m following you.

Jonathan: They always talk about finding something that you love doing and you’ll never have a job for the rest of your life or something like that. It’s not necessarily about something you enjoy because something like I enjoy cooking, I enjoy baking but I can’t do that for a job because that’s my hobby. But I do also enjoy writing code so I can do that for a job. It’s a thing about finding what you love but also earn money and gives you purpose and that whole thing. And there is a Japanese word for it. If you find that thing and focus as much of your energy as you have to find that thing, that will take you on the path to success I believe.

Matteo: Okay yeah, inspiring. And let’s enter a little more into our discussion. What made you look for something in your self-employment path like Codeable? Was there a specific reason like you didn’t like your previous jobs where you probably were working for, or in a way you felt like you were missing something in your professional life, or what else?

Jonathan: So I started with Codeable in August-September last year. And if you look at the last quarter of the year I literally… in the course of the last year I literally went through 4 distinct phases. The first 3 months was trying something, trying to find clients, doing websites build, something which I didn’t have a lot of experience in but I had these awesome themes, page builders that do everything for you. And literally finding work that nobody else wanted because, you know, budget, time or whatever the case is. And realizing that was not what I’m good at, what I can earn from or what I’m passionate about. So then I moved onto the next step and the next step was my focus, my niche is custom development; extending plug-ins, extending themes, adding functionality, rest API, all that kind of thing. Then I started looking at all the options. There are companies like Toptal, there are companies like WP Curve, Freelancer.com, Upwork. There are all these companies and I looked at their processes and I tried processing projects on a few of the Freelancer packages, I applied to WP Curve. And I realized that most of these businesses their focus was always about the bottom-line of money. So get the cheapest developer to do the job, we don’t want to spend a lot of money that seems to be across the board.

Matteo: Yeah!

Jonathan: That’s great for certain companies. I found that there wasn’t a company I found across that board that their focus was good customer service. Now my focus is good customer service as I explained earlier. For me, it’s important to build a relationship with a client. They know they can contact me and say this has happened help please, help me sort it out. Even if it doesn’t relate to what we did together maybe I can advise or I can guide. Interestingly, I just spent 5 years of my post high school career in the customer service industry, in retail. I’ve got that built in you know the customer. The customer is your salary so keep the customer happy and you’ll get a salary. And then somebody I think somebody mentioned Codeable to me and said: “If that’s how you think you should look at Codeable”.

Matteo: Oh…

Jonathan: I went on it and the first thing that I saw, I think it was somebody who may have freelanced for you guys for a number of years and he now works for Automattic funny enough, and he said: “If that’s how you think you should really check out Codeable.” I went on and saw the key thing was customer service. The secondary thing was fair price for fair work. But the primary thing was building good customer relations, good communication, you know Automattic talks about communication, is the lifeblood of any business. Within a freelancing environment or self-employed environment where there is no one person controlling client developer communication, it’s up to the developer to manage better communication, here is a business which is helping the developers do that. This is where I can do my best work if you will. That’s what led me to apply at Codeable.

Matteo: Nice story, if I understood correctly somebody references you to Codeable, right?

Jonathan: Yes!

Matteo: Just test it…

Jonathan: Yes!

Matteo: Do you remember the application? How you went through it? Was it hard for you? Anything, was it funny or hard probably? I don’t know.

Jonathan: My biggest concern was my lack of WordPress experience applying as a Codeable developer. I only started… I had known about WordPress and dabbled in WordPress about 2009 my blog has been running on WordPress since 2009. But my work career was never in WordPress it was in other frameworks. So I never really got to dig into WordPress and understand how WordPress worked. So when I applied it was about June midway through the year when I applied. I was very nervous that I didn’t have enough experience in WordPress to get through to that point. I applied in June and I left it. Some time went by and I went “okay my experience level isn’t enough that’s obviously why they haven’t gotten back to me”. I kind of just went on with my life. Funny enough, I was back on the Codeable website one day for some reason and the little chat window popped up and there was David. Yeah, and you know “Hi I’m David”. Probably going to pronounce his surname wrong David Papandreas. “Just want to see if you need anything”. I thought, why not.

“Hi David hi I’m Jonathan” and we just started chatting. It was amazing I said to him upfront I’m not a client I’m a previous a developer, I applied and I was just on your website and he just started a conversation and I thought this is pretty amazing. This is guy is a happiness engineer at this company, I’m sure he’s gotten way better things to do than chat to random person but here he is chatting with me. Maybe it wasn’t him maybe it was a bot whatever… I just thought it was cool and we started chatting and he said: “When did you apply?” And I told him and he said “Okay let me have a look at some of your things. Okay you’re there I see your application.” He said: “Has anything changed in your life?” I said when I originally applied I was very nervous because I didn’t have WordPress experience. And he went “Oh tell me about that”. And we started chatting about my lack of so-called experience. He said to me: “Hang on you’ve been working as a PHP developer, framework and all that so it’s just learning a few new functions and way of doing things.” He said: “Have you built plug-in?” I said every since I applied I built a few plug-ins that I’m selling. He said: “Why haven’t you added that to your application?” I didn’t even think of that. I didn’t think of adding my plug-ins. He said: “Send me the details”. I sent him the details he updated it. And within about 2 weeks I was contacted by Chris. And Chris and I had a bit of a back and forth. He was going to send me the first sort of phase testing and I was busy with a project so I couldn’t get to it. I was nervous like these guys are going to move on, they’re not going to want me because I’m not available. I kind of very much almost applied my employed experience of being employed at a company to this Codeable situation. And Chris said to me “No stress, no worry when you get there you’ll know.” So we did the test and he was very happy with that and I had the interview with I think it was him and Raleigh. That was… I was about to speak at Word Camp Cape Town.

Matteo: Wow, astounding!

Jonathan: Raleigh was like “Wow that’s amazing you’re speakers and all that”. I just said to me I went to Word Camp Cape Town in 2015 for the first time I decided after that WordCamp I had 3 goals; number one I was going to switch 100% to WordPress; number two I was going to speak at a WordCamp within the next year, I was going to bombard them with applications if I had to; number three I was going to eventually organize a WordCamp. Those were my 3 goals when I walked out there. I’m very much a guy when I make a decision I do it, whether it’s crazy, whether it’s an angel trick kind of thing, I’m going to do it.

