On September 12th last year I felt pretty good about myself. My Bachelor’s thesis was all done, I had a month to prepare for the presentation and my first website was done, all shiny and new.
4 weeks earlier I had decided that a) I was going to take a year off before eventually starting a Master’s and b) I was going to use that year to become my own boss and stop living off my parents’ money.
All I wanted was to make $500 a month, so I could pay for rent and food.
Since I had spent 2 semesters studying abroad, and friends kept asking me to review their English papers, I thought I’d do a great job at translating between English and German.
That day I had just put the finishing touches on the intro video.
Fast forward to mid October, one month later. I had just sent out 50+ emails to former customers of translation agencies, trying to collect information about why they had hired a translator, what results they had hoped for and how they found who they were looking for.
The results after over a month of work: $0.
