I just made $30,000 last month, as a Blockchain developer.
My main activity on EatTheBlocks is to be an educator, but recently I started to feel some impostor syndrome. So I challenged myself to get back into real, production coding. And it paid off. After just a few month of freelancing, I am already at $30,000 USD / month.
Let’s see how I made it happen.
Impostor syndrome
It all started with a bad case of impostor syndrome.
Back on 2017, I was coding a lot. I created EatTheBlocks, I started to teach Blockchain to other. And as the education business was growing, less and less time for coding…
At some point, I stopped doing production projects. I was only doing tutorials. And those tutorials became less and less technical, as I was trying to get more beginners on the channel.
It was fine for a certain time…Until I started to feel the impostor syndrome. Haters started to challenge my technical skills. And it did affect me a bit. But most importantly, I started to miss coding, regardless of haters. Coding is my passion, and I realized missed it.
Not conding also made me lose my confidence. Sometimes I had some ideas for some apps I could build, but I realized, I didn’t have the confidence anymore, because I was too rusty.
Back to coding
At the beginning of the year, I decided to get back to coding.
How do you get back your confidence and your skills? There is only one way, you got to practice. So I started to do coding livestreams, where we coded a project for several hours.
And it was quite scary. The first few tutorials were not great. But I got better really good, and got back my confidence quickly.
It was good, but it was still just tutorials…What I really needed was production projects.
Back to production
As the saying goes, God helps those who help themselves.
An old customer contacted me, after seeing my coding livestreams. It was the customer who hired me for my first 6-figure job, back in 2017. There was no interview, they just gave me the job on the spot
It was for a small project, $5,000 budget. It was for an NFT mint application. Even though it wasn’t a complex project, it was still challenging: it was a real production project, not a tutorial.
It means that you have to make exactly like the customer wants. It means that you have to make it…actually work. It means that there a tons of little details and bugs that you have to fix. The kind of things you don’t do for a simple tutorial.
It was a fullstack project, that required Javascript, html, css. And integration with a Solidity smart contract. We deployed the app on Vercel, as it was a NextJS prohect.
Month 1 of Blockhain freelancing: $5,000.
For the second month, another old customer reached out to me. I was lucky yes, but I also, Once again, this customer reached out to me after seeing my tutorials on Youtube and most posts on LinkedIn.
Once again, no interview, I got the job right away.
This time it was a smart contract project, in Solidity, better paid, even though it was just part-time.
Month 2 of Blockhain freelancing: $10,000.
For the third month, this time I kept one my customer, so I already started with $10k.
2 other customers contacted me:
- One for a small $5k project – token creation
- And another one for a bigger $15k project – protocol development
All projects were for Solidity development.
I was pretty busy with these 3 customers at the same time. But I was happy. All projects were interesting, I felt engaged in my work, I felt competent…and… I was well-paid!
Month 3 of Blockchain freelancing: $30,000.
Conclusion
I didn’t try to get a full-time job, I went for freelance instead, because it was easier to start like this after not having recent and relevant work experience.
I started with a small project, to get my foot in the door
I asked for testimonials after my first project, to make easier to get the next customer.
With my recernt production experience and the testiomonial, I was confident to get my next customer and ask for a higher price.
Doing just Solidity development was much profitable than a full-stack project.
The personal brand that I built on social media was a huge help, and I recommend doing this to every developers.
If you want to get started in your Blockchain career follow this free roadmap I created. It will tell you exactly what to learn to become a professional Blockchain developer and get your first paid gig in the industry.
Leave a Reply