Matteo: If it’s on your list…

Jonathan: If it’s on my list, I’m going to do it yeah. And that’s why I keep my list very small because otherwise, I’m not going to do it.

Matteo: Otherwise, yeah it’s complicated.

Jonathan: He was very happy he said: “We’re very happy so thank you very much”. I think within a week Chris came back to me and said: “Happy to have you onboard”. The next day already before I was even on the system, he was emailing me to saying “Here is a project, if you’re keen.” So yeah it was a very interesting. And I actually said to him afterward, the Codeable system is very similar to the Automattic way of doing things. It was a very relaxed, easy to do and comfortable experience to become a part of the Codeable team.

Matteo: Thank you for sharing your… really an insider view here. How are things going here at Codeable?

Jonathan: As of today…

Matteo: As of today yeah.

Jonathan: As of the end of last year today things are going well. I have personal targets that I’m trying to meet in terms of what I want to earn. I’m happy to share those figures; I have no problem sharing those figures. My personal target every month I want to try and make $2000. Now that, and my income that I earn from the other business, puts me in a happy place where I know I can feed my family, pay my bills, there is a little bit left for daddy’s toys. And that’s my target. So as of December, my withdrawal was just short of that just $200, it was about $1800.

Matteo: Pretty close.

Jonathan: It’s pretty close. If you think about the fact I started in September. I’ll be honest the first 3 months were difficult not because it was difficult finding work but it was difficult for me again to find the process that I’m comfortable with. Not the process other people follow, the process I’m comfortable with. That’s something I’d like to say to anybody watching this. I’m going to make a suggestion. Anybody watching this who wants to work with Codeable, don’t try to be like any other developer. Do what works for you because if you do what works for you, the customers that want to work with someone like you will come and find you. And that’s what I found. Somebody once said to me that if you see a task and somebody that you know well that you respect applies for that task… because my question was its respectful for me to reply to that task. And he said: “No because you don’t know that that customer, that client will work well with that other person. That person may be amazing but the customer might work better with you and you’re robbing the customer the opportunity to work with you”. That opened my eyes to a different way of thinking. So as long as I stick to the way I work and the way I’m comfortable in doing things, then the customers that want to work with that kind of fiddle, the clients that want to work with that type of person will work with me. Then there is no worry about other people applying because other people will apply and the customer will choose the person that’s right for them.

Matteo: Yeah.

Jonathan: If I wasn’t right for them then the next customer might be or the next customer. That’s kind of what I’ve discovered is to not worry about everybody else, just focus on my niche and what I do and how I do things not try to be anybody else. Right now December was a very good month, January is shaping up too. I think I might even hit my target or might even go over which I’m excited about. I don’t think much but it might even go over which I’m very excited about. For me, that’s quite an achievement.

Matteo: Wow!

Jonathan: Yeah!

Matteo: First month of the year… last month, sorry in December you almost hit your goal.

Jonathan: Yeah!

Matteo: This month you’re almost going above it so… congrats.

Jonathan: Absolutely, thank you.

Matteo: I mean I have another question. If you look at your past working life, let me just use this once your past ‘freelancing’ life. Sorry to use that.

Jonathan: No problem.

Matteo: And you fast.forward to today how things have changed for you. Are they any different?

Jonathan: So yes they are different in a lot of interesting ways. I can choose to take an afternoon off and spend it with my family if I want to, or I can choose to work from 7 in the morning till 7 in the evening if I want to. That was a big thing. It’s difficult to explain but for those people who have children your life changes quite drastically in that you realize that it’s not about how much time you spend but it’s about making sure the time you spend with them is of quality. And because we were self-employed at this business, the time I was able to spend with my children was not quality. Now I can make decisions and, for example, my son’s birthday is coming up in January. My wife is saying she wants to do something on Wednesday afternoon. I can say: “I can help you with that”. I can schedule my life and schedule work and I can help you with that. We’re talking about in a few months time packing up, taking a few days and going away for a break. So I don’t have that requirement. This is the funny thing is I can go away and still do some work. It doesn’t have to be full time but when I was on holiday over Christmas there was a client project I was still doing a bit of work on because it kind of overlapped and that was fine. And the client understood I was away and I flicked it in when I could. I have my laptop and my internet I can work anywhere.

Matteo: That’s the freedom.

Jonathan: That was a big change is the freedom. The interesting thing about freedom is you have to be the kind of person who can manage that freedom. There was a stage when I first started in web development 10 years ago, where I wasn’t self-employed I was working with somebody else and they were basically bringing in the clients and I was billing them. I wasn’t getting my own clients, I was theoretically working for them but I was billing the project. And I used to… it was so silly, I used to sit and work till about 2 am, then play Counterstrike till about 4 am, and then sleep till about 11 in the morning and wake up and restart the cycle. And that’s great when you’re that age but as you get older you have more responsibilities, you can’t do that anymore.

Matteo: Yeah…

Jonathan: I realized that actually if I had managed that a little bit better I could’ve been more productive with the time I had and had more free time to do other things. But I just kind of didn’t have a process I would just wake up and just doing whatever my body felt like doing and eventually once I’m wide awake then I would start working. So the big thing I found is with the freedom comes a little bit more, you have to have a little bit more self-control.

Matteo: Structure, I’d say.

Jonathan: But once you got that structure it’s easy to plan things and do things. The other thing that it’s brought me is almost a… it’s very cool working for a company and working on projects for a company and doing the things that you do. As a self-employed freelancer, you almost get more control over choosing the projects you want to work on; and that I quite enjoy. In the beginning, I stayed away from the bigger projects because keeping to small projects means I was doing different things all the time.

Matteo: Yeah.

Jonathan: Now I’ve learned that with a bigger project it’s possible to manage it in a way.

Matteo: Yeah.

Jonathan: That you set up 4 or… I’m actually, I’m sure it’s alright for me to share this. But I’m actually going to write an article at some point for one of our internal documentations on how to take a big project and break it up into smaller tasks because there are 2 advantages to that number one you’re never getting board because you can jump around and change. Number two your client is not at a point where they’ve shelled out a huge sum of money. Let’s say you get half way through or a third of the way through and something happens in your life.

Matteo: Agree.

Jonathan: And you can’t carry on now Codeable support has to now try and get another developer to read up the entire set of documentation whereas if you had broken it down into tasks the new developer just has to worry about the last three tasks or the last two tasks.

Matteo: Yes.

