Today we held our second public seminar on “How to Start Your Freelancing Career” at TECHRISE. The last time we decided to hold the same seminar, which was two weeks ago, more than 70 people registered to attend. We ended up having to select only 30 due to the limited space in our office. Seeing that it was a great hit, we decided to hold a second round of the same seminar. This time too, we got over a 130 sign ups so we just decided to go for two sessions in one day. I suppose we should have closed the form earlier, but we were just curious to see how many would respond!

The reason why we came to choose this topic was because both Take and I have had quite a lot of experience freelancing as a part time job. I mostly translate, while Take has recently been taking on more web development projects. We discovered freelancing about two years ago, with a Japanese freelancing platform. It was a total game changer for us. Initially it was hard getting projects with the competition, but eventually we were able to get more gigs as we experimented with our profile and our approaches to clients. After playing around with different ways to market ourselves, we began to earn quite a nice amount of pocket money. We were even able to earn back our travelling expense for our vacation by working a couple hours a day during that vacation (we still had fun, honestly!). We became workaholics in a way, but we loved the freedom of being able to work from anywhere, and doing as much or as less as we wished to. I honestly wouldn’t have been able to gain the experiences I have had so far, or even come to Nepal if I wasn’t backed up financially with what I earned from freelancing. Some of the tactics that we used in freelancing worked like magic, and once we got hold of it, things came pretty easy.

So our presentation was mostly around the tips and tricks we accumulated over the couple of years. I hope people found it useful – I mean, I certainly wish someone could have told me some of these things when we first started off! 31 participants turned up in each session, and the room was packed with human bodies. Mostly IT students, as well as some professional designers and web developers came out today. Even some who were currently working were interested because apparently they couldn’t really make it just by working for their company.

Having two sessions in a day was pretty tough, but it was a lot of fun interacting with the participants during and after the presentation. Besides, in between presentations Lakshman and Aadesh ordered Momos so that we would get that oily energy boost ;) Some seemed to be genuinely interested in what we do at TECHRISE. I hope we were able to get some TECHRISE fans though this event!