I Review My Own 2017 Book On Freelancing

it is just a complete waste of time in my opinion to send cold emails today if you have a portfolio and you done work they will reach out to you I think when you're starting out it's very tempting to just Spam the world me me me me me and follow up 20 times and get blocked they should see your profile and they should be like wow I can't believe this person exists a lot of people today are freelancing India to India which I think is a terrible idea it's not close to what You' make freelancing

outside if you're doing India to India it's not exactly freelancing you're running a business too many people want to make too much money really quick and one learning I've had is it takes time I think if I put P this much harder I'm going to get this much more so the question becomes what's my cap can I just keep going I had a easier time after some time charging more for my services than less I think if you're good you can charge whatever you want but to be honest you'll never feel 100% confident I think

the next TCS Lio blah blah blah is going to be made in [Music] video ladies and gentlemen hi today I have aov with me and for those of you that don't know abinav his full name is abov chakara me and abov wrote a book in 2017 which got published in 2018 it was called pajama profit it was about freelancing it was about remote work much before remote work is even a thing and the cool part about the book is that we made lots of predictions in the book and now 7 maybe 8 years later I

actually want to go through those predictions and I want to see how many of them we were right about how many of them we were wrong about but before that I want abov to introduce himself abav welcome how you feeling what's up vun what's up folks my name is abinav I'm the the founder of 10K designers uh last 4 years I've been living in Copenhagen I just moved back to Bangalore and yeah it's been a while since we wrote this bro yeah I we wrote this 2017 we started writing this oh you have a copy

he was a really old yellowed Pages Copy but yeah this is it dude so books last like 7 years right after 7 this is 2017 so about we wrote in 2018 so about 6 years later 6 seven years later the book has become yellow like the pages look like you know one of those old library books you can see some yellow stain on it this is not you putting talcum powder or like not talcum powder like turmeric on it right this is actually age I have to dig it up this is a first day copy

we got this on the day of the launch so I met a guy recently and uh the reason I wanted to do this video the reason I texted you I called you actually the reason I wanted to do this video was somebody I met recently he was 30 years old he like bro I read pajama profit and I was young I was like wait what do you mean young he's like no bro when I read it I was like 25 or 26 or something like that I was like oh my God it's been around for

a while the average like if somebody read this when it came out and they were 20 years old they now 26 so they've actually had six years of career time to figure out whether this is real or not and I feel like this is the book that really got us loyalty and followers um and and I think a lot of it has turned out to be true it because before it's time a lot of people look at certain chapters and be like dude this was way before it's time so what I want to do today

is I actually want to go through this um and I want to go through chapter by chapter and sort of figure out what are the predictions we made did it play out whether we were wrong on some things I think we should also be honest if we were wrong about certain things and be like why were we wrong right it helps us sharpen our thoughts for the next 5 years right and also in the end I want to make some more predictions for the next 5 years right so that's what I want to do why

did we write this book we started we actually started an agency more than 10 years ago right and in fact I've dug up this old business card like I was my God Chief Financial Officer basically I was the only one who could handle the money but we started the services thing because we were like yo we're in college we've got the skills we can do Photoshop a little bit figure it out how do we take these skills which is an abstract thing and possibly make money from this and we did that college it was great

but I think by the time we wrote this book it had been couple years since that had happened we had already graduated people would ask us you know how how to get started in freelancing and we were already starting to forget right we were already on the startup path like going hard into it and so we were like you know couple more years we're not even going to remember what this was like we need to right now put down all these thoughts write a book so I said if anybody just asks like hey I want

to get started freelancing what was your journey with freelancing what do I like there's a list of like 20 to 50 questions you can just say here's the link check out the book interesting you know we have two versions of that card you should be another version right so I think in the beginning we started with just so you know this we actually started this as a T-shirt and laptop skin company yeah right in college my first big pivot right actually I wouldn't even call it Big I don't know what we were doing in college

but this is the first card and then we had a second version of the card when we became corporate professionals after we started making money so the first one is before making money you can see there's a eagle or a hawk or something in there like a black a lot of textures lot of like grunge textures specifically good for that era really good for that era and like this made in Photoshop like 100 layers just for this PSD and then this is our out his logo and we said you know t-shirts not going to cut

it not cool let's get into more digital stuff let's do websites um and that's when we did this nice your title also changed it went from Financial Officer to Media strategist media I don't even know what that was but the thing is I was about to get into design and I think and not even I think I remember you taught me Photoshop right I was like bro I want to move from this and let's do Photoshop and then I was like okay what do we do and so the reason I called myself media strategist is

I was like we need to use design we need to do the use the cool stuff we're doing to get attention to make ourselves look cool to make ourselves look trustworthy and that's when I realized oh okay design you can use the stuff in Photoshop but then it has this effect on perception yeah interesting so let's go through the book Let's dive in let's see what we've written let's see uh whether we're right or wrong so pajama profit the Millennials guide to a sustainable freelance career question number one are freelance careers sustainable they are sustainable

but I think the definition if you call yourself a freelancer number one you're going to get from your parents and stuff they're like bro don't do this for free like no no I don't do it for free time waste okay but besides that I think freelancer is too limiting today um as we go through the book you'll realize that the better word for this is probably something of an independent Creator or just see if you're a designer and you work on brand experience UI design call yourself that don't call yourself a freelance and freelance that

you cheapen the role in a way yeah interesting I love the first the what what do you call it prologue or whatever we had one line okay I love this line it is so true but also untrue it says I'm going to read it out to the internet without which we'd be working 9 to5 okay without the internet we wouldn't be doing this but there's a lie in this which is we said that we be working 9 to5 I work I wake up at 12: in the afternoon and I work all the way till I

go to sleep so I work 16 hour days thank you internet you also work cuz without the internet we wouldn't be able to work 24 hours there's nothing else in the world that's that stimulating to hold your attention for that long too much dopamine yeah interesting yeah but without the internet this wouldn't exist this book wouldn't exist we'd be living the beaten path I'd be some corporate employee somewhere you would be some corporate employee somewhere we wouldn't even know other parts existed so without early internet in our brains and getting I think one common thing

between you and me is we both got computers early not mobile phones computers early mobile phones I think I got it slightly late and I think having a computer and internet connection early really showed us paths outside of the beaten path and I feel today a lot of what's being shown on the Internet is actually beaten path only but with rata like new packaging um but yeah forever grateful to the internet for for making this happen okay let's start so there's a bunch of chapters it's a very short book it's like 100 Pages or something

we're not going to go through everything awesome so chapter one uh was I think you know one of the things we said was one of the biggest factors that we've seen contribute to employability and I was running a recruitment startup at this time is technical skill and presentation we agree on that I think over the years we have realized that it's not just about skill the technical skill it's also about how you present yourself online the second thing which we said was in this chapter was what this book is not so there are two points

to this one is the book is not an abstract rant about the freelance industry we offer our insights and our personal learnings second thing which almost everyone forgot in the freelance industry especially in India is that this book is not a replacement for hard work we merely show you our paths but and we made a lot of mistakes along the way this book will help you sidestep some of them but it still requires hard work and dedicated approach yet uh I feel like that part of the message might have been missed by the audience do

you feel that I feel like people thinking people think freelance is a temporary thing and so the benefits that come with just going at it for a long amount of time that's the hard work and people might not stick around long enough to get that reward but then the bigger rewards come later right the smaller rewards are just the ones that keep you going day by day yeah also there's one line that I want to mention here is a special thanks to Ghana Shas for helping us edit and refine the concepts in the book so

2017 we wrote this you're now married to her yeah we dating back then now married yep nice so you predicted that as well in a way right you knew that this name wouldn't change yeah awesome uh so we started with our story I'm actually going to skip our story uh because we spoke about it very quickly we was we started as a t-shirt company in college we were just we we were bored in college wanted to do something realized t-shirts are actually a lot of hard work for very little margin so we actually pivoted from

t-shirts to freelancing that worked for about 3 years and we started off freelancing at about $67 an hour like ridiculous rates and then eventually went to like $1 $150 an hour uh our life changed over those 3 years we realized money is not everything I'm sure you also came to that same inclusion and that's why when we want to take on harder risks you buil something called listen which is a startup uh I built job Spire again startup we raised money you went on from listen to work at unacademy as the head of design so

I'm sure your esops there have are now worth bazillion dollar but yeah I think you know from where we started to where we're at the path has been good yeah right awesome there's one more line we said it's in bold which is tomorrow if you put me in a strange country without any resources all I need is a laptop and an internet connection and I know I'll build myself an awesome life fairly quick do you believe this this actually happened to me so last four years I was in a strange country uh after Ghana and

I got married we moved to Copenhagen like in 2020 uh right in the middle of covid and strange country beautiful country awesome right living there cold weather amazing architecture very inspiring but I had zero connections right and actually the only thing that kept me sane was that because of online work because I had built my distribution personal brand I was able to run 10K and even grow 10K in these four years while there right and yeah I mean I had some friends there but to be able to work hardcore actually grow the company remotely I

did not like we were working remotely back then right and this was when remote I think remote only became a common thing during covid yeah before that we were working remotely we were working with clients but um last four years actually built the startup totally remotely in a strange country so totally true yeah actually you know the next chapter and this is the chapter called freelance economy uh it says freelancing is the future I think we were right about that right I think the world really went from everyone needs to have like a 10 year