Jonathan: So it just means all around it’s just easier if you need to get somebody to pick up the project or the client gets to appoint where they go okay I have enough. I don’t… I realize I don’t need these extra pieces anymore or I’m not… I don’t have budget for these extra pieces anymore. Let’s leave them till I do have budget. It just gives you way more scope of managing a bigger project.

Matteo: You can wrap things up in every milestone, every step.

Jonathan: Exactly and that’s applying the scrum methodology to a Codeable project.

Matteo: Yeah nice… so I guess you must quite happy about this freelancing life or path you’ve taken. Let me ask you one last thing. I know some other experts like you, after working with us for some time, they’ve been able to let’s see… travel more, put down a deposit for a new house, or just invested on improving their freelance business with better software for example. How about you did you do anything like that? Are you planning to do anything like this?

Jonathan: Let’s put it this way because of my journey through life and because of my experiences I’ve kind of, in terms of personal goals, in terms of putting down a deposit on a house, getting a car, that kind of thing, I had already more or less achieved those before I became 100% self-employed and that was because of the advantage that I had with this other business. Right now the goals are more family-oriented. So making sure I can put aside money for my children’s education; making sure I can pay off my home loan; making sure that we can improve the house; making sure that I can just make you know supply for my family, food, you know, pay my bills. I have every month that kind of thing. But yes there is more of a personal goal that I want to…

I’m hoping to start that fund this year, is a personal travel fund, because my wife and I have discussed about once the children are older and we can leave them with a granny for the week, we would like to do some traveling. We weren’t able to do it before we had children, so we would like to do it afterward. So that is something I would like to try and put some funds away for. And obviously, you know, being able to invest in myself. So something that I’m looking at right now is possibly upgrading my laptop. It doesn’t need to be done right now but, eventually, it would need to happen and I would like to get something that would last me for another 5 years. Also just making it… what I like to try and do is I like to try and take a small amount either every month or every few months and invest it in a piece of software that makes my life easier. So as an example, one of the early things I did last year is I took $99 and I invested in buying myself a copy of PHP Storm. That has made my life so much better. Something that I started doing at the beginning of this year was I started looking at how I’m spending money on hosting and how I can improve that. Actually, I found that I could reduce my cost by making some changes. So ironically being in this position where I’m working at Codeable and I’m able to manage the work coming in and have this goal… because I know what projects are coming up I, know where the goal is, and how much time, and I go oh I can actually spare half a day and I sit and look at where I’m spending money and how I can reduce that. My goals right now are more around saving, family and those kinds of things at this point in time.

Matteo: Yeah that’s amazing goals. I mean they are still super important. It’s not just about…

Jonathan: I’m not a Lamborghini guy like Nathan.

Matteo: Okay well, that’s great to hear. I think that’s enough for today Jonathan. It was super interesting hearing your story.

Jonathan: Thank you.

Matteo: And thank you for sharing it with me, with us. And once again, I would like to thank you very much for spending your time with me and all of us. So wish you a great day and talk to you soon bye.

Jonathan: Thank you very much, bye.

Matteo: Bye.

The post Changing Lives: Jonathan Bossenger appeared first on Codeable.

In this new episode of Changing lives, we’ll meet with Onur Demir a full stack PHP developer working with WordPress since 2008. Onur has specialized in many areas like CSS, Custom Post Type, Custom Themes, Gravity Forms, Avada, WooCommerce, just to name a few.

During the interview, he’ll share with us his insights and thoughts about:

• why he decided to be a freelancer
• why he started his own company
• what strengths and values he sees in Codeable
• how being a Codeable expert changed his life (and his business)

Need help with your WordPress projects?

Hire Onur Demir or just post your project and have one of our other experts take care of it immediately.

Want more stories from WordPress developers? Check them out here:

Changing lives #1: Spyros Vlachopoulos.
Changing lives #2: Nathan Reimnitz.
Changing lives #3: Alexandra Spalato.
Changing lives #4: Raleigh Leslie.
Changing lives #5: Alex Belov.
Changing lives #6: Bogdan Dragomir.
Changing lives #7: Ray Flores.
Changing lives #8: Zach Nicodemous.
Changing lives #9: Oliver Efremov.
Changing lives #10: Bruno Kos.
Changing lives #11: Surendra Shrestha.
Changing lives #12: Marius Vetrici.
Changing lives #13: Mitchell Callahan.
Changing lives #14: Puneet Sahalot.

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a new episode of “Changing lives”!

Video Transcription

Matteo: Hi everyone this is Matteo from Codeable and in this new episode we’re going to meet with Onur Demir who will share with us his story and experience as a freelancer. He will also tell us more about working as a Codeable expert, telling us more how these experiences in a way changed his life. So thank you for joining us in this new episode of changing lives. We really appreciate it.

Onur: Hi Matt, how are you?

Matteo: I’m great you?

Onur: I’m great as well.

Matteo: Wow so let’s start and let’s start with the super easy question. Why don’t you start by saying which part of the world you are, where you’re from and most importantly how long have you been a freelancer.

Onur: I’m from Turkey. I was born and raised in the capital Ankara. But for the last 9 years, I’ve been living in Antalya which is the south coast. That’s all about where I’m from and where I live. And how long I have been a freelancer, well I’ve been a freelancer all throughout my life.

Matteo: So you’ve never been an employee?

Onur: No.

Matteo: Wow, I guess you’re the first one the first time I’m hearing this story. So you’ve always been freelancing through your entire life.

Onur: Well, it started like hey I don’t want to work for anyone; I just want my freedom when I was in college. So I had to create something that I could sell to people but it wasn’t so easy. Then I thought let’s start a company and I was like a one member show. And I have been freelancing since then.

Matteo: Would you mind telling us what you like about freelancing? Why did you choose this business path instead of ending up in a regular 9-5 job?

Onur: Well, first I’m a workaholic I love to work and a 9-5 will not satisfy me.

Matteo: Really?

Onur: Yeah really and when you work hard for anyone when you exceed the hours of the time they will not be paying you so well. So instead of trying to be a slave I just wanted to be a master.

Matteo: Wow that’s a nice catch really.

