Varun Mayya - Pyjama Profit: The Millennials Guide to a Sustainable Freelance Career

Pyjama Profit

The Millennials Guide to a Sustainable Freelance Career

PYJAMA PROFIT

The Millennials Guide to a Sustainable Freelance Career

Varun Mayya, Abhinav Chhikara

BLOOMSBURY INDIA

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First published in India 2018

This edition published 2018

Copyright Varun Mayya, Abhinav Chhikara, 2018

Illustrations , Varun Mayya, Abhinav Chhikara, 2018

Varun Mayya and Abhinav Chhikara has asserted their right under the Indian Copyright Act to be identified as Author of this work

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ISBN: 978-9-3871-4685-3

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To the internet, without which wed be working 9 to 5

CONTENTS

It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. Its also a very clear path to happiness.

SHERYL SANDBERG

Why we wrote this book

To give you some background, I have worked in recruiting for over three years now, and the biggest factors that Ive seen contribute to employability is technical skill and presentation. As a team, weve also seen an unprecedented shift in employer mindsets all over the world, and temporary staffing is at an all-time high.

When I was in college, I accidentally came across my first freelance project. It was a small website a friend of mine needed to be designed, but it threw me on a curiosity fueled path that opened big doors for me. I knew nothing about websites back thenI was a student who liked video games and did not know how to code. Both code and the internet were very daunting back then and it was the need to complete the project that required me to self-learn the coding languages needed to put together a website. In fact, I never wrote another line of code for at least a year after thatthe entrepreneurial bug had hit me. Abhinav (my co-founder at the time, and co-author of this book) and I and had started a t-shirt and merchandise company along with a few other friends in college. It was only a year later that we came full circle and started freelancing again.

Weve seen thousands of developers, filmmakers, designers and digital marketers cap themselves by working in a 9-to-5 job most of them blatantly ignorant of the wide variety of opportunities out there. Personally, it confused me that most of the advice given to young graduates was terrible. I understand the need for a 30-year-old with several years of experience in a particular space to stay bound to an industry and a company. But it surprised me that several 20-somethings were doing the same thingessentially capping themselves to a salary bracket and a skill set.

After making several thousands of dollars on the circuit and having worked for some amazing clients in remote teams across the world, a few of us got together to team up and build something in the recruitment space, while Abhinav went on to join Housing.com.

Jobspire, born out of that belief, went on to raise VC money and hire some of the brightest young minds in India. Now, were armed with two years of hard recruitment data, having seen more than 4 million people visit our platform for a job and thousands of resumes uploaded. We thought it was time to put everything we knew into a bookto help youngsters and new grads understand that there are better paths in a country full of opportunities.

We envision this book to be a data-backed manual that every millennial in the country turns to when making his/her first career decision. A manual that is ready for the freelancing revolution on the horizon.

What this book is not

We wanted to have a section that clearly defines what this book is not:

1. This book is NOT an abstract rant about the freelance industry. We offer a perspective that might not be familiar to you by including insights into our own personal learnings and earnings. We wanted to be open and upfront about what we made, and provide clear insights on how you can achieve the same, if not better income.
2. This book is NOT a replacement for hard work. We merely show you our paths and how we were able to learn what we learnt, and present ourselves the way we did. We made a ton of mistakes along the way, and hopefully this book will help you sidestep some of them. It still requires hard work and a dedicated approach for doing freelance.

If youre willing to put in the work, learn your core skill and apply what youve learnt, you should be able to see similar results. Weve also kept the book as concise as possible, so you can head straight to work after this read.

Wed like to thank everyone mentioned in this book for helping us navigate the journey and for providing feedback on the early manuscript. A special thanks to Gaana Srinivas for helping us edit and refine the concepts in the book.

If Im going to tell a real story, Im going to start with my name.

KENDRICK LAMAR

Prologue

Varun, my colleague said, pulling me out of my half-slumber.

Thats 30,000 in total.

Abhinav was counting crumpled notes of various denominations. We were five of us, sitting around a table under a shady red light in A-206, my apartment in Manipal. We called ourselves SIZR, and our expertise back then was making t-shirts for our classmates. We would make custom t-shirts for each class in our batch, and we made a nice little profit of 15 a shirt. We had a supplier in Chennai who would print these t-shirts for us, and we would sell it at 300 a pop.

Everything from the logistics of taking orders to delivering door to door at the Manipal Institute of Technology hostels was handled by us. We never took a dime from any profits we made. Instead, we tried to pool the money to rent out a small 300 sqft. place for us to work from, and to pre-book future orders. We tried everything from making jersey-like class t-shirts with individual names on the back, to putting strontium aluminate (a substance with high photo-luminance) on t-shirts to try and make them glow in the dark (it worked!).