u/main_account_4_sure

Ive been freelancing since 2018 as a fullstack dev. I used to make $80 - $120k USD/year, but this year I'm barely going to reach $15K usd.

Is the market that bad or is it just me?

Hi everyone,

Professional background

I've been working as a dev since 2016. I got into college back in 2010, got my first job as a fullstack jr in 2016, and I was lucky enough to work at an agency in Europe working with huge brands (McDonald's, Heineken, etc).

I learned a lot at this job and, 2 years later, I quit to start freelancing and travel. I got into Shopify and, at one point, I met a YouTuber who was a "dropship guru" and needed a dev.

He was fond of me and recommended me to all of his students, and I ended up getting 50+ customers overnight.

As his business grew, I kept getting new customers, and it was honestly a dream come true. I had between 30-100 projects per year. Some would pay a few hundred dollars, others $10k+ USD, it was working well.

This became my main source of income since 2018, for ~8 years, and I learned a lot as well.

I managed to save enough, buy my own place, and invest.

The problem & my attempt to solve it

The problem now is that the type of work I used to do is no longer needed, very likely due to AI.

I went from ~20 customers in 2025 to 3 customers in 2026, while actively searching.

I decided to take 2 months "off" to completely rebuild my portfolio. I coded and deployed 10 micro-SaaS products in 2 months, from May to July (working 12-14h daily, 1 day off per week, almost went to the hospital due to overwork).

Some projects are taking off: currently 3 projects have 500+ active users, one of them has 1k+ users. A few of them flopped.

No "pro" features yet, everything is free while I'm "testing" which one has more traction. Next step will be implementing monetization.

I also added all of these projects to my portfolio with thorough technical explanations on my blog. It includes how I coded them, how I found the idea, validated it, etc. It's very rich.

My thinking here is basically: if the SaaS products don't work out, at least it will serve as a portfolio, so it's a win-win situation.

But I'm still failing to find freelance work. I try reaching out to businesses (I have a video introduction, 20+ testimonials, Shopify stores with 100k+ monthly visitors that I coded from scratch, etc.), but nothing works out.

I feel like if I dedicated myself full-time to social media and just showcased my projects, I could potentially improve my odds (I used to record videos and got DMs from people wanting to work with me before), but honestly, I just wanted to code things, not record/edit videos.

Question

My end goal is just to land 10+ projects per year.

Any projects, though preferably Shopify. I can do many things technically, Shopify, Shopify apps, SaaS, landing pages, apps, AI implementations, whatever it is, I'm able to do it technically, but I'm having a hard time finding reliable clients, despite having good reviews and experience.

What are your suggestions?

Thanks.

Hi everyone,

Professional background

I've been working as a dev since 2016. I got into college back in 2010, got my first job as a fullstack jr in 2016, and I was lucky enough to work at an agency in Europe working with huge brands (McDonald's, Heineken, etc).

I learned a lot at this job and, 2 years later, I quit to start freelancing and travel. I got into Shopify and, at one point, I met a YouTuber who was a "dropship guru" and needed a dev.

He was fond of me and recommended me to all of his students, and I ended up getting 50+ customers overnight.

As his business grew, I kept getting new customers, and it was honestly a dream come true. I had between 30-100 projects per year. Some would pay a few hundred dollars, others $10k+ USD, it was working well.

This became my main source of income since 2018, for ~8 years, and I learned a lot as well.

I managed to save enough, buy my own place, and invest.

The problem & my attempt to solve it

The problem now is that the type of work I used to do is no longer needed, very likely due to AI.

I went from ~20 customers in 2025 to 3 customers in 2026, while actively searching.

I decided to take 2 months "off" to completely rebuild my portfolio. I coded and deployed 10 micro-SaaS products in 2 months, from May to July (working 12-14h daily, 1 day off per week, almost went to the hospital due to overwork).

Some projects are taking off: currently 3 projects have 500+ active users, one of them has 1k+ users. A few of them flopped.

No "pro" features yet, everything is free while I'm "testing" which one has more traction. Next step will be implementing monetization.

I also added all of these projects to my portfolio with thorough technical explanations on my blog. It includes how I coded them, how I found the idea, validated it, etc. It's very rich.

My thinking here is basically: if the SaaS products don't work out, at least it will serve as a portfolio, so it's a win-win situation.

But I'm still failing to find freelance work. I try reaching out to businesses (I have a video introduction, 20+ testimonials, Shopify stores with 100k+ monthly visitors that I coded from scratch, etc.), but nothing works out.

I feel like if I dedicated myself full-time to social media and just showcased my projects, I could potentially improve my odds (I used to record videos and got DMs from people wanting to work with me before), but honestly, I just wanted to code things, not record/edit videos.