Onur: So I can set my time schedule as I want, I can work all night, I can work all day; no one can tell me when I will work or when I will sleep. And I just want to be challenged; that’s the main part. When you’re freelancing there are lots of challenges. Some days you’re fixing an easy CSS and other days you’re fixing a tremendously high-end PHP code and one day you’re dealing with a server. So the challenge is not always the same and it’s always changing meanwhile, you get a great market research so you know what people are seeking for. For example, you’re getting freelance jobs about something more frequently than the others then you see the market needs a product like this so that we can…

Matteo: Yeah.

Onur: So we have formed the company and we’re bringing our freelance experience into that company and we bring products and sell to people.

Matteo: Okay we’ll get there. I’m going to ask you about this… Sorry to interrupt you because we’re going to develop this further down the interview because I have another super tough question and I wanted to ask you right at the beginning. So even if you’re at the beginning of this interview I’m going to ask you like a tough question right away. Are you ready?

Onur: Yeah!

Matteo: So what does it take to be a good freelancer and do you think anybody can be one?

Onur: Well what does it take? Well, you have to devote yourself if you want to be a freelancer. I don’t know from whom I heard but there is a saying “If you want to win your life do your own job.” So being a freelancer is the exact equivalent of this saying. If you want to be a freelancer you have to devote yourself, you have to communicate. You have to work harder than anyone you know. If you do all those well the rewards will be great. You will achieve great things. But first of all, freelancing means discipline.

Matteo: Yeah.

Onur: If you’re thinking like hey I’m a freelancer I can do whatever I want whenever I want, that’s wrong. That’s the major mistake that you’re going to do. And the second mistake that I come across often is that be honest with you and your clients in every situation. Things can happen, you can deliver late, and you might not able to deliver but be honest with yourself and your client. This way they’ll bring you more clients that for sure.

Matteo: Yeah I totally agree with you.

Onur: So there are 3 things: devoting yourself, discipline and being honest. Those are the 3 keys to being a good freelancer in my opinion.

Matteo: Yeah, super powerful.

Onur: The rest is about luck.

Matteo: Yes, luck is always part of life.

Onur: And knowledge, nut knowledge can be gained.

Matteo: Yeah right, so now that we know how you think about being a freelancer what does it take to be a good one? You were saying you’re not just a freelancer running solo. You’ve taken the leap and started a company. Would you mind sharing with us this experience? What were the challenges and what are the motivations that pushed you to create a company?

Onur: Well, first of all, the challenges I think is the same everywhere around the world: the legal issues.

Matteo: Really?

Onur: Yeah forming a company there are legal things you have to know, like taxes…

Matteo: Yeah, I know what you mean.

Onur: So if you’re trying to take the leap with no money, with no consultants, it will be a challenge.

Matteo: A huge one.

Onur: And I suffered it. If anyone thinks about taking the leap, first save some money and hire some consultants and then do that thing. The challenge was that and the second challenge is always for a company to get clients.

Matteo: Yeah!

Onur: So you have to have a plan about it. For me, it was a must to take the leap because I’m a developer, and I’m an engineer. I have no artistic skills.

Matteo: Yeah.

Onur: I have no design eye. I can make things work but that’s all.

Matteo: That’s it.

Onur: And we or I needed a designer. And also I was developing some products and I needed someone to support the product so I can deal with the development. So that made 3 people right off the bat. So it had to be a team then we formed the company and it’s going well.

Matteo: Cool story. Okay, so back to the main topic: what made you look for something new in your freelancing life like Codeable? I mean was there a specific reason like you didn’t like your previous jobs where the way you were working before? In a way you felt that you were missing something in your business life?

Onur: In short you’re asking why I’m at Codeable?

Matteo: Yeah!

Onur: Okay, I heard Codeable from a client of mine.

Matteo: Interesting.

Onur: And she was saying that it was a great place for WordPress developers. Well, at the beginning I wasn’t a WordPress developer I was a full stack PHP developer.

Matteo: Okay.

Onur: I checked Codeable and it was looking nice and I applied. I can say it’s a nice experience. I suppose anyone who thinks themselves as an expert should come into Codeable. It’s also very nice to be in Codeable. Well as I told you I came to Codeable by recommendation.

Matteo: From one of your clients.

Onur: Yep.

Matteo: How long have you been a Codeable expert?

Onur: 3 months.

Matteo: 3 months okay, and how are things going here at Codeable?

Onur: Well I don’t know how to put it but it’s been the busiest 3 months of my life.

Matteo: Really? Can you elaborate on this a little bit?

Onur: When I joined in Codeable it was July and in 2 weeks I had a vacation plan.

Matteo: Yeah…

Onur: So I had to leave for 10 days. But the jobs were coming in, coming in, coming in and I was hesitating to estimate on them but I couldn’t stop myself. So in my vacation, I was working.

Matteo: Yeah, which is you know…

Onur: Because all the jobs were fun. And working in Codeable is so much fun. When you’re in Codeable even if you’re not touching any link on the screen the intercom pop-ups David, Chris or any other person says hey please look that, please look at that. You just try to be nice and look at that and see oh that’s exactly how I can do it. And it was so busy. When I came back from vacation I started doing some other jobs etc., then I took another vacation because it was in the plan. So I’ve been in Codeable for 3 months. But I’ve been like 2 months at work because I had 1 month as vacation etcetera.

Matteo: Really?

Onur: And it was a living hell, Matt.

Matteo: Really?

Onur: Yeah, because you just cannot believe how nice to be a part of a family I can say for Codeable it’s a family.

Matteo: Nice.

Onur: All the experts, all the Codeable staff they are all helping each other. So you can’t stop yourself but work. That was great, in 3 months we did well I think.

Matteo: Yeah I think too I mean that’s a nice story.

Onur: We have finished 60 tasks.

Matteo: Yeah.

Onur: It’s great .

Matteo: Are those… this projects you just mentioned, do they have something in common or some are, I don’t know, small projects, other ones are a little bit bigger?

Onur: Well, honestly I couldn’t get some small projects over big projects.

Matteo: Okay.

Onur: Big… let’s say moderate projects; not so big not so small but nice projects. With small projects, there was too much competition you know so it wasn’t easy to get those projects for us. The other ones were great. The projects were about everything from design, conversion, to WordPress to WooCommerce or fixes, plugging development, or even consultancy there were lots of variety about the projects.

Matteo: Yeah, which is nice…

Onur: That’s great because if you’re specified on something you can go on it and get jobs from Codeable. If you do anything that comes challenging to you (like me) you can get jobs for yourself as well. For example, we don’t know anything about SEO in our team, and I see there are lots of SEO projects as well. If I was an SEO expert there are jobs for that section as well.