15E career at a particular job then move on to the next job for 15 years to a lot of this especially youngsters today are freelancing a lot where they're sort of working with a company for like 3 6 8 months mve on to the next company I don't don't like no value judgment on it but um it says that uh you know in America Freelancers were 35% of the American economy but that also included gig workers like a guy delivery guy or whatever I feel like freelance economy has really grown in the last few years

Co really accelerated it but we couldn't predict Co back then like nobody knew that Co was going to happen so what were you thinking when you wrote that the future is going to be work from home remote work pajama that's why it's called pajama profit right you're sitting in your pajamas which is a symbol for home and then you're making profit how did you know that before Co when I was in school it was all about the people we interact with are the people who we immediately know right for example you and I we met

at an IIT coaching first eventually we were also in manipal but you were limited the things you can do are limited by the people who are around you but then the thoughts that you think are limited to what they think yeah the reason I knew this is because yes we got computers very early we had access to the internet and we were plugged into these subcultures that to the rest of the people around us didn't even exist right for you it was DOTA for me A lot of it was just like Pokemon being a top

contributor on Yahoo answers I don't know why I was doing it it was just fun status yeah and you would get points and all of this stuff and so I had this feeling already that you know of course I want to be in a place where there are awesome people one of the reasons I also chose to go to manipal is I was like yeah let's have an experience that is an immersive away from home but yeah I had this feeling that you know there is more out there than the stuff that is immediately around

you and so if it is possible to do stuff on the internet it's possible to meet people on the internet a lot more can be done you just I had no idea what it would be and I didn't have an idea of the specifics you know when I started building freelance to the Future when I got my first project I feel like we have always experimented and once we run an experiment and it works for us like there's that feeling right we we called it in this book we called it the first project effect till

the first project nobody believes you nobody believes that fancing is possible they don't believe it themselves even I didn't believe it the first time I was on odesk today it's called upwork and I got my first project at the Malaysian ey Clinic we spoken about it in this and they wired me money online and it came through my because that time I also had this confusion how are they going to send me money yeah PayPal i' never heard of PayPal and that time we were paid through PayPal right it was like a life-changing moment you

see money hit your bank account and then you can use that the next day to buy groceries it's different like I was beaming I was smiling the next day I went to the you know in manipal we have these stores right outside and I remember going to one of those stores and I was smiling and I was buying stuff and I was like they were like why I was like it's my money I made money for the first time so I think um that's when I knew the the freelance economy is a thing because or

freelancing is the future or actually at that time I thought it was a present and I made this one mistake which today I don't make which is just because I'm doing something it doesn't mean it's the present because from us because we're the early adopters right because we've started using the internet very very early any new technology will will will be very early to it right like what we've done with AI but it takes the world 10 years to adopt it so today 78 years later has become mainstream uh that can also be a problem

as we learn in the book and I think when we were in it we thought we were late yeah we were like I wish like we're too young because we would see all these Freelancers who had logged hundreds and thousands of hours like how do we even compete we we thought we were really late to it to be honest yeah we were super duper duper young because there's so many people in the world so many people who want projects done it's just the number is massive it's like hard to compute and it's only gotten bigger

and bigger and bigger awesome so we predicted actually we didn't predict we uh indeed has a graph here of the projected freelance jobs this this was broken by covid so it I'm sure it went straight up beyond that but there is one thing right which I think people got the wrong message from it's that this book is about taking advantage exploiting the conversion rate between US dollar or any other foreign currency in India this is actually a financial book I'm not I'm a financial idiot but this is a book about Finance there's a book about

how Global price Arbitrage works but we didn't know it back then we thought oh we're making money from US Canada etc etc that's why we getting paid so much we knew that we obviously Indians wouldn't pay us that much but a lot of people today are freelancing India to India which I think is a terrible idea like it's not it's not close to what you'd make freelancing outside do you have any thoughts on the financial angle of of what we wrote I think it was interesting because suddenly money which is a hard thing it's like

like literally we were counting notes from the t-shirts no UPI back then yeah no UPI either to money becoming software like money becoming like something that comes in your email just like a attachment yeah that was like okay money is now you know it's in the computer and computer is kind of our domain like we're into this I don't know India to India is a bad thing it's just that if you're doing India to India it's not exactly freelancing you're running a business or you should be if you have one client you should do a

job yeah pretty much right and I think the interesting thing about this is if money is virtual now and it's gotten even more virtual right with like whatever UPI crypto all of this stuff see the big picture right the whole point is you don't have to limit yourself geographically in terms of people opportunities that's also money yeah I think the and there's a line here where we said the best talent isn't local for the US guy there it's like to hire someone like a software engineer per year is like $200,000 but if you go to

India it's like $20,000 so huge like it's an obvious win for them the problem is Trust of course they don't trust you know somebody who charging $20,000 because even they are like how can it be so low just like you are saying oh how can that pay be so high those guys are thinking oh how can the pay be so low especially during that period people just couldn't understand I had a easier time after some time charging more for my services than less MH it's weird because I was just like if I charge too less

I the perception will be like scammer yeah you should just be slightly under what they were charging and that's when we were making awesome money right like when somebody else was charging X but we were like xus 20% they're like okay that's believable so I think that is where we really got the opportunity from just be slightly cheaper than you know what talent is already there like I feel like the clients they should see your profile and they should be like wow I can't believe this person exists yeah like price is one thing but it's

like yo there's clearly something here like there's a mismatch yeah but I think we've ruined that I'll come to you know a little bit of where I feel like the world has changed to be become even more low trust now right because of certain people charging too little and then just being really bad at what they do and not communicating well like we have now have a bad reputation on the internet Indians like I I I wrote an article about this I don't know if you remember on medium I had written one article 2016 2017

about how there's too many Indians there charging too little and then scamming the customers right and because that you know now they they see that from you're from India and you get like a bad signal we'll come to that later but I think we also spoke about something called the pajama economy where we said that this is not true for all jobs might be true for design software Etc there's this V diagram what does this V diagram mean pajama and profit right uh first one is you got to be in the area of see we're

doing this to make money right there needs to be a profit to it pajama it's about Comfort right in the sense that you don't have to work from pajamas but it's like you get to decide what level you want to be operating at right and so it's the it's the when diagram off it's sustainable it kind of grows number two it's in your control you can kind of um tune this up and down and in that intersection you can go deeper and figure out do you also feel like I mean one of the things I

remember when we were talking about this is I also remember I said that it also has to be where the profit pool is like you can't fance certain things that there's no market for like you can't freelance as a grocery store worker right because you need to be there physically so this is this is a few jobs back then which were really overpriced in America knowledge work not overpriced maybe normal for them which we could really take advantage of that's where the profit pool the Arbitrage was and that's what you know we sort of um

took advantage of and again we spoke about you know why they actually want to hire us because it's you know it's cheaper it's obvious uh there's one really cool thing you wrote about the economy here which I I loved right so I think before this I wrote some about of all this price parity and stuff but I think you wrote something very awesome which is you are free to take as much money you want from this River No Limits like the economy is like a river you you're free to take as much money as you

want from this River No Limits the Only Rule is that you have to put in value that is equal to or more than the money you make it's very different from how regular people think about work today I'm going to a job you pay me I'll do the minimum yeah yeah okay but you're saying that it's like Indiana Jones you you've seen Indiana Jones most people haven't seen it right like uh if he's taking a treasure he has to put something of equal weight there otherwise the entire thing will collapse yeah so you have to

it's a trade can you explain this better for us I think the kind of thing I was realizing back then was growing up we're more consumers of stuff right and so we're purely consuming the money though seemed to be in creating stuff right and so the whole point of value creation is yeah you're consuming stuff you're learning the skills but you need to create something out of it right so value creation is a huge part but then how does this tie to money so the economy as a flowing river like you're sitting in a cafe

the lights are on people are making transactions all around you the economy is going right but if you want to be a part of this you can't just steal right you got to create something that has value people want it for that you know firstly people have to realize they want it and then if they do they pay you money for it and if you can just kind of figure out what's your part in this you can actually take as much money in the like flowing river of money you can take as much from it

but then the way you do it is through value creation and I mean some people messaged me saying they loved this concept some people like bro what are you talking about but yeah I think once you run a business once you start getting into this it becomes a little obvious like yo I think if I push this much harder I'm going to get this much more more and so the question becomes what's my cap like can I just keep going yeah and I think it's not about hard work as much like it's it's not like

that Crow and the water story where you just put keep putting like this thing and the water keeps rising and that that the stones are hard work the stones are value and sometimes value is not so connected to hard work it could be something that people really really really want but don't have but it's very easy for you to make it might take you one second to do it maybe you have an amazing talent to mimic somebody else's voice and let's say we were in an economy where that was very very valuable it'll take you