Question

My end goal is just to land 10+ projects per year.

Any projects, though preferably Shopify. I can do many things technically, Shopify, Shopify apps, SaaS, landing pages, apps, AI implementations, whatever it is, I'm able to do it technically, but I'm having a hard time finding reliable clients, despite having good reviews and experience.

What are your suggestions?

Thanks.

Hi everyone,

Professional background

I've been working as a dev since 2016. I got into college back in 2010, got my first job as a fullstack jr in 2016, and I was lucky enough to work at an agency in Europe working with huge brands (McDonald's, Heineken, etc).

I learned a lot at this job and, 2 years later, I quit to start freelancing and travel. I got into Shopify and, at one point, I met a YouTuber who was a "dropship guru" and needed a dev.

He was fond of me and recommended me to all of his students, and I ended up getting 50+ customers overnight.

As his business grew, I kept getting new customers, and it was honestly a dream come true. I had between 30-100 projects per year. Some would pay a few hundred dollars, others $10k+ USD, it was working well.

This became my main source of income since 2018, for ~8 years, and I learned a lot as well.

I managed to save enough, buy my own place, and invest.

The problem & my attempt to solve it

The problem now is that the type of work I used to do is no longer needed, very likely due to AI.

I went from ~20 customers in 2025 to 3 customers in 2026, while actively searching.

I decided to take 2 months "off" to completely rebuild my portfolio. I coded and deployed 10 micro-SaaS products in 2 months, from May to July (working 12-14h daily, 1 day off per week, almost went to the hospital due to overwork).

Some projects are taking off: currently 3 projects have 500+ active users, one of them has 1k+ users. A few of them flopped.

No "pro" features yet, everything is free while I'm "testing" which one has more traction. Next step will be implementing monetization.

I also added all of these projects to my portfolio with thorough technical explanations on my blog. It includes how I coded them, how I found the idea, validated it, etc. It's very rich.

My thinking here is basically: if the SaaS products don't work out, at least it will serve as a portfolio, so it's a win-win situation.

But I'm still failing to find freelance work. I try reaching out to businesses (I have a video introduction, 20+ testimonials, Shopify stores with 100k+ monthly visitors that I coded from scratch, etc.), but nothing works out.

I feel like if I dedicated myself full-time to social media and just showcased my projects, I could potentially improve my odds (I used to record videos and got DMs from people wanting to work with me before), but honestly, I just wanted to code things, not record/edit videos.

Question

My end goal is just to land 10+ projects per year.

Any projects, though preferably Shopify. I can do many things technically, Shopify, Shopify apps, SaaS, landing pages, apps, AI implementations, whatever it is, I'm able to do it technically, but I'm having a hard time finding reliable clients, despite having good reviews and experience.

What are your suggestions?

Thanks.

Hi,

I'm trying to achieve something and I'm having a really hard time.

When I press "D" to move to the right, the analog stick goes to its full range, as expected.

However, when pressing shift + D, I'd like to go half of the range, so I can walk instead of run.

I presumed that I should use some type of virtual gamepad (vJoy, AntiMicroX, etc), configure it in there, add the gamepad to the emulator and it'd work, but after hours of trying, I didn't get anywhere.

I heard that Mugen had this feature built-in (hold shift to change the analog stick range to 50%, hold ctrl to change it to 25%), but I have no clue whether this is a possibility in

RMG.

Any tips?

Thank you.

Hi,

I'm trying to achieve something and I'm having a really hard time.

I'm using AWSD to play Smash Bros 64 on RMG. I need to use RMG specifically because I'm playing online and the Discord players all use it.

When I press "D", the analog stick goes to its full range, as expected.

However, when pressing shift + D, I'd like to go half of the range.

I presumed that I should use some type of virtual gamepad (vJoy, AntiMicroX, etc), configure it in there, add the gamepad to the emulator and it'd work, but after hours of trying, I didn't get anywhere.

I heard that Mugen had this feature built-in (hold shift to change the analog stick range to 50%, hold ctrl to change it to 25%), but I have no clue whether this is a possibility in RMG.

Any tips?

Thank you.

hi

i want to find more youtubers in my niche to collab with. My gardening channel has 2k subs and I'm looking for other small channels between 500 to 10k to collab. any tips how i can find these besides searching forever on youtube and opening each page?

Hi everyone,

I am a senior developer, and recently I have decided to share my content on Youtube. I can speak fine with the camera and so on (worked as a teacher for a while), but the truth of the matter is that I don't really enjoy being on camera.

For my first videos, I have recored my face only for the first minute or two, and then the rest just coding tutorial with OK-ish editing/memes to make things not too boring.

DO you think this is going to kill retention?

Thanks!