Matteo: Yeah

Onur: And as I told you previously I’m not a designer, we have an in-house designer but we’re not using her for our outside projects she’s only working for our inside projects so we’re not touching any design jobs but there are design jobs as well. The most surprising thing about Codeable for us is there are also non-Word Press jobs we did a PHP job as well.

Matteo: Really yeah probably I know that it happens.

Onur: Very rare let’s say 1-1000 but they come in.

Matteo: Probably this was… I don’t know if it was like a new client or just a recurring one that had also PHP requests.

Onur: Yeah it was a recurring client.

Matteo: Okay nice story! Another question: so if you look at your past freelancing life and then you fast forward to today, how have things changed for you? Are they any different?

Onur: Yeah when you’re freelancing outside of Codeable if you do not have a backup plan or if you’re in a country like mine, where there is not so much web development jobs that you can get from your surroundings, you’re doomed. You can’t get any jobs and if you even get jobs they will be very cheap. And you will not be able to pay your rent as well.

Matteo: Okay.

Onur: When I got in Codeable I said if I were only doing freelancing that would be enough because Codeable gives the value of the freelancer. For example, in other freelancing platforms, the client is always right. Whatever you do the client is always right and they can punish you even if you deliver. But in Codeable that’s not the case. Codeable first values the experts and the clients; they are equal in Codeable.

Matteo: They are equal.

Onur: Codeable… I was not a believer when I read the story. When I see inside of the Codeable I get the exact picture: Codeable hand-picks the clients.

Matteo: Yeah, we do that.

Onur: So if you’re a freelancer that’s a blessing.

Matteo: Yeah.

Onur: Because in many freelancing platforms you’ll see many huge projects. But they are never ever serious about the project. In Codeable that’s not the case. Every project is a serious project, every client is a serious client and Codeable covers your back. For example, for a job I was about to apply, I was warned by Codeable staff that the job would contain some design work and I’ve applied with no design abilities. They asked: are you sure? And when I saw it, wow okay I withdrew my estimate, I’m not in that. That’s great because they are protecting the client as well as the…

Matteo: The developer, the expert.

Onur: The developer, yes. The client forgot to write the design job in the project definition and Codeable stuff was waiting for people to write in there so that they will warn the people. That’s something great.

Matteo: I know, this is a real value to a freelancer.

Onur: Yeah definitely.

Matteo: And also to the client.

Onur: Yes for client, for the developer… for the client because they get the worth of their money.

Matteo: Yeah that’s it.

Onur: For the developer because they get work off their time.

Matteo: Yes

Onur: When you’re in other freelance platforms you will see quotes like $10 per hour. On Codeable that’s not the case.

Matteo: We’re totally opposite to that.

Onur: Yeah and I like it.

Matteo: That’s great to hear.

Onur: It’s like the Picasso tale. Picasso is doing a painting next to a river and a guy is watching him doing the painting. And Picasso finishes the painting on the canvas and the guy goes next to Picasso and says “Master I want to buy the picture you just drew”. Picasso says “It’s let’s say $10,000.” And the guy says “It took you an hour to draw it”. And then Picasso replies “No it took 50 years and an hour to draw.” So being a developer is like that you are putting in an hour job but everything is not done in that hour. You’re old past experiences, you’re old knowledge, your whole lifetime is in that hour so it has to be priced well and Codeable does that.

Matteo: Yeah I know that it’s one of the things that I think it sets us apart from the competition with other platforms.

Onur: Honestly you do not have any competition.

Matteo: Thank you for that. So last question. Yeah just one last superficial question. I know some other experts like you after working with us for quite some time have been able to let’s see travel more buy a motorcycle, put down a deposit for a new home or they just put back some money in their business to improve it. So how about you did you do anything like that? Are you planning to do anything like this?

Onur: Well I’m planning to do something but it’s too early to speak of it because, as I told you, I’ve only done 2 months of work.

Matteo: Yeah.

Onur: We got in some money but…

Matteo: Probably it’s a short bit of time.

Onur: It’s too early to speak of it. But if I were in Codeable let’s say, 5 years ago it would be different because when I saw the great picture of Codeable it changed how I looked at the job, the market, everything.

Matteo: Really?

Onur: Yep definitely.

Matteo: Wow that’s a huge impact.

Onur: Definitely because when you’re a freelancer or any business owner the sales is the most expensive bet unknown part of the job.

Matteo: Yeah I know that.

Onur: And if you can develop something but you can’t sell it’s worthless. Codeable just deletes that dilemma from the table.

Matteo: Yep.

Onur: If you are willing to communicate you can get clients. And when you get clients you get the money and you can run your life, run your business and do anything you want. That’s the key. And Codeable is great value for that.

Matteo: Thank you so much that was like the best… one of the greatest endings to this type of interviews. So I think that’s enough for today. It was super interesting hearing your story. Thank you for sharing it with me and us and once again I would like to thank you very much for spending your time with all of us so wish you a great day and talk to you soon.

Onur: Talk to you soon.

The post Changing Lives: Onur Demir appeared first on Codeable.

In this new episode of Changing lives, we’ll meet with Puneet Sahalot a young WordPress developer with more than 8 years of experience and CEO of IdeaBox Creations, a well-known WordPress design and development agency. Puneet has specialized in many areas like jQuery, PHP, CSS, Custom Themes and Plugins, Genesis framework, WooCommerce, just to name a few.

During the interview, he’ll share with us his insights and thoughts about:

• what he likes about freelancing
• why he decided to be a freelancer
• how he was able to start his web agency owner
• how being a Codeable expert changed his life (and his business)

Need help with your WordPress projects?

Hire Puneet Sahalot or just post your project and have one of our other experts take care of it immediately.

Want more stories from WordPress developers? Check them out here:

Changing lives #1: Spyros Vlachopoulos.
Changing lives #2: Nathan Reimnitz.
Changing lives #3: Alexandra Spalato.
Changing lives #4: Raleigh Leslie.
Changing lives #5: Alex Belov.
Changing lives #6: Bogdan Dragomir.
Changing lives #7: Ray Flores.
Changing lives #8: Zach Nicodemous.
Changing lives #9: Oliver Efremov.
Changing lives #10: Bruno Kos.
Changing lives #11: Surendra Shrestha.
Changing lives #12: Marius Vetrici.
Changing lives #13: Mitchell Callahan.