5 seconds for that 5 Seconds you make a lot of money like a like a celebrity doing a brand deal for a minute in that one minute they'll make more money than most people make in their lifetime but that's because there's a demand for it right so it's more demand that you satisfy with that value and you're able to take out out of the river right and when you run a business you're also delivering now value to your employees actually they are delivering value to you you are sending money to them so I see it

as like a bunch of lines between all of us some lines are thicker because they're adding more value and therefore they taking extracting more and some lines are thinner because the value and the cash exchange is lower whereas the traditional employee mindset is I'll do school I'll do college I'll get this degree and then I'm going to get a job no matter even if I go to the office and do nothing which I think is a completely broken concept and it's made this should be the real concept thought right like social media has completely got

like the inverse and it kind of sounds like some kind of business concept but in reality it's the most human thing ever like gratitude is Lindy right if can you explain what Lindy is it's something that has existed over time and continues to be today and so the longer something has stayed true the more it's probably a part of I'm probably not defining correctly but gratitude has been around forever right in a tribe if people are grateful to you because you provide something your value goes up and the the precursor to that is you got

to figure out what value can I create that people want and money is just a codified version of it actually money started as an IOU like oh you did this for me thank you I owe you here's a slip you can use this next time next time you want I I grow buffalos you know you saved my life here I was almost about to die you come to my house you give me the slip I'll give you the Buffalo even if I'm not there my friend will give you the Buffalo he knows the slip that's

literally what it is and when you go to work to a job you're supposed to deliver some value that is rare rarer the better right like if you have gold that time it was considered and the more grateful they are the more you can get the more it's valuable to them also like somebody's life is very valuable that's why medicine in the US super expensive right somebody's life is very valuable so the more valuable something is to somebody the more they they're willing to spend on it right so I wish more people understood this even

today versus the oh I get a job and then all I have to do is like just you know 8 hours there or 7 hours I think that's like completely missing the point right I think it's it's more about value delivered next we spoke about and I love this right we spoke about pajama categories those V diagrams we said okay there's certain pools where there's profit M let's talk about the pools of the profit and we call these these pools the pajama categories these are the pools that we had seen on upwork and odesk I

mean odesk at that time but dude there's a graph in this okay which I absolutely love it's truly played out I want to show people the graph yeah okay there's a there's a nice can you read out what are the categories so there's two axes one is demand for skills and the other one is time it starts with early adopter so there's very low demand for skills then there's acceptance that people are like okay this is something that's needed then this peak popularity where 2022 software engineering where everybody wants it and then suddenly there's commoditization

which is now everybody can do it right therefore the value of the thing is going down commoditization basically means it's too easy to get this product so people are less grateful so they're spending less money on you and then there's this last thing called automation which in 2017 for some for us to have this graph uh was pretty cool so early adoption acceptance Peak popularity commoditization automation we have seen this with software right and I keep talking about it and I'm like yo Peak popularity was 2022 it's 2024 where on the other side of it

starting to get commone pretty soon it's going to get automated right and we are seeing this exactly play out how do we have the wisdom to do this in 2017 I think it's connecting the pieces but question for you how does someone know where they are on the graph or is is is the industry on the graph or is an individual on the graph you can see by the number of courses being made on the topic right if there too many courses on it there's one it's fine there to that's fine feel like 100 people

making courses on it you are Peak popularity and then once it gets to thousand people making courses on it you are commoditized right because then if thousand people are making courses on the demand for people learning it is very very high therefore when you're applying to a job as a software engineer now you're competing with so many others who have also learned the skill therefore you're less valuable to the employer Therefore your price is going down people like infosis TCS salaries have stayed static considering the inflation is continued to go up that actually means that

the value of a software the average software engineer has declined which I believe in it's just Comm monetization if there were less software Engineers they were like software is still very valuable to the world don't get me wrong right people think I think software is over or whatever right like it's still very valuable to the world people are still going to use software whether internally or selling it outside that's a different debate but I feel like if you have so many software Engineers available for higher then the prices are going to go down it becomes

a less rare product people are less grateful there's less of an IOU and then there's going to be automation bold of us to say this pre AI era but let's see if we've spoken any more about AI in a 2017 written book awesome so then we started speaking about pajama categories and dude we had like a bunch of categories here that we had some experience with I'm want to talk about them one by one the first one is admin support mhm and we said you can make between $3 to $10 an hour and the new

technology Cycles every 1 to 3 years you have some experience with admin support yeah I think back then we thought admin support is like just low level hey you have to make an Excel sheet with 500 and just manually do da d da today for example there is somebody who runs operations on my team they get paid really well where they from they're from Philippines right um mother of two Unice does awesome work what's her name Unice okay and the thing is she's top performing employee right she's Pro she's also right now probably the only

person in the team who's remote and it's not lowlevel task at all like it's firstly engaging with uh customers engaging with internal Community um talking to students talking to mentors but it's a high trust role like she has access to most of my stuff it's a high communication role like you can't just be like oh like you have to be very clear uh you have to constantly be in the loop with me and so admin support I did not expect it would be crazy I thought it would be lowlevel task and I think the lowlevel

task I think she uses GPT for a lot of stuff but then it's also she's taken over a lot more responsibility because the small stuff she's just able to do it yeah awesome so dude there's one more thing you said in this some types of skills that fall under this pajama category include transcription yeah data entry personal and virtual assistantship customer service and research this is what your assistant does and you use a tool for this right you used a platform to get these assistants called some.com that time was called Shepherd or something right so

in insane how admin support has become such a big thing that time it wasn't virtual assistants weren't that big I somewhere didn't exist back then or at least I hadn't heard of them which was awesome the next pajama category is marketing pretty obvious I think it's done fairly well you know everything from ad writing to you know video creation I think he's done superbly well would you put content under marketing we have a separate category called content writing it's the third category it's called content writing and we said time to learn the basics is 4

weeks client demand is high but we spoke about it in terms of writing this is pre Geo and I'll tell you what we've written okay this pajam category includes article and blog writing academic writing and research copywriting creative writing editing and proof reading web content and so on okay as a freelance content writer you have to understand the business and decide what content works best how to convey the message in the best way possible and how to drive a point that will affect the business goal okay and of course we spoke about content Management Systems

like WordPress back then I think content is still very valuable I think both of these have combined now like marketing and content like a pure content writer probably not it you need somebody who thinks from that audience perspective I mean one thing I think we got wrong and maybe this was preo but I think we should have really accounted for video a lot more like people are not reading as much as they are watching people are watching like four five hours of video content a day yeah and to place this in time right we didn't

have channels back then shorts didn't exist most podcasts were Audio Only blogs was the biggest category of content right because SEO was the primary way that you know we made our channels after the book The Publisher had asked us that we need to promote this who make channels I wouldn't have started my YouTube channel without this book The Publisher said go make a book so go make a channel so I thought screw it I'll do it I'm sure it's the same for you I think if we had written this book after we made the channel

we would have been like yo we experimented this there's some traction here maybe it's going to become big but insane content writing then there was design which I think you've captured as a category in India uh this includes user experience design web design illustration logo design branding why has it become all about uiux today yeah why is the narrative captured by that I think uh uiu caught like this was mid last decade a lot of web designers were like yo are we only going to do websites like what's next and the fact that mobile was

picking up apps were picking up the biggest apps we used today you know started last decade um I think design uiu design became one of the highest valued design roles mostly because the output you created would be used by millions of people right much rarer for yeah much rarer for design to be scalable although today I kind of feel like it's gone to a point where as a designer you cannot just do uiux you got to be thinking about the bigger picture and so so I do feel it's shifting towards a More Design generalist role

but you know the way I will probably rephrase this is people care about experiences right Cold Play tickets um you know concerts in India going crazy cafes more cafes than ever people want you know not just the cafe branding logo to be great they want the physical experience to be great they want the merch experience they want to put this on Instagram they want the virtual experience to be great a lot of d2c companies yeah yeah so I think the design we're we're probably I feel like we're early in design in the sense that design

now is becoming a bit of an all-encompassing thing where it's all experience whether that all experience all touch points UI X which is web app in-person experience merch experience physical product experience content and media experience and so brand experience as a category yeah I think that's a new one that I see I would call it graphic design but I've also realized that that's like calling a coder computer typist right so I think design needs a rebirth like a design needs a branding rebirth in a way right because I feel like there's lots of valuable task

but kids don't want to do it like I'm having a hard time convincing people that look UI is good but how many app screens will you do once the company becomes successful it doesn't need any more those companies are flooded with designers and we don't really use new apps anymore I haven't downloaded a new app in like forever right so uh that era is over now everything's moved on inside the apps the arena is now inside YouTube inside Instagram posts videos Etc so people have just missed out on this whereas apps also technically were inside

a layer which is the app stores which is inside the phones so it's just gone one layer deeper it's not it's and it's not any less valuable or more valuable it's just as a YouTube channel for YouTube or an Instagram channel for an account the content you post there that you know back in the day to get crazy amount of users you needed to make the app now within the app each account has millions of monthly actives millions of daily actives right so the attention of detail that you would give to that now it's everything

