For the month of May, I decided to go for goals that focused on money:

• Find at least one gig that pays, and grow one product—existing or new—that people will pay for, that I can foresee making a living off from.
• Commit a small, non-zero amount of funds into investment.

Somehow I didn’t feel motivated to find out about investing, since making some money was more urgent and important. So the 2nd objective is a fail. But there’s been some small steps in the first one, which is somewhat encouraging but nothing to be proud about…yet.

A market for Sheet2site or Carrd agency?

So I doubled down on the one gig that pays, that is, my existing web design services. Sweet Jam Sites wasn’t enough, so I tried growing it and spread out my offerings wider and into different types of websites, just as a marketing experiment to see if that can help tide me over this tough period. I already had a Fiverr account to showcase my JAMstack web sites service, but this month I added 5 more gigs to offer:

• Build an events countdown site using Carrd
• Build a wedding countdown site using Carrd
• Build a real estate listings site using Sheet2site
• Build a job board using Sheet2site
• Build an Amazon affiliate listings site using Sheet2site

I chose Sheet2site and Carrd because I really enjoyed using both these products. I think they are nice products, well made, and with promising potential. It also helps that they were made by fellow indie makers too. The main thing is to test if there’s market demand for such a service. Granted, it’s already super easy to build websites using their website builders. But after using both of them enough, I found there’s still a bit of a learning curve required, and definitely some low code involved to make a Carrd/Sheet2site site work best. I’m hedging on people who need it fast enough or is disinterested enough to want to pay for such a specialist service. Yes, if there can be a Zapier agency, perhaps there can be a Carrd agency, or a Sheet2site agency! 

Next I went on to create the same offerings on a local marketplace called Carousell. But Carousell was more fun because you can also message other sellers who might need your services, and Carousell for full of property agents, HR recruiters, and events folks. To be honest I always found finding email leads to be a chore and not something I enjoy doing, but with the messaging feature on Carousell, it was bearable and much faster! The gigs also come with analytics, so it was educational on which gigs got the most traffic, and guess what - the affiliate site offer actually got the most traffic, but no enquiries! And I didn’t send out any cold emails for that! Interesting data…not sure what to make of it. The other gigs got less traffic but more enquiries though. 

But none of these efforts resulted in real cash on hand, sadly. ?

Being chaotic in a chaotic situation: Act, sense, respond

Other random earnings that I grabbed at because I can:

• Scored a UX mockup design gig from an acquaintance yesterday, finished today! S$500.
• Got 20 coffees (~US$100) from a friend for all the COVID products I did to help others! Bless her heart. 
• Applied for S$5000 grant to remake Grant Hunt bot v2, because a friend approached me to give it a try (he worked at the foundation). Outcome TBA.
• Confirming a website gig for S$1250 that came recommended by a volunteer whom I worked with on a free COVID website for a NGO.

The weird thing was, being chaotic in a chaotic situation actually produced more tangible results than following linear, peacetime pathways. And most of that came from free work I did recently. The Cynefin framework shows how in chaotic situations where there’s no precedents, one needs to act first, sense what worked what didn’t, then respond. Looks like Mr Cynefin might be right…

Other FREE things I did

?‍? Launched VisualAid.sg - got featured in 3 different publications. Grew the translator and design team by 30-40%, and more to come! Launched 3 new translation graphics. And all these came up without any of us volunteers ever meeting in real life. That would have been unimaginable in the past, but amazed how it worked out despite everything being remote.

? Made two free COVID sites for social good causes (one for a sustainability NGO and another for a storytelling collective), I also offered to make portfolio websites for creatives. Some others are in process. Helped a friend set up her multi-vendor marketplace on Wordpress, because I wanted to help.

? Continued to grow Dabao Dash and connected hawkers with driver. Created a Telegram channel for realtime notifications. But beginning to hit a stalemate with Dabao Dash, because I was not allowed to post on the delivery Facebook group. That cut off a huge amount of organic traffic unfortunately. Unsure how else to proceed for this project, now that lockdown is ending…

I think I did a lot in May despite all the craziness of our “Circuit Breaker” lockdown! And as Singapore exits our strict lockdown, to a soft lockdown for a few weeks, and hopefully a wider re-opening of the economy in July, I hope there’s more gigs to come. At this point, I’m pretty much open to anything!