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a new episode of “Changing lives”!

Video Transcription

Matteo: Welcome everyone! This is Matteo from Codeable. In this new episode, we’re going to meet with Puneet Sahalot who will share with us his story and experience as a freelancer. But, he will also tell us more about working as a Codeable expert, letting us know how this experience, in a way, changed his life.
So, hey Puneet! Thank you for joining us today in this new episode of Changing Lives, we really appreciate it!

Puneet: Hey mate! Nice meeting you, and thank you for inviting me to this episode of Changing Lives.

Matteo: It’s a pleasure mate! So, I’m really looking forward to hearing more about you and your story. So, to get the ball rolling why don’t you start by saying where you’re from, which part of the world you are right now, and most importantly, how long have you been a freelancer?

Puneet: Ok. I’m living in the beautiful city of Udaipur, Rajasthan. I’m in India. And, I’ve been a freelancer since 2009. So, it’s been almost 7 years now…

Matteo: So, you’ve been a freelancer for quite some time.

Puneet: Yes.

Matteo: So, would you mind telling us what do you like about freelancing? I mean, why did you choose to start working by yourself, gamble on yourself and not ended up in a regular 9-5 job?

Puneet: I think the best thing about freelancing is that I get to choose the kind of projects I want to work on and the clients I want to work with, along with the freedom of working at my convenience. So, if I want to take a break from work for a few days it’s easy for me to schedule my clients and work accordingly. Of course, being in India, there’s a difference in time zones but I know that I can adjust for different time zones as well.

Matteo: Ok. So, freedom, of course, is one the most important reason that people opt for when starting their freelancing business path. Even if we are at the beginning of this interview I’m going to ask you a super tough question right away. Are you ready?

Puneet: Yea, sure!

Matteo: What does it take to be a good freelancer? And do you think that anybody can be one? Just to clarify my question a little bit further – off the top of my head, I think that dealing with clients, for instance, is natural for many. And also, you need to be good at planning your resources… So, what do you think? What does it take to be a good freelancer?

Puneet: I think the most important part is excellent communication and meeting the deadlines with your clients. So, if you can communicate the requirements and expectations very well with your clients and meet their deadlines set for your projects accordingly you can be a good freelancer.

Especially when we are working remotely and we are located in completely different time zones and in different countries it becomes a little difficult to convince your clients and build your trust initially. But, over the period if you build your portfolio and maintain your online presence I think it’s easier to convert your clients into long term clients.

Matteo: Yea, yea. I agree. But you’re not only a freelancer running solo, you have your own agency, right?

Puneet: Right.

Matteo: Would you mind sharing your experience on that? I mean, how were you able to scale from being a solo freelancer to an agency owner?

Puneet: So, I started as a freelancer. The initial idea was to continue freelancing but over the period I realized that I was leaving a lot of money on the table because I had limited time, limited skill set and my interest kept growing to try out different kinds of projects. But, as myself, I had limited skill set specializing in theme development. I saw a lot of potential in plugin development as well. So, 2012 I started my agency with only one developer and now we are a team of developers, designers, quality, and others. Over that period we have been growing, we have been getting new clients and investing the same money back into our business and it has helped me to grow into an agency.

Matteo: Yea, nice. Congrats! Tell us what are the challenges involved in the switch, if you could pick out or list a few of them.

Puneet: I think the biggest challenge for a new business owner is to find the right kind of team members. There are a lot of people who know how to code, but how to code best, how to best follow the guidelines is not a cup of tea for everyone. Some people are not going to learn those things. So, if you can find the right persons who are excited about working and excited about learning, it’s easy to build your team.

And then, the next problem as it concerns an agency is managing multiple people at the same time and dealing with multiple clients at the same time. So, you need to set up an effective project management process for your business. And, on top of that, we need to effect a quality analyst who can test everything, who can analyze everything and ensure that the goal or final product which we are delivering to our client is realistic and bug-free to reduce client revisions and back and forth.

Matteo: Ok. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. So, back to the main topic – what made you look for something new in your freelancing life, in fact, like Codeable? I mean, was there a specific reason, like you didn’t like your previous jobs or the way you were working before? In a way you felt like you were missing something in your professional life, or what else?

Puneet: So, luckily, I never got a job. I started my career as a freelancer. Initially, I started working on a particular theme and a framework. I wanted to expand my business because I discovered a site to build custom themes, custom websites and even offer custom designs. So, that was limiting for me with my existing set up; and then I came to know about Codeable through Twitter and I tweeted about it and asked if I could join it or not.

Matteo: So you heard about Codeable through Twitter?

Puneet: Yea!

Matteo: And do you remember how you got in touch with Per or Tomaz? Do you remember this?

Puneet: Yea. It was a regular day, I was going through my timeline and someone tweeted about this new freelancer marketplace for WordPress, and it was Codeable. Interestingly, I found the website, I browsed the website and I found it really impressive. Because I’ve never been to any other websites earlier I never believed them, I never trusted them. Because there was a lot of competition the quality was not a focus on other websites but Codeable was and is, completely different.

So, I tweeted and asked if I could join Codeable, then I had a few email conversations and I was on board in 2014.

Matteo: Wow, nice! So, how long have you been a Codeable expert?

Puneet: More than two and half years now.

Matteo: And how are things going here in Codeable? Do you have anything to share?

Puneet: Yea. It’s been amazing! I think Codeable is one of the reasons why I run an agency now and why I’ve been able to scale up and I’ve been able to put a decent amount of money back into my business and grow my team. So, this has been fantastic joining with Codeable. And I think there is always a little place in your heart where you want to thank everyone at Codeable, and the founders of Codeable. It’s been an amazing community, more than marketing and a place to find new jobs; it’s a community for me. All the developers here are fantastic, and if I get stuck I can consult them. They are friends and not competitors here.

Matteo: Thank you! It’s a nice story, a nice point of view. Really, thank you for sharing this. And, if you look at your past freelancing life and you fast forward to today how have things changed for you? I mean, are they different?

Puneet: I would say my life has completely changed. As a freelancer, I was working crazy work hours. Being in India I was working late nights until early morning. But, after joining Codeable, this was a big relief. As I often tell my clients – I am not in your time zone, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to run away or I’m not going to complete something on time. Because Codeable provides a basic guarantee and trust to both of the persons it’s easy to convince clients. And this is how a lot of clients have worked with me without worrying about losing their time or money.

