I'm Coming Back to Freelance From Early Retirement

In December 2020 I firmly decided to start the comeback process from my early retirement.

Mainly for the reasons I described in the early retirement beta test post. Anyway, retirement has never been planned to be endless.

Upwork in Dec 2020 - Jan 2021

First of all, those funny guys downgraded my account from Top Rated 100% Success Score to a Rising Talent level.

Rather weird, especially taking into account that I've had 1200+ billed hours there. Although I have to admit, that I've had slightly above zero activity on Upwork since April of 2019.

So it takes a little more than 1.5 years to kill a top-rated Upwork account.

Upwork Is Not The Same

Brand new first impressions from Upwork were awful. Tons of smelling job publications with inadequate budgets and enormous amounts of bids for every more or less worthy job post

At some point, I thought: "WTF I'm doing here?! Why not just go to Linkedin where I receive tons of invitations or to AngelList and find a full-time remote job at some worthy startup or probably a big tech company?!"

Should I Give Up Freelance and Go Full-time?

Suddenly I started to get signs telling me like "man, the world of freelance just won't let you go so easily".

I'm kidding, I just received several pretty good news from my freelancing mates and it inspired me not to give up.

Soon after that I came across several pretty good contracts and caught one of them.

Funny fact: My mate and I started to look for new job opportunities at the same time. Me an iOS dev, and he an Android dev.

I was looking for a contract at Upwork and he used Linkedin and personal contacts. It took us almost the same time, about 3 weeks for the whole process.

Building in Public: Portfolius App

As soon as I started freelancing again, my work on Portfolius literally halted. Definitely need something to do with it.