I have I I have one very important three four paragraphs that we've written okay for example if you're working in uiux design we would highly recommend sketch app of figma yeah this is 2017 figma if you were saying that it released in 2016 yeah it came out of closed beta in 2016 that's insane so a year into figma you said this is going to be the next big thing and then it's been now it's like popular maybe last year it was like at Peak popularity right um that's insane that's like I mean but but that's

the thing right like now it's coming into design school curriculums figma at that time nobody knew it they were still teaching Photoshop and little bit of other tools and whatnot right Coral draw and all that now figma has become Main stream it's the same thing like people don't recognize that actually we will always be far before your school curriculums like we're using stable Fusion now it's been it's been a year actually we started using stable Fusion the day it came out we started using chgb we've gotten faster your cols have gotten slower 5 years later

stable diffusion will be in your CV and you'll be like in your in your college course and you'll be like oh I remember these guys talking about it by that time it'll be like 35 37 something like that and and that's the early adopter curve right yeah if you like you most people will only hear about it when it hits Peak popularity but you have to be in the niche you have to be a nerd about something to even catch these little waves we said more stuff for Logos and animations Vector design tools like Adobe

illustr Illustrator and Affinity Designer work well for video production and animation Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premier Pro are widely used and that's now your category with a yeah yeah so I think really um it's been 7 eight years six seven whatever lots of years and it's incredible that many of the technology predictions have held up like you should have assumed in six seven years new things would have come out lots of people are building new video editing tools not lots of people are building new design apps yeah uh or apps to do design yet

the status quo has held up Photoshop is still King figma is still doing well considering it was back then why do you why do you think the tooling hasn't changed so much I think the tooling has it's just that when it comes to Peak popularity when it comes to the mainstream teams will use whatever is most popular like it's hard for you to convince your um 100 person org back then even back then um when I was at unacademy we were using sketch and then one day I was like guys we need to switch to

figma and they were an early stage startup they were like yeah whatever you say goes but I knew counterparts who were like yo we pay a lot of money to Adobe for our licenses and Adobe XD is bundled into this and so we can't switch and so it became a company top down decision because it was the peak popularity thing there's one line I said here which is there are huge overlaps in what you can create with these tools UI and video I mean design and video sister I mean it's almost the same thing right

one is motion design one is design motion why why have students taken it to feel like like completely separate categories like in my books a UI designer should be able to do video and vice versa like it doesn't feel but I know the comments will say otherwise I know there are different things but both have behavioral elements to them you can't when you do video editing it's not like a brain dead going and saying I'll just make this animation you're thinking about the end guy right you're thinking about how to keep his retention up with

UI you're thinking about the flow and the convenience of that flow but people tend to pitch these as two completely separate Fields why I think it's because in the past decade skills took very long to learn like Photoshop I took a year or two before I got comfortable right and so if skills take really long to learn you learn less skills per unit time and so the mediums that you're in are very limited versus now with figma somebody can learn figma within a couple of hours within a week you feel quite comfortable and so if

your skill has gotten better you are probably now want to explore more with it and the thing you said absolutely right which is actually thinking in terms of my capabilities skills mediums is the old way of doing it the new way of doing it is what do people want users right in the end a user is going to interact on their phone with your app your video anything you put out and then also the environment in you know your cafe or your physical products and so you got to think in terms of what do users

want what's their experience and also what do Brands want to make that bridge to close that gap between where you know where they are and what users want I don't like that that's a very College way of doing things electrical engineering is different from this engineering from that it's a very Branch driven which I don't like the next thing we spoke about was webdev which is I think we agree that it's done fairly well in the last 6 seven years we spoke about Game Dev 3D modeling a lot of freelance opportunities from the US even

right now like companies like the Mill who outsourced to 3D um modelers in India I met one who's doing superbly well 30 40 lakhs ANM because of the price parity it's not great salary for there but here it's an awesome salary um so I think that's good we also gave a bunch of courses like all free courses where how you can learn Unity we spoke about Unity web dev uh sorry Unity Video Game Dev uh we spoke about 3D game programming this is back in 17 right and if you remember back then I think I

was pushing back like let's not include the courses right because I was like anybody who wants to do this needs to build theit of figuring it out themselves but then the other balancing side that you brought in was like you need to give people a starting point right um figuring it out is hard yeah gets even harder when you're in there's so much noise right there's so many people selling and you don't know what is like that's why we kept it all this stuff free just like yo this is free stuff you get started with

this at least then you have some direction to choose the path like without going through through the tutorial if you have to choose a path in any game you don't know where to go it's confusing yeah next we spoke about product management my personal opinion is I think we were wrong about this I don't think PM is a freelance job yeah I think pm today is a very people Centric role you need to be there yeah and yes if you're remote there's a big gap in fact I feel like admin support that's probably the wrong

word for it because this person she's now my not even virtual assistant executive assistant head of operations almost I would say the similarity not to say that they're the same similarity is that product management people intensive very trust-based role High communication skill and uh hard to do online yeah yeah but doable but it didn't I don't think it picked up in the way picked up it got popular but I just feel like it's one of those roles where if you're really good at it you should be in the office like You' be much better at

it in the office because it's so directly connected to business objectives like all the other things are not everything else we spoke about as freelancing the reason you can freelance it is not directly connected to business objectives even code is not like you don't know how many how much more sales you're doing because of some line of code you can't quantify that and I feel like because of that you can always Outsource it because you're like it's not like it's critical but it's not something where you know me having one person outside is going to

damage but PM like decisions on what to build will you lose a lot of time if you have the wrong person doing it and you need it to be directly under the f ERS or whoever the guy running the bus guy or girl running the business is product management commoditized today or is it are we already at a part where it's automated I think it's not even hit Peak popularity yeah I think product management is still a little bit early uh it's like acceptance people know it's important people think it's a wo woo role right

like people think oh why do you need product management lot young people think that uh older people over uh like process it right they're like no you do a and then B and then C that's how you do product management I think it's not about any of that I think it's about uniquely understanding what your users want it's a behavioral role actually a lot of this to become successful is like understanding Behavior right like so as a PM if you know users are always going to do this like in a video we know that you

know if if you you know we have a part where it gets too long and we're dragging it on to give more context we can go deeper if necessary but sometimes we don't because we're like bro they will click off and the video will do 10 times worse just because you've gone slightly deeper on this one point especially in short form so you know it's not really like it's just understanding Behavior it's the same with apps right like you know if you have three buttons what's the darkest pattern to have to people to keep people

there it's a little bit of dark arts you know going on there but it's it's a behavioral role and you need to sit with the data so little hard to do remote then we spoke about app and backend Dev uh and we gave them like the full thing right full vamy we spoke about hey you start with learning databases which is SQL anything based on SQL then we spoke about you need a language so for example c c Ruby Java we were using a lot of Ruby on Rails back then so the third thing we

spoke about was you know framework like you know Ruby on Rails Java has spring stuff like that so I feel we gave them a very good uh you know starting point and this was also one of the highest paid remote roles this is where I was making the most money like I did some design but I didn't make as much money doing design as I did Ruby on Rails I think that made me quite a bit of money um and the the revolution of Ron real has just made everything simpler right it came with something

that we called scaffolding which means that you want some you know a specific type of create read update destroy type of page where maybe a you know Forum post or whatever you can just generate that quickly like a starting point very quickly and Ruby had a great Community where people used to put out these things called gems where they said you can use a gem and you can figure out authentication you can do this automatically you can do this automatically so the community was awesome so you didn't you weren't like really you know gizy code

right you were like bro my job is to give this feature to the customer I'm paid per the by the hour so I want to do more for the customer and one thing that started happening after I started using ruon rails I'm sure it happened to you as well once you got good at the skill you started pricing differently we stopped pricing per hour well like we're getting good at this we can do this authentication thing we've done it 50 times it doesn't make sense that I get paid per the hour for doing this anymore

I'll charge fixed price for these five features that's when we start thinking more like a company rather than than an hourly basis thing and I want to touch on that a little bit later but we spoke a lot about how do I pick and we also spoke about how a lot of success in many of these jobs including writing code is creativity and there's this beautiful image that that I made right like I don't know if you can see this right yeah it's about how how to become creative it's actually you can anyone can become

creative it is first step copy something Second Step understand how it was made okay third step break it down into its individual components what is part A what is Part B what is part C Etc learn how individual components were made so you learn each unit each token of the thing and then finally put individual components together in a new way and that putting individual components in a new way uses creativity so you break things down into their individual tokens or their individual units put them together in a new way and that's called creativity 2017

you said creativity is not like some crazy you know you're right born with it or not it's learnable if you replace the words creativity the word creativity here with Gen it's exactly the same thing this is exactly how gen is creative you take something you break it down into its individual tokens you put it back together in new ways it's roughly how gen works today so that's why gen is creative yeah yeah and I think the thing people miss out on is if they combine things together in the most standard Normy basic way you're going

to end up with an output that is words or maybe the same as gen if you want to really get creative above the base creativity of where Tech is today you got to have good taste where does good taste comes from it comes from your experiences in life how you internalize these experiences and then want to really Express that in your work right the best designers I've worked with they go crazy when they find a rare resource when they find a small way they can improve their thing better or they're like wo I I can't

even believe why didn't I think of that right versus most people who maybe are self-limiting they're saying I'm not a creative person those people are really blocking themselves because they're not even taking the effort of going and finding what's out there yeah like one thing I've I was very sure of is that creativ you can make people creative like I've seen people who are completely uncreative who work with us for a while and then actually become creative it's just about learning the patterns in your industry like I would be very uncreative in real estate because