So, this has been a big relief for me. At the same time, as I mentioned earlier, I have been able to invest back into my business, and that has changed a lot for me because now I have a team so I can offload some burdens. They will deliver the same quality work I expect from them, and that’s a good thing for me.

Matteo: Sure is! Do you remember how many projects you’ve worked on and completed?

Puneet: I think it’s close to 200 now.

Matteo: Wow!! Impressive! That’s an interesting number.

Puneet: I have been a bit choosy about the kind of projects I pick up. Sometimes I take up small projects and sometimes I go for bigger ones like complete website building or custom themes and plugins.

Matteo: So, I guess, at the end of the day you must be quite happy about this new freelancing life that you have started with Codeable and that you have also started with your company. Let me ask you one last thing. I know some other experts like you, after working with for some time have been able to travel more, buy a motorcycle, put down a deposit for a new home. Others have invested in improving their freelancing business with better gear, for example. How about you? Did you do anything like that? Are you planning to do anything like this?

Puneet: Yes. I think I have been able to do a lot of that. I got some freedom to travel more. I have been attending a lot of WordPress camps because of that freedom.

Matteo: Nice!!

Puneet: It’s always fantastic to meet the WordPress community. That is one big plus for me. And, as I said I was able to invest back into my business and grow my agency; and that again is a huge plus. And I was able to put away some savings and I was able to travel.

Matteo: Yea! That’s it now. What more do you want? I mean, that’s awesome story! 😀
I think that’s enough for today. It was interesting hearing your story, Puneet. Thank you for sharing it with me, with us. And, once again, I would like to thank you for spending your time with all of us.

So, I wish you a great day and talk to you soon.

Puneet: Thank you, Matteo. It was wonderful being with you and I’m happy to be a part of Codeable. Thank you very much.

Matteo: Yea. We are happy to have you on board, mate.

The post Changing Lives: Puneet Sahalot appeared first on Codeable.

In this new episode of Changing lives, we’ll meet with Mitchell Callahan an experienced WordPress developer and co-founder of SAU/CAL, a WordPress agency focused on WooCommerce development. Mitchell and his team have specialized in many areas like Custom API Integration, Custom Plugins & Themes, Gravity Forms, MailChimp, Plugin & Theme Customization, WooCommerce Subscription, just to name a few.

During the interview, he’ll share with us his insights and thoughts about:

• what he likes about freelancing
• how he was able to scale from being a freelancer to a web agency owner
• what vision and core values drive his company
• how being a Codeable expert changed his life (and his business)

Video Transcript

Matteo: Hi everyone! This is Matteo from Codeable and in this new episode we are going to meet with Mitchell Callahan, who will share with us his story and experience as a freelancer. But that’s not all! In fact, he will also tell us about working as a Codeable expert, letting us know how this experience, in a way changed his life. So, hey Mitchell! Thank you for joining us in this episode of Changing Lives, we really appreciate it!

Mitchell: Hey man, thank you Matteo. I’m just doped to be here, so light it up! Let’s do it!

Matteo: I’m really looking forward to know more about you and your story. So, to get the ball rolling why not just start by saying which part of the world you are right now, where you’re from, and most importantly – how long have you been a freelancer?

Mitchell: Yea! So, right now I’m located in Toronto, which is like the biggest city in Canada

Matteo: Woa…

Mitchell: Yea, yea. It’s a dope spot and the rest of my team is all around the world. How long have I been in the game? Probably… It’s been about. It’s March 2011, so just about 5 years or over 5 years.

Matteo: Ok. So, you’ve been a freelancer for quite some time now. Would you mind telling us what you like about freelancing? Why did you decide to start working by yourself and not ending up in a regular 9 – 5 job?

Mitchell: I think my answer is pretty much the same as everyone else’s. It’s that freedom. I mean, you’re still working with other people but I can be anywhere in the world and I can set my own hours. I wake up and have my coffee and I just sit at my computer. I’m not worried about the commute or going to some office who knows where.

Matteo: That’s empowering. Right. Even if we are at the beginning of the interview I’m going to ask you a super tough question right away. Are you ready?

Mitchell: Ok. I’m bracing myself.

Matteo: What does it take to be a good freelancer and do you think that anybody can be one? Let me explain this question a little bit more. Off the top of my head – dealing with clients isn’t natural for many. Also, if you’re not good with planning, for example… Or maybe you’ll likely face some bumps in the road. So, tell us about it. What does it take to be a good freelancer?

Mitchell: I think the one thing I always tell people is the customer experience – you really want to make them enjoy working with you. And that means a lot of things. So, it’s about setting your expectations, so they know what they’re getting into, they feel reassured, they feel safe and confident… And something that really works well for me is just being completely honest and transparent and really communicate, over communicate! You can’t say enough. So, I would really hone in. Of course, you have to have a great product because that’s a part of the whole package. But really just hone in on delivering a great experience and people always come back.

Matteo: Yes, yes. I so agree with you man! But, I also know that you’re not only a freelancer, you’re also a web agency owner. How cool is that, right?

Mitchell: Yea, yea! It’s a different mindset. Instead of thinking about solo, you are thinking about how you can I really scale this up and bring more people and let it grow.

Matteo: Would you mind sharing your experience in that? I mean, how were you able to scale from being a freelancer to a web agency owner. What are the challenges involved in the switch, for example?

Mitchell: Well, first, the company is called SAU/CAL. We’re a distributed team.

Matteo: Nice shirt.

Mitchell: Thanks brother! Likewise man. I try to get my hands on one of those Codeable tees, but it’s exclusive man, you know. The time slot… if you order in that window you can get it… I like that scarcity man.

The key to scale up is the same, you know. Once you get more business there are too many pieces that you can’t handle. Once you’re a developer you want to develop. You don’t want to worry about sales, managing your cash flow, accounting and your legal. So, for me it was just really establishing kind of like a culture and our values (what’s most important). So, when people come into my life that have those values, you bring them into the team. And that becomes such an enjoyable experience to work with.

It’s all kind of (I don’t want to say reactionary), but you get the additional sales, sign up for something like Codeable, get more jobs than you can handle, and then you adapt – like ok, I’ve got to bring another guy, let’s do this!

