[ad_1] Este ensayo también está disponible en español. I am a very lucky person. I studied software engineering at a private university, I’m white, straight, handsome, and I live in Taco land. I could have easily joined a multinational but there was always something that stopped me. It was probably that I felt I didn’t fit into the office world. My friends became engineers looking to create video games. Someone succeeded there, but then the company where he worked was closed. All I knew was that I wanted to do something with computers and graphics. You study the closest thing to what you have in your head but the reality is always different. I like programming but I am not passionate about it. I’m in love with visuals, so creating web pages with a platform as friendly as WordPress fit perfectly with my profile. Since I like to write and join puzzles, plugins and now Gutenberg blocks have made literally everything fit in my work. Working for projects instead of for a single company has given me the opportunity to see many worlds. The word WordPress has given me a lot in life Like when a client found me on Google searching for a specialist WordPress developer to ensure that a film festival website was always online. With WordPress magical things can happen, such as getting to know Brazil thanks to this project and since I had continuity, they looked for me again for the next edition to go back in person. But then you learn some business. I put the condition that they also pay the plane ticket to my then girlfriend. I threw in such a condition thinking that they would not do it, but it was accepted. And you think: budgets must be exercised and the peace of mind of having someone in person is worth more than you think. With WordPress, every time you give it comes back to you Like when in 2013 I opened the help group on Facebook: WordPress Guadalajara and by sharing bits of my daily knowledge, people began to position me as the person they should turn to. It is not that you share knowledge for the benefit, but somehow it always multiplies. In the community you meet people who inspire you and who make you reflect on where you stand and thanks to whom. I want to talk now about my wife, she is also white and privileged. She did not finish university because she has always been rather self-taught, she dropped out when she realized that the level was not what she was looking for, so she found great teachers outside. She sells her drawings and for a long time she made more money than me. Besides life, money is something we share. I sold her website to her ten years ago and she is the most talented artist I know, you should meet her. One day an acquaintance dared to ask me what it felt like for her to pay the bills. When you are young it makes you want to argue with everyone. What makes me laugh is that at some point my wife is going to make a lot more money than me again. In the meantime it’s nice to move forward together in Taco Land. As time goes by, you realize that it is a good idea to choose your battles. And that there are things that you can achieve little by little if you have enough continuity. For many years they asked me if I continued making web pages, or if that making pages was still profitable… Making web pages is a fundamental part of my life. Along with the tacos, my dogs and my wife. It seems that if you offer a good service, making web pages turns out to be more stable than working for any multinational. So it has been for me. Even in the pandemic I have had more clients than ever, of course, helped by a great team such as my partner and star web designer, Nina, who taught me how specialists who work independently for the common good can join together. Soy una persona con mucha suerte. Estudié una ingeniería de software en una universidad privada, soy blanco, heterosexual, guapo y vivo en el país de los tacos. Fácilmente pude unirme a una multinacional pero siempre hubo algo que me lo impidió. Probablemente fue que sentía que no encajaba en el mundo de las oficinas. Mis amigos se hicieron ingenieros buscando crear videojuegos. Por ahí uno lo logró pero luego cerraron la empresa donde trabajaba. Yo lo único que sabía era que quería hacer algo gráfico con computadoras. Uno estudia lo más parecido a lo que tiene en su cabeza pero la realidad siempre es otra. Me gusta la programación pero no me apasiona. A mí me enamoras con lo visual y la creación de páginas web con una plataforma tan amigable como WordPress encajó perfecto con mi perfil. Como me gusta redactar y unir rompecabezas, los plugins y ahora los bloques de Gutenberg han hecho que literalmente todo encaje en mi trabajo. Trabajar por proyectos en vez de para una sola