I don't know enough about the industry but once you know an industry well you can break it down into units you can rearrange those units you can bring something new to it there's one more piece we wrote in this chapter and we're about halfway through the book right now but it's an important piece about passion versus money and there's one line we said which is that the only thing that really works is discipline do you agree with this I think discipline works great in the short term to keep you going but if you really want

to stick through something in the long term passion is super important yeah that's one thing I've changed my mind on like I used to think it's all about discipline and just doing the same thing over and over now that it's been 10 years since I started more than 10 12 years since I started my career technically bro it's it's everything is Passion driven like you can't sustain any career without passion like 10 years is a long time to be disciplined no human has the discipline to do it 10 years you either love it or you

don't and if you don't love it you're going to burn out in 2 years if you love it or you find a way to love it you can stay for 10 years and looking back it's not that I I don't think I was the most disciplined person neither was I it's just that I couldn't imagine doing anything else and uh I was like it's this or nothing and so I didn't even stop to think and once you keep going down that uh you reach these places where people haven't even can I ask you why we

why we thought it was about discipline we were very young we were like 23 24 we had some experience we were running companies I was running a company you were at head of design at on Academy why did we think it was about discipline I think the word passion carries a negative thing where it's like oh movies are my passion music is my passion like people abuse the word passion yeah but if you kind of let's just say remove the current associations with the word passion and you're like it's the thing that you can't imagine

yourself not doing yeah suddenly there's very few of those things in your life it's so surprising that both of us agree that passion is super important where 6 seven years ago we wouldn't have agreed I we would have just been like bro passion like stupid I think in college people misuse the word passion you're right but actually it's all passion all the way down like if you're really passionate about something and you've shown signs of being passionate about it you are going to do well at some point or the other yeah it's you will Outlast

every other person who's there just for money yeah and I don't think one cool thing about both of us is I don't think we've ever done anything for the money we've always even the passion leads you to a point where you know there zero money in it you'll still go there I know you very well and you know me very well so we'll always go there yeah interesting next chapter is around communicating your value and I think we spoke about how to charge right we said that when you start your career you start you know

at an early rate and over time you move to fixed price because uh but it's bad to start with fixed price in the starting because you don't know how to bill um and we also spoke about weekly billing you have any thoughts on this I think the core concept is if you think you're really good why doesn't the world believe so right if you're really so smart why can't you put in that effort or figure out how to make the world believe that and I think the problem is people don't know how to communicate their

value which is how do you make the skills you have relevant to the other person got it so you know what I feel is that um I think this chapter doesn't matter I think if you're good you can charge whatever you want if you're bad you will always be like even if you say I want hourly billing monthly billing weekly billing I want this much client will be like get out of there it's it's like it's this right who wants the other person more and I feel like a lot of freelancing is converting it from

a push based business where you're trying to get leads to a pull based business we'll come to that I think that applies to everything now uh but before that we spoke about how to get clients and I think this is the important part let's assume somebody already has the skills or started picking up the skills we spoke about how to get clients and that time it was different compared to today so we have a chapter there called the platform game we said how do you land your first project use these vertical platforms like upwork right

that time it was called odesk how do use uh you know dribble behance there bunch of platforms right and you was you had this amazing piece about your player profile how it's about creating a profile that people are really attracted to you think we were right about the platform game I think now decades later um we live in a matrix all right like straight up all right and I think the reality of it is you have to realize you are playing a game cuz if you don't realize you're playing a game you don't realize that

hey I don't have to play to not lose I can play to win but for that I need to understand what game am I playing I feel like this platform game one thing we were wrong about is I don't think it was about as much about up workor and this thing and that I mean social discoverability was very low back then not enough people had Internet it's just how does an American client find you the guy who desperately has the problem how do you get in front of him the day he has the problem and

I feel like using platforms was the only way because that's like urgency right leaking into the world but I feel like today it's become about Twitter and Instagram and YouTube today it's like earlier we were selling in these Niche markets whoever really wanted the service today you're going out on Twitter and ringing the bell and like you have to do that so the platforms have evolved into like these super platforms right the twitters and the the things of the world and I think one cool thing you said is that when you're reaching out to somebody

communication is key and we spoke about what it looks like from the Freelancers perspective and what it looks like from the client's perspective let's say you pick up a project you are saying okay day one I'm doing the cool design day two I'm like you know doing something else day three you know I'm fixing this from the client's perspective day one I just paid the guy I haven't heard anything day two I haven't heard anything day three is 100% scamming me so you spoke about how it doesn't matter how much work you do that's important

but you also have to communicate your value yeah I mean not value you have to communicate what you're up to yo I finished this today here's the temporary screen you have finished this today like even today I work with so many people outside of the business and even in the business who won't even respond and I assume it's dead two weeks later they'll respond and they'll be like bro I finish this right and it'll be completely wrong direction from what I wanted right or it'll be perfect either way I lost trust even if two weeks

you come back and you don't respond to me and you do something good I will still have lost trust in you cuz I'm like I can't trust you through the process today you might have done this right next time when we do a project we might have gone in a completely different direction or whatever we're doing so the line in bold here is managing expectations and consistent communication I think everyone who's read this book learned the skills part and we have a huge audience that now has the skills but they forgot managing expectations in consistent

communication why it's the harder thing yeah in fact a note on this back when I started freelancing I assumed the client knows best right because I still little bit carried that um employer employee like you have to seek Authority and so I assumed the client knows best which led to an assumption that the client will tell the process but in reality like looking at today today when I send a proposal I'm like hey every 48 Hours you will on the dot receive an update from me the first update will be within on this date every

week we will have these many calls and you know I I set the process I set the frame are so busy yeah and the client feels awesome about this because they don't have to now think about it and live in this uncertainty they know that this person has a system they have a process and that I know at every stage where we are what the expectation was and where we're going to go next would you recommend people use platforms today like Odes upwork I mean upwork and all the others I think a platforms are a

great way to get leads but the problem is the platform set this path and process for you which means they also charge extra for it but then it also means you get a lot of people competing to be in this it's a little hard today with the competition today yeah so my suggestion would be if you're able to create your own platform which could be on any of it could be a Twitter it could be a YouTube it could be your personal website that you're driving traffic chapter about that we'll come to that I think

that's the better approach and honestly if you are on these platforms and you're trying to stand out having an external source that the client can actually go and look you up massive Advantage you know one thing we spoke about is that it's good for your first client platforms but after that it's about repeat projects and referals you want your first client to connect you to because clients are usually well connected like if you're an entrepreneur and you're successful you'll know other entrepreneurs part of the game I feel like so many people forget this and their

customers over like they don't respond to their clients they do a shitty job they get thrown out of projects and they go get a new one you don't want to be in a place where you're constantly getting new projects but you're constantly losing old projects because what you'll realize if you do a great job for that first customer that's five new customers guaranteed guaranteed or at least two new customers guaranteed just do the best job you can don't be in expansion mode before you you're in the you know I've proven this mode and I feel

like too many people want to make too much money really quick and one learning I've had is it takes time I'm sure you also had this right like it takes 6 seven years for things to even if you start freelancing you'll be successful in year three year four we start 2012 when we first started freelancing 2015 is when we started making serious money and that not very consistently today I'd probably be able to make very consistent freelance money if if I were to do it but I still feel like it took so long right to

be to be in the top few and top few is where the money is and the rarest thing is trust right the people who are burning each and every client they just assume they can just get the next one yeah but that might seem like a good shortterm strategy but over the long term you make it so much easier for yourself if you are able to roll this trust across clients why why do they do it why do they burn clients especially when freelancing online people are like my clients don't know each other so if

I do something here other next client is not going to know right versus in real life everyone knows each other everybody knows each other if you don't deliver if you someone over it's straight up that word gets around and I think trust takes a while again you can lose it but then reputation is how is as trust builds up that becomes this thing called reputation I don't think you can onot build reputation but small steps trust becomes reputation dude we did a project okay where for one of our clients where there was another agency involved

and the agency guy got thrown out of the project okay and he's like first day he got the project he's like can I tweet about this he'll get us some more this thing or whatever I was like I don't know ask the client because there's a separate agency young kid okay I was like I don't even know why he was on the project and he was like I want to tweet about this I'm like listen when you're online what you doing online and what you're doing offline is like when you're not the same person online

offline the world gets to know eventually so it's best to be the same person online offline and that might take you some time I understand when you're 20 you can't be that cuz you have nothing and you're hustling and you're trying and you're struggling and everyone's story Little online little bit is exaggerated 20% people can give you but it can't be like 2,000% different yeah right so you have to I think that's very important and we also spoke about Community right like being in a community of other Freelancers and uh people next next we spoke

about the Freelancers mindset which is how much money can you make you know what's the target etc etc which I think is kind of a boring chapter cuz I think and I think the main takeaway from this chapter is I mean it's just about how much money you can make I think we were right about all the numbers but I think the main thing here we call it is the we we came up with this is the first project effect nobody believes they can freelance till they get a project online and they deliver and I

feel like today the first project effect a lot of people have gone through that time it was just two of us and maybe two three others in our in our circle like SES karik bunch of others but anyone outside of that didn't believe us like it's like they look at you with disbelief they're like no you're not making money online the only way is through a job I had a friend I don't know if you were there I had a friend who was sitting next to me on a table and he was like bro I'll

do anything for a five lak perom job right I don't I think you know who I'm talking about this is in college I like yo we're making so much more than that and then we'd say it and they be like it's like no we're making it and they're still like look at you and they be like no chance so that's uh today that believability element is there everyone believes you can make money freelancing which is which I think is cool I think first project effect underrated because if you you need to First prove to yourself

that you can do it that's the first project effect you need to prove to yourself a second time that you can do it so you know it wasn't a fluke you need to prove it to yourself the third time that you can do it so you're like now I feel confident convincing the world that yes yes that's that's me but to be honest you'll never feel 100% confident even if you're doing 100 projects you have a big company you have hundreds of employees I feel like you still won't be fully confident like that fear is

always going to be that can I repeat this or am I just a one trick pony yeah that's there in everybody's head awesome next chapter and this is a chapter that a lot of people disagreed with us on back then but I think now it's become real it's called your personal brand dude 2018 2017 we wrote the book 2018 it was published nobody believed in the ideas of of a personal brand they said well you mean CV and I was like I remember this conversation I used to have with people like no no I don't

mean CV I mean personal brand they're like CV LinkedIn I was like no bro that is like your work history or college history whatever I talking about your personal brand I'm talking about you putting yourself out there putting out content about yourself you telling the world what you can do like you mean sales and people didn't get it like they didn't understand why everybody needs to build a personal brand the VCS were like Founders shouldn't build a personal brand it should be about company and I was like people don't listen to companies people listen to

people and they're like no no no it has to be the company building a brand I don't want the founders to build a brand and at the same time you know employers didn't want their employees building a brand they're like bro you work for me stop building brand stop doing you know putting out your own content on the site today it's been normalized in every company everyone's putting out content on the site and that's completely fine and I think you know we said there are two things right to build a person brand one is be

better than the average person at your skill and number two share what you know and teach others that's what we've done for 10 years what why did we get this right and other people get this wrong I think people have this apprehension about being a too salesy like promo guy promo guy they're like I don't want to be seen as desperate right and back in the day to give you an idea if if you were somebody let's say you were in school and you started a YouTube channel your friends would laugh at you the next

day you come to class they going to be like look at this guy look at this guy what are you doing today it's like yo I mean firstly everybody's got a channel whether that's on Tik Tok Instagram or YouTube but they don't even think about it right so today's generation the question is not about should I build a personal brand or what is personal brand it's more about how can I put myself authentically out there such that people resonate with it they're attracted to me and they get to know what I'm all about back then

it was like yo I mean why should I put myself on the internet that's so risky what if people think something of me right versus today yeah that's the default I feel it came from our freelancing this thing we were competing against on odesk I once did this math right I was like any given point of time any project will like 50 applications how do I look better than the other 50 applications I was like whatever I say I'll do it with jazz we'll do a nice CV around it we'll do like if I'm putting

my you know work experience I'll do it nicer I'll make a nice Banner was that sort of stuff I was just trying to win the deal against the other 50 today you're on that big platform Twitter Instagram the competition is now tens of thousands of people now you absolutely need to be more salesy yeah right and I feel over time it's become more about you have to promote yourself otherwise no one's going to give two shits and we also were right that it has to be built personally and not at a company level nobody cares

about company brands even if you have a company brand and you have a face on it the face will get popularity yeah and the company's loyalty at the end of the day will be to the face we've learned this with all the edex now right where they'll build like some superhero and then when those superheroes leave the tech get kind of gets crushed on the way out like I I think we just took what was true for freelancing and we were telling the world the Freelancers to build a personal brand today everyone has some freelancer

Dynamic so everyone's built a personal brand I think the misconception people had was personal brand is I have a logo I have a logo and that's my profile picture and now I'm a personal brand yeah but I think the thing that we realized to break this down is you got to put in the work you got to put in the right amount of actions this lead to some results show that you show it as people see these results they're like oh we can trust this person as your trust builds up people are like oh they

can do this thing and now they have a reputation for it yeah and then as your reputation builds up all of these things together that's your personal brand interesting and you know we we also spoke about promoting your content not just putting out the content where do you promote it and we said Hacker News Reddit Kora Facebook Facebook groups Twitter yeah only Twitter survived and it's not even called Twitter you know what did we get wrong about promoting your content we didn't we didn't account for video here I think that's our big Miss like ntin

Kut put out a post about how they really missed the early train of YouTube and now they want to go all in and they're spending you know you know a lot of money and they're getting a lot of talent to do video I feel like we didn't see video coming I mean we saw it we spoke about Premier Pro and this thing we just didn't see how big it would become and how much of people's time they' consume on more video I think it was weird back then to watch video on your phone because I

never watched an influencer till like 2021 I was like you're following influencers and phones were smaller they were slow and so if you want to watch a video inter was terrible on phones yeah so if you want to watch a video you will watch it on your computer yeah and even that you're not going to stream it it'll probably be you know you're watching it video took over it was insane so we we put a recap on how to build a personal brand work on enough projects and gain references to be notable in your field

create a personal website WordPress or a medium blog now I would add YouTube uh post original content that you've written on a regular basis pick a regular schedule stick to it whether it's daily weekly monthly build a recurring Audience by creating a newsletter and sending out emails with your content I feel like that's changed now to just video content once you have more inbound projects coming in than outbound which at some point there's some scale I think the scale is about 100,000 followers at which point you'll get more inbound than outbound maybe sooner if you're

in a niche yeah for you it would have been 20 25,000 000 right where inbound is higher than outbound then you can win off freelancing platforms then you don't need to look right and I think the next chapter was something I was completely wrong about which is the art of the cold email we still thinking about outbound back then and this entire chapter right about cold emailing customers finding their details reaching out to them crap like I feel like this is the one thing we were wrong about why I have thoughts but I want to

hear your thoughts whether you think we were wrong I think when you starting out it's very tempting to just Spam the world get get your this thing out there me me me me me say something say something and follow up 20 times and get blocked yeah versus when eventually you have this trust and reputation you just have to say hey I like your work interested in working together let's get on a call and if you have this base of work built up if you have this reputation buil up people reply and so I think uh

the other thing in this is that today most cold emails are Chad GPT and it's obvious Chad GPT so I see it and I'm like yo this sucks versus back then even to write a base cold email you had to do it yourself uh today though saturated and it's very hard to cold made without a portfolio like without some body of work why should I trust you you're emailing me why should I work with you give a reason like especially somebody who's successful they'll always ask why should I work with you give a reason and

if you haven't built anything by yourself there's no reason for you to give and you're wasting their time and they've got a lot of people wasting their time in their email so I feel like the saturation got really high and these people want to work with good people what I realized is the smartest people in the world actually want to work with good people so they if you have a portfolio and you done work they will reach out to you you don't need to do anything it is just a complete waste of time in my

opinion to send cold emails today it is much maybe there's some this thing in Twitter DMS or LinkedIn DMS or whatever but I feel like even then you need a personal cuz they will look at your profile when you DM somebody first thing they're going to do if they don't know you is they're going to click on you and they're going to find out what has this person done so anyway the personal brand matters more because they're deciding at the DM level should I even respond to this person is it even worth my time and

interesting people are always looking to connect with other interesting people yeah it's it's it's like it is what it is so I feel like the the previous chapter kind of negated this chapter and I feel like if we had to do it again we'd just be like just focus on the personal brand instead and then at some point you will get to a scale where your DM matters and then it's no longer spamming or sending 10 emails or whatever like I was desperate when I was 20 we needed clients so we did some of this

but I wouldn't do it again and I have some people who follow up so many times that I'm just like bro stupid right then we spoke about there's an entire chap about tax tax was a very new thing back then yeah I mean this has changed a lot because the tax rules in India have changed there's no way we could predict this we're both not financially Savvy uh but uh I I feel like just get a person like I don't think do do you bother with your tax do you personally see your tax got somebody

who does it yeah like I don't even know how much money I've made to be very honest like I just have a person doing it and I trust them and I've been working with them for a while if I get in trouble I get in trouble um then we spoke about managing your finances where we spoke about where to save all this I think that's been like we had some rules okay which is number one avoid debt I think that's correct but I also feel like you don't want to get logged into loans and em

yeah but also I've seen the other side when you have a loan you actually work harder once you have enough money a loan makes you work even harder otherwise it's very easy to retire on less money next thing is talk about money I disagree with this I don't think you should talk about money I think the only place you can talk about money is high trust circles yeah you should not talk about publicly the minute you do it in a public domain it triggers people yeah and I I've decided in my life I don't want

my life to be about money at all like it has to be about cool experiments things I'm doing money uh the minute you talk about money people make it only about money and then you lose your identity as anything ex else except money hate it then diversify that I still agree with and the last one is habituate to a Frugal lifestyle I think disagree yeah yeah your Balenciaga shoes are very expensive how much they cost 80k yeah so why why have we uh why have we see my guess is when you're starting out you're playing

in defensive right you don't want anything to go wrong and so you're always protecting what you have which is great it's good to have that mindset so from that perspective I understand you got to be a little paranoid at 20 we didn't have that much money at 23 we didn't have that much money so this was important yeah but moving forward as you grow older you want novelty in life you want to connect with people over interesting things that you've got going on and in general I think you know like street wear in India huge

right now why it's because people want to express themselves right so it's not about being Frugal and wearing Basics it's about it's not about money it's like I want to express myself through whatever I buy through the products through what I watch yeah we kept saying that the lower your personal burn burn rate the more money you can put into learning through new things and trying out new ideas that's what I do every dollar we make we put it back and trying something new cuz I don't know what else to do with life to be

very honest I think what this can be really bad advice because for me I delayed hiring a team for the first 2 years of running 10K designers I tried to do everything by myself and I think a little bit of it was the whole Silicon Valley thing of don't hire before you need to and of course being Frugal being paranoid I don't want the company to die but then eventually I realized you can't just hold money like this right you got to you got to have a hand open if you want to receive dude it's

like this I sometimes I so the first time I played GTA right uh one of the recent versions I would like buy buy something and then I'd buy more things but I wouldn't use it like I play a lot of souls games right like elen ring Wukong I'll have items I just won't use it because I'm like if I use it it'll go and the worst feeling bro you finish the game and you're like why would I have so many items oh my God right so and even though I play a new game and I'm

like now I use all the items I collected and you can do a new game plus right where you play the second version of the same I mean second retelling of the same this thing and I still don't use items I'm like but if I use it it'll go and maybe there's a chance I'll die maybe there's a chance I'll lose so yeah it is like I still believe in spending everything back on the company like I feel like playing a life where you hold money is not really a fun life and you're taking away

from the economy that's money that if other people are giving you value you should put it back and that's why we tend to hire people and and whatnot um it's a it's a more fun life like now that you're working with the team compared to when you doing it with two three people it's so much more fun yeah I don't need discipline just like every single day I'm excited about every small thing that happens exactly yeah next is a chapter on managing stress and ambiguity and uh again we spoke about creativity the minute you becomes

about creative flow when you copy something understand how it is make made break it down blah blah blah creativity really helps the opposite of creativity when you're stuck doing something is called anxiety where you're using creativity in the wrong way basically you're creative about bad incidents that might happen in the future I have learned one or two things about you know managing stress and ambiguity in freelancing and running a company and work in general but I want to hear your thoughts first yeah I think the opposite of creativity is like creativity is all about flow

but the opposite of that is resistance and I think when you are stressed when you're anxious you start resisting things because you're like I want to be safe from this but the more you resist the less you can get into flow um yeah I feel like um I feel like people make bigger demons in their head than than it is the first time I raised funding for us 1.72 cror is a big amount of money but if I had hung out with other entrepreneurs I would know that it's not a big amount of money even

for back then it was okay it was decent but it was not that big and lots of investors that pulled it in so but in my head I thought I raise like 100 million and the the anxiety and pressure on me was very high and I broke down because of it to be honest like the first two years like I don't recommend anyone being an entrepreneur right out of college it's a little bit hard like you can't absorb the pressure yet and Entrepreneurship is more pressure absorption role than it is anything else cuz every day

there's some right and can you can you manage it so I feel like a lot of managing stress and anxiety is not making it a big demon in your head like even work you can just quit you hate a job why stay you can just quit it's normal I feel like when you're working from home though you make bigger demons in your head or if you don't have peers so if you sit in an office and you have 10 peers who are all like when I was giving exams right like we were in manipal you

know we' all sit in one house and we'd be like bro I don't know anything about tomorrow I haven't studied and there'll be 10 other guys who like yeah even I didn't study and all of us would High fire and then we'd all go and almost fail right somehow we' come out uh but I feel like if I was sitting at home doing the exams would have been much bigger pressure in my head I wouldn't know what the normal this thing is so when you do a job if there are 10 other people if you

do freelancing freelancing with 10 other people are like bro this is normal this ambiguity about next month is normal then you feel more calmed because you misery loves company and when you have five other people who are in the same state as you you feel better so I feel like a lot of this anxiety can be erased by just sitting with five other people who do the same thing as you in some Community or some this thing that's why companies are much better than freelancing cuz you're doing it like you're doing it with 10 people

now they're all feeling similar things and that helps you deal sleep a little bit better and I think the world realized how important communities were when we were forced to be alone during pic yeah we went mad yeah and yes there was a lot of Discord activity and you're doing all of this but overall the bigger picture it points at is if you're doing something alone just by yourself you feel like the odd one out and so you kind of create this massive resistance in your head like what if it goes wrong what if I

do this versus the minute you do it in a community it's like hey it's not your problems are not unique problems are not unique and everything is figureoutable like you can do it you can figure it out yeah um yeah I agree I think I have some thoughts around work from home which we'll come to right around pajama Prophet itself yeah but we'll talk about that later then the penultimate chapter which I think this is the last chapter we'll cover it's called robots will take your job yeah 2017 bold statement to make there's no reason

and no way a human mind can keep up with an artificial intelligence Machine by 2035 gray Scott I think most people probably skipped this chapter number one because it was the last one so they're like oh whatever um um but I don't think people took it seriously yeah I mean I don't think I took it seriously when you suggested we add this as a chapter yeah but it was obvious not it's some point or the other like it might not have been AI based automation it could have been other ways but we spoke about AI

specifically here but it's this curve AB enough right this curve that eventually after commoditization automation comes and automation could come in many ways automation couldn't come with somebody else giving you an SDK of your entire app and then you can just Implement that instead of building your entire app like we saw that happen in my previous company right so I mean you can think about this in this like 10 years 20 years ago to maintain a an e-commerce store would cost you $200,000 you need engineer you need Magento today it's like Shopify at $2 $30

a month yeah right so that is Automation in a way right like now you don't need an entire e-commerce store there's already something that provides it for you as the End customer and you as the End customer don't care whether it's yours and you know you have a Dev running it on Magento that's actually more complexity compared to Shopify which you know is a billion dollar Stable Company where lots of other people will complain if it goes down like you want reliability and stability once you get to a certain scale and we it has now

been proven that Shopify is reliable at scale but back then people were still unclear they're like there was used to be this argument that it's better to do Magento with your own Dev than Shopify and we had a lot of clients also reaching out saying I want to do my own store with Magento or whatever so that was what I meant when I meant automation to some extent right which is somebody will build something and then you the thing that you would build for a customer now is replaced lowlevel repeating tasks eventually people eventually there's

a lot of incentive to like hey let's just get this out of the way yeah yeah and then there I said there were chat Bots that are replacing aspects of customer support so that's turned out to be true um and then we also spoke about should I be scared right about this Automation and we said that look you don't want too many people jobless it turns to verbal and physical violence and that's what we're seeing on Twitter we're seeing a lot of verbal violence play out because people have a lot of free time in their

hands and people should not have that much free time um humans have a mind that invents problems real or fictional right and then we spoke about how the pajama Prof economy actually helps when you're freelancing at least you have something to do you have some gigs to keep doing and it's different from where you do lots of odd jobs versus you know you're doing one repeatable automatable thing where you're using this creativity but dude there's a bunch of lines here where I'm just going to read it out the defense against this is when each human

being can create one unique combination of experiences and skills based on their personal interests and purpose they can build their own unique brand Brand Story an AI can't copy a unique Brand Story an AI can't write a book about it can write a book about Superman but it can never make money because it's copyright to someone else yeah the chapter creating your personal brand in this book reflects the idea this is the only way humans can differentiate between themselves and a trainable machine the trainable machine has no heart no passion both true and no creativity

and then in brackets I said machines will get pretty creative soon though you can read it here right so we were right I mean it's a complete disagreement a lot of people thought at that point machines are not going to be creative today it's like it feels like heresy to even say that machines cannot be creative but back then I remember no had a tweet saying AI is never going to be creative and a lot of people said AI is never going to be creative so my entire thought process here is dude what we do

creativity is just breaking things down rearranging it we already knew that and that's exactly what ended up happening but this combination this defense of you build your personal brand and you use this tool and your skills to create your own unique story is what you've become very successful at and that's what I've also become very successful at right with the AI Avatar we're using AI it's my story nobody else can make aun May AI AV because I would sue them uh because I own the rights to me it has worked out exactly as we put

it down here this was the only defense against AI the personal brand combination with AI and your own understanding of the skill in the space which is amazing I feel like and that's what I want to talk to you right like I feel like we're at the end of the book at this point I wrote the job SP story and all that I feel like we've reached this the end of this book and I think the biggest differentiator between back then when we wrote the book and now it's not even remote work I think it

is AI and now we have the chat gpts and the stable diffusions and so much more right so what I want to end on is I want to end on two things right one is now I want you to make three predictions okay it's going to be out of the blue I'm going to make three predictions about the next 5 six years um just like what the predictions made in the past you would have tried something new you you tried freelance back then you you saw upw workk and odesk work for you so you're like

okay I'm going to extrapolate this over the next 10 years it's just going to keep going up because I see the value in this nobody believes me what is something nobody believes you on right now three things that you have tried you have some experience with and you can extrapolate and know it's going to become much bigger and of course there needs to be some profit there so number one outputs can be replicated but the thing that cannot be replicated is your unique story there is no second war Maya correct right uh so I think

what's going to become really important is people lean into their personal experience personal story and express that in their work so I think the importance of expressing your taste being you know being let's just say authentic or being yourself the 100% version of yourself becomes super important I think in terms of design we might see individual siloed roles uh um kind of get less relevant over time I think the design role of the future probably looks something like a creative director this is somebody who has a unique set of experiences a unique set of global

references for what they think is cool and is able to take that channel that into narratives So Stories into products into all the things that they create so that's number two creative director as the future role of design it's called a creative director somebody who's just like I'll use all the tools in front of me and AI in front of me and people in front of me to tell stories to the world to to to spread narrative in the world and to you know sort of make these products also shaped by narrative instead of being

a generic yeah and number three I think marketing as we know it is dead um most advertising um let's talk about it right so I think most companies today uh think in terms of hey we need to do campaigns this campaign is going to be on TV newspapers you know the traditional advertising mindset I think we're already seeing at the edge that's changed for I think the future is companies hiring creators to run stuff but I think the future is companies realizing hey we need to not think in terms of Silo roles we need to

think in terms of BX the brand experience across touch points and so I think marketing is likely not going to be a you know uh the kind of role it is today it'll be more about Community activations it's about defining the culture such that people understand what exactly this brand is about uh and it's going to become more about how do you have a unique brand voice that represents something uh and I think the people who do it will be um creative directors designers whether that's multiple mediums whether that's somebody who's a video editor who

now wants to Branch out whether that's a uiu designer who's like hey I want to get into physical Street Wear I think that's how it plays out interesting I'll tell you three uh three this things I think the first thing is video is going to be huge I mean this is something we both agree on I guess I I mean the world agrees on I don't think this is the future anymore I think it's just shy of peak popularity I think next year it'll be Peak popularity after which there will be commoditization and whatnot um

I think just I think I'm I'm going to make wild predictions I think the next TCS Vio blah blah blah is going to be made in video like I'm pretty sure of this right um just the sheer demand of people who want content is out of the roof because like we've mentioned right AI is automating everything so you're only concerned now about getting users there's two ways to get users either on ads or do content and content it really works you go speak to the guy called Ethan who runs something called parallel live it's like

this one app okay and he's like he's grown the app to millions of users very quickly and he's like the only thing I do is influencer marketing I don't do anything else so everyone who's building an app who's building products who's doing d2c like the mama story is really on the back of lot of creators zero story is also on the back of a lot of affiliate creators in the early days I don't know if you know this so video has really mattered and people just prefer consuming video we have never had anyone consuming 5

hours of blog post a day the average person did not consume 5 hours of blog post per day but they are consuming four to 5 hours of video on screen time wise at least which is insane you and I considering we are creators we never used we never spent 5 hours reading blogs or or even the newspaper maybe we spent our parents ER spent 30 minutes an hour reading newspaper now it's like they're spending too much time on video that's number one I think video is going to be huge number two is I think games

are going to be huge both I mean games are also pajama category I think it's the most under pajama category because if you look at my time where my time is going when I'm bored I'm sitting at home I'm just video gaming but that's also because I grew up gaming so it's exception but if you you sit in any flight in India and then you sit in the business class of the premium economy seats the people next to you will be slightly older slightly more well to-do and also really bored they pull out their phone

they're not doing work nothing okay they pull out their phone they're playing video games and they're playing Candy Crush and like like the boring game so as borom increases as AI automates more tasks and roles people want new experiences they want to be immersed in a new world and they want it to be on mobile phones so mobile phone Gaming controllers are going to be big games are going to be big uh you know making games is going to be more and more important as we saw with Wukong recently right they're now going to like

push the boundary of making games uh and it's not only going to be games it's also going to be experiences you saw the the new glasses by meta right oron I mean it's it's pretty obvious that at some point we are going to be living in a world where 3D creatures near you you're playing Pokemon in the real world like what you're doing right now like what you're recording right now right so I feel we are going to be in that world and it's not very far away the third prediction and actually I have four

but I'll tell you the third one anyway I think work from home is not a good idea for early stage companies I think if you're a mature Company by all means work from home but I think you can't do pajama profit as an early stage company you know how our done this book if I was doing it today I would have gone in the real world met the hund somehow met physically at an event or whatever like people saying networking is for idiots or whatever it's for idiots if you've already have some story for yourself

but I think in the early days you absolutely have to network I would go meet the wealthiest people in India the people who are actually hiring the people who are at businesses build physical relationships with them cuz that you can unlock a lot of money when you build physical relation relationships IRL IRL in real life right because and people also do better over time so if you know somebody today 5 years later they will suddenly have the capital deployment ability 10 times as what they had 5 years ago so building those deep relationships matters helping

those companies grow actually matters in the early days and it is a physical role so it wouldn't be pajama profit it would be pant profit or trouser profit right where you actually have to go in the physical Street or cargo profit right where you're wearing caros and going around because the most comfortable thing to wear so I feel work from home is super overrated for young people once you become successful once you already have a brand very easy for you to get more project sit at home by all means 30s by 35 you should be

able to sit at home that's fine should not start your career like this do you agree yeah I think uh IRL relationships underrated importance of community we talked about it the physical Community I mean colleges are all about Community it's a four-year Community experience we don't remember the classes we remember the relationships as a part of my life I miss the most yeah I'm sure with you as well right like if I had to choose one thing I miss is like just College not class but College yeah and it's worth every rupee ever spent yeah

right it's the one thing I don't regret at all in terms of spend right so I feel like if you can create that for others it matters if you're part of that it matters for your life you sitting at home what memories are you making you're sitting at home doing the same thing routine you know life burns out very quickly when you're doing that what memories are you making what new stuff have you done you're making a little bit of more money you're doing it without having to be in an office on time great but

you're missing out on the entire experiences that your peers are having I'm sure at our office they like bunch of people who are going out having fun at night I don't know but I'm sure it feels somewhat to call we try to make it as much to especially for the young people to make it feel as much as college so I think you'll ruin your career doing work from home in the beginning of your career but later on I understand the last point is around coding and I think I should clarify my thoughts on it

but first I want to hear your thoughts on code yeah see I don't see code AS somebody who was a who did computer science I no longer see code as a skill I don't see code as a thing to do I see code more as a material as a thing you get to play with right and so today as a designer I'm not locked thinking about or should design or code I'm thinking about okay I think for my full creative expression I need to be comfortable with as many materials as many mediums as possible and

code is a strong one yeah I what I think I think writing code will die it will become English at some point but engineering will live on Sid from my team from 100x Team keeps saying this he's like bro the reason we named it 100x engineers and not 100x coders is because we don't know what's going to happen to cord and it's pretty like you you seen replate agents and all it's pretty it's pretty clear that you're going to have to have English but still knowing what to say and what the computer can do still

requires you to know how to code M so it's almost like you learn the skill but then you use English to implement the skill because you need to learn the limitations of the computer you need to learn for example simple stuff right like you can't make a game without knowing how pixels are rendered on the screen yeah right I'm talking about the the actual 3D models how they're rendered how light works in a game engine you need to know all of that so you already need to know all that theory cuz only then can you

prompt the system to say I want this character doing this I want this animation at this time if you don't understand how State machines work you won't understand how animation loops work yeah so it's stuff like that so you need to know the concepts you need to be a coder but you might not write code M it's like this right it's like the best example I can give is that of a warrior you need to know how to swing the sword okay you need to know how to hold the sword which swords feel good which

swords feel bad how to sharpen it but then you are no longer the one going and Swinging The Sword in battle you are the strategist you are telling the three swordsman either you're telling the four flank him from the right side you're telling him don't use these swords use guns instead because this is the this angle is blocked that's what we'll all be doing and if you don't understand how swords work or how guns work or how the swords man works yeah then you are never going to be able to do battle strategy well so

it's sort of like that coding is learning how to code is important but coding might not be as important that's my analysis of this which is where I think the future will head amazing I think how have our predictions held up I'd say pretty well um it says the Millennials guide um because we were Millennials back then but I think any jenz who read this had a massive advantage over uh their peers and now it's played out there like lots of 25 26 year olds who are like bro pajama profit Kickstart My Career like I

didn't even know all this existed I was going to go do some chemical engineering and then be some chemical engineering guy somewhere I didn't even know all these internet roles existed yeah which is awesome like did you expect the impact you wouldd have from this no and a lot of that is invisible so in fact I still don't know it yeah um every once in a while I hear somebody mention it um I know we've written this book I know there's a lot of our own life experience that we've put into it uh but it

was many years ago and so I feel like maybe it might be time for um the next version I'm so surprised we've been on the internet for 7 eight years and it's still holding up yeah should have been canceled by now all right that's about it thank you all for joining I hope you learned something from this video make sure you like subscribe abov has a channel too yeah check out my channel it's ABN ux I also run 10K designers you can check that out on YouTube awesome bye-bye