Matteo: Let me ask you this: what made you look for something in your freelancing life, in your web agency path, like Codeable? Was there a specific reason?

Mitchell: Yea! In order to succeed people often say you have to figure out all the wrong ways to do something, or you just have to have really good success at one thing. That’s another way to kind of know what the right way of doing something is.

And, for us, we did all these mistakes – like, we were targeting people with very generic marketing. Like, ‘we’ll build your website’. It’s just so generic and it’s really not unique. The beauty with Codeable is that Codeable is only for WordPress, and we’ve only ever been developing for WordPress. But, we never, ever stated that, and what Codeable really taught me was knowing your specialty, knowing what you’re good at and really just communicating that. It’s so specific. It’s not generic.

That’s why Codeable has been so awesome for us, because it allows us to work on what we know and what we’re good at. It’s just the ideal customer! So, it’s been a really awesome experience for us.

Matteo: It’s kind of you to say that and super interesting, of course! Do you remember how did you hear about Codeable?

Mitchell: I heard about Codeable because most of the development work we do is WooCommerce, and WooCommerce has a program called Woo Experts. But, before it was called Woo Experts it was Woo Workers. And on the Woo Workers page, at the very top there was this banner for Codeable. And I was like man, who are these Codeable guys? They get all the spotlight up here!

I made that mind shift a while back, and I was like why do I look at Codeable as a competitor? That’s just silly. So, I reached out, had a chat with Dave and I realized we need to be working on Codeable or with Codeable! So, we contacted you guys and it’s been awesome ever since. I just love your whole team. I’m really glad we did.

Matteo: Do you remember how long you have been a Codeable expert?

Mitchell: I think it’s about 6 months now.

Matteo: Six months, ok. There’s also something interesting in your story because you’re not just a Codeable expert, you also participate in what we call Codeable Pro. Would you mind sharing your experience with this program that we have inside Codeable?

Mitchell: Yea. Codeable Pro is awesome. I remember when I heard about it, they were like ‘you got to prove your work before you can hop on there!’ I was like – I’ve got to get this Codeable Pro man! And so, we did our first couple jobs and they went well and we’ve since graduated.

And, Codeable Pro is really just instead of doing individual tasks it’s about the project approach. It’s bigger things that require more resources that a single freelancer may not be able to handle on his own. And so, as an agency, that was a perfect fit for us. So, it’s been fantastic.

Matteo: So, through Codeable Pro you’re also targeting different types of clients, right?

Mitchell: Yea. We’re dealing with more businesses, not so much like… (well, everyone is kind of a business which comes from Codeable), but just bigger companies with bigger needs.

Matteo: Well, thanks for your explanation.

Mitchell: I mean, it’s clear. You could probably explain it better. You’re from Codeable.

Matteo: Let me ask you this: when you look at your past freelancing life and then you fast-forward to the present how have things changed for you? Are they any different?

Mitchell: Yea. They really are. One of the hardest parts of building a business is your sales. There is this phrase, I think it’s Mark Cuban who says ‘more sales will solve all your problems’. It can be a struggle. And after being on Codeable that part of the business is a lot more effortless. So, the beauty of when you can simplify a part of your life and when it takes less time, it really opens you to focus on things that you may have never focused on before.

Now that Codeable can handle the sales and marketing parts we’ve really had time to build internal tools, automate more of our lives… And that’s always cool because that’s when we progress and progression is what makes you feel really happy.

Matteo: Let me ask you a super wide question like: how is it going with Codeable? How many tasks and projects have you already completed and how is it going with this project you are working on?

Mitchell: Right now we have about 4 active projects, some that can take a bit longer because they are larger in size. And we have completed I think we’re about 8 or 9. Ours are pretty big, so for someone else on Codeable who does tasks, consider 50 or 60 tasks combined.

Matteo: Yes, of course.

Mitchell: But honestly, it’s just nice to… I remember getting my first payday from Codeable: I was like man, that’s sweet cheese!

Matteo: Do you remember that specific project? Do you mind sharing with us something about it?

Mitchell: Yea. It was this awesome guy named Shawn And he had a lot of customization he needed on his site. I just remember him clearing the bill and us receiving the funds. I was on vacation and I just remember the wire coming into our bank account, and I was just like ‘sweet’.

Matteo: That’s a great moment!

Mitchell: It was so great man!

Matteo: Just like cha-ching!

Mitchell: It’s just awesome man.

Matteo: That’s amazing to hear mate! I guess you are happy about this new freelancing life. But let me ask you like the one last thing – I know some other experts like you who, after working with us for some time, have been able to, let’s see, buy motorcycle, travel more, put down a deposit for a new home, invested in improving their gears for their freelancing business…

How about you, did you do anything like that? Are you planning to do anything like this?

Mitchell: To be completely transparent – when we built our business we’ve always been able to fund ourselves from revenues. But earlier on when you don’t have any money sometimes you have to borrow some money. So, earlier on we did have some money that we had to pay back. And I remember when we’ve paid it all back and that’s like really refreshing and it feels good, and now it’s about saving money and investing money.

Matteo: So, it’s a new chapter in your business life.

Mitchell: Yea, absolutely! So, speaking about making a big purchase – I will be buying a condo in the next month. So, Codeable is helping out with that for sure!

Matteo: Really? Wow, that’s a huge one!

Mitchell: Yea. And Toronto is crazy! Condos here are just so expensive! But you got to do what you got to do!

Matteo: Yea, sure! That’s great to hear mate! Well, I think that’s enough for today, Mitchell. It was super interesting hearing your story. Thank you for sharing it with me, with us. Once again, thank you for spending your time with me and with all of us. So, I wish you a great day and talk to you soon!

Mitchell: Likewise man, thanks. And thanks for hopping on. And for everyone out there listening, if you ever get on Codeable, you’re going to hear this from Per, the CEO. I love him. He says ‘More tasks, just do more tasks!’

Matteo: He sure does!

Mitchell: Yea. I highly recommend the platform to anyone. If you need work, or if you’re looking for work it’s fantastic. And you guys are so, so killer man.

Matteo: Thank you so much Mitchell. We so, so appreciate it!

Mitchell: Likewise my man. Well, take care, and always a pleasure.

Matteo: Likewise. Have a good day.

Mitchell: Peace.

The post Changing Lives: Mitchell Callahan appeared first on Codeable.