Sapph

I feel the issue with a lot of this advice like "don't care about what other people think about you", "be yourself" is, it tries to free people from one extreme (caring too much about what other people think for example) by talking about the opposite extreme.

It is helpful to have awareness about how your behaivor and actions may affect others, depending on the situation and your relationship with them, and how they may perceive or react to it. I find the key is to have and develop values you consistently act and live by so even if someone reacts negatively or different from what you expected, you don't feel this means you did something wrong or need to change something about yourself.

Something else if you're a freelance developer: In order to command a higher rate and not just be hired as a code monkey to implement a predefined task, it helps to position yourself as a consultant who can help the client discover the best solutions to achieve their goals.

Example: instead of just agreeing to develop a client's website per their initial specs, in your discovery call, find out what their goals for the website are.

Let's say they want to use it to capture pre-orders for an upcoming product. Based on this, you can propose a few ROI-positive solutions like integrating payments with their email marketing platform to engage customers and bring back cart abandoners, hosting a viral share giveaway, etc.

I feel while a learning methodology may make it go faster, what matters more is having the intrinsic motivation to actually get started and keep going (especially when you hit roadblocks).

What works for me is having a project or goal I'm excited about. That motivates me to learn the skills and knowledge to achieve it. Back in my teens, I really wanted to customize a Neopets guild (remember those? ;) ) so I started learning HTML to be able to. After, it was "I really want my own site" so I learned PHP to customize Wordpress and so on.

When I was in school and some of the information I had to learn wasn't directly applicable, I made a game out of testing study techniques. Such as taking annotated screenshots out of Youtube videos (10x better than textbook diagrams and walls of text). This game (which was really about changing my own perception from "ugh, rote memorization" to "let's test study techniques") helped me through the denser materials.

There's another company that lets travelers subsidize their flight ticket / earn money for delivering US products to their destination:

https://grabr.io/travel

Key difference is:

You buy the products locals ordered (locals pay for item + delivery fee upfront into escrow) so there's no risk of a third party hiding drugs or illegal materials.

Question: do you send new users an onboarding drip email sequence?

This makes a huge difference in driving them to actively use it and upgrade later.

Sequence:

1. Welcome email.

2 Educate them about the value of one major feature with screenshot(s) (what makes it better/easier than similar products).

3. Educate them about the value of another major feature with screenshot(s).

4. (Specific to your product since tons of existing users request features): Send an email listing the top 3 most frequently requested features and ask them to vote for (click on) one. This email increases user investment in your product and subtly reminds them about it.

5. Ask them to upgrade (buy a licence in your case).

You can find templates of these emails here: http://www.artofemails.com/onboarding

Tools you can use to send this sequence: ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, MailerLite

Don't worry about possibly annoying some users with the onboarding sequence. The increase in number of users you'll convert will greatly outweigh the number you may potentially annoy (and they can 1-click unsubscribe anyway).

Always liked this stealthy prospect finding method. Here's another few (best for B2B):

1. If some change happens at one of your competitor's product (got acquired, changed a beloved feature, etc.), go through threads on public forums discussing it. You'll find a lot of current users (ie customers to poach) of that product. A recent example: Atlassian acquiring Trello.

1b. Also, look through the comment sections of news sites that reported this change. You'll also find tons of current users there.

2. Go on user submitted product review sites. Lots of them out there for different types of products: Chrome extension review page, Capterra, G2 Crowd, etc. Approach the users who left reviews expressing dissatisfaction with the competitor product. Or users who use a complimentary product.

3. If a competitor product hosts customer sites on their servers (Shopify, etc.), you can reverse lookup their IP to find all of them.

Then it's a matter of introducing your product with a semi-personalized cold email, reassuring the prospect you have the competitor product's most vital features and you also do XYZ better than them. Here's a template: http://www.artofemails.com/cold-emails#competitor

Have you considered highly targeted value based cold emailing?

The HN community may be weary of sending / receiving unsolicited email but if you provide massive value upfront and only contact prospects who would get 2x+ ROI from your product/services, you will not be seen as spam and will convert a good % of the prospects.

I've run a lot of these type of campaigns and the key is to:

A) Only target prospects who have a real need for your product/service and have the budget for it

In your case, I would go on different grant websites and add their grant recipients to your prospect list. This way, you only target organizations who actively use grants.

B) Do a bit of work for them to provide upfront value in your cold email

In your case, research a list of grants they're eligible for (you can share the same list to nonprofits in the same space) and provide unique insights about these grant givers are looking for based on your experience. Your value upfront + value ideas will open the conversation and naturally lead to prospects asking about about how you can help them.

You can get an idea of what the initial email could look like here: http://www.artofemails.com/sales-freelancer#writer

How I see negative emotion is, it's similar to what physical pain teaches us.

You touch a burning stove. It hurts. You learn this action -> undesirable outcome and avoid doing it. (Sometimes it can take a few times though!)

Just that with negative emotions, sometimes it's less obvious the cause or it's an interplay between a few. And sometimes, there's a time delay between an action and the negative emotion. That's why self-awareness and introspection helps a lot in learning from your experiences.

I think the "you can choose to be happy all the time" movement maligns negative emotions too much - it can be an important warning "hey something is wrong" system in life. Also, I believe the use of the word 'happiness' often leads to misunderstandings.

You cannot be happy, the emotion, all the time. Hour to hour, day to day, we all go through different emotions.

You can however be more consistently happy, as a perspective on life and approach to life.

That I believe is what people really mean when they talk about 'being more happy'.

But a lot of people misunderstand that, thinking if you aren't feeling weeeee most of the day, you aren't really 'happy'.

I think the beauty of side projects is it's a low pressure way for people to put their idea out in the world and see what happens. Only difference between a hobby and side project is most side projects start off with a slightly more defined potential to monetize it.

And if the project pans out, great! If not, hopefully the side project was you doing something you love anyway so you still had fun and gained a lot of experience.

The fact it's now easier (cheaper startup costs for many types of work) to start side projects is a boon for the rest of us. It means every once in a while, someone who would never had considered starting a biz right away but would create something for fun may end up bringing a truly valuable product or service to the world.

I started my biz (http://www.artofemails.com) as a side project. I think seeing it as a side project in the very beginning freed me from feeling I had to do market validation and the whole launch a biz laundry list to just put it (in my case sales email templates) out there. Once it was up and I got really positive feedback, that's when I committed to growing it as a fully fledged business.

On a related note:

The majority of Beijingers used to live in courtyards flanked by houses by four sides: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siheyuan

Growing up in one, you get to know all of your neighbors really well since you see each other every day. My mom who grew up in a one, still knows all of her childhood friends and they have regular reunions.

Wish they were more communal spaces like this today where you're bound to regularly run into and interact with your neighbors.