Am I a Gary Vee Generation Freelancer or a Steve Jobs Generation Freelancer
Someone recently asked me, are you a Gary Vee generation freelancer or a Steve Jobs generation freelancer. Intrigued!!??
How do we dissect the two? While on one hand, Gary Vee consistently speaks about ‘hustle’ or hard work, 24 hours a day to stay ahead of your competition. Steve Jobs was all about building ‘experience’ for your customer, staying premium and trouncing your competitors.
Therefore, question is as a freelancer what defines you. Hard work or Building experience.
What kind of Freelancer I am?
For me, ten years plus of experience – I would say I am from the Steve Jobs generation where building premium products and content for my customers worked to build reputation and consequently more work.
I still remember it started as a small project where I had to code a part of the website. Back then, the sheer joy of seeing your work hosted on WWW (or World Wide Web) was quite the high for me.
One thing led to another and in a short span of time I started building dynamic websites for clients with a Pan-India footprint.
However, this was not enough. A lot of coding and website building was taking place offshore. I was looking to dabble in international projects. Not long, I stumbled upon a freelance network – Elance. They helped me set up my portfolio and offer proposals to international clients.
As I were interacting over mails, the client asked for payment methods. That is where I began fumbling because until then, I had never handled overseas payment.
Thus started my visits to the banks and back in those days, it was quite tedious. There was Wire Transfers and Swift code, each attached with a definite time lag in payments.
It was during the course of my research that I stumbled upon PayPal, an online company helping Freelancers with Payments. It was as easy as creating a profile on any website, adding your bank details and relevant information related to taxation (such as PAN card) – and I was live.
Then with Seller Protection Policy offered by PayPal, I am always assured that my payments are safe and I am eligible for a full reimbursement for my services in case of any dispute. This empowers freelancers everywhere to go Global with even more confidence.
I have been working with many International clients over the years. One thing that has always connected us all is PayPal. We just had to share our PayPal.me links, something like this – https://www.paypal.me/malharbarai and payments are done in a jiffy.
With time, size of projects has also increased and many times, I have had to engage a team of designers and coders to deliver the desired results. This time when PayPal launched a contest to refer your freelance friends to the network, I decided to include my entire extended team in this. Helping them work out PayPal as a medium for their own individual work and at the same time maximizing my own chances to win an Iphone 7 !
So to come back to the question at the beginning:
Am I a Gary Vee or a Steve Jobs generation freelancer?
I am definitely a Steve Jobs Generation Freelancer. What about you?
Rome was not built in a day, so is a freelancer.
Over the years, I have groomed my skills and delivered great results to clients repeatedly to earn a reputation in industry. All of this cannot happen overnight and only through sustained efforts and smart choices – like PayPal !
Your Turn
How has been your experience using PayPal as a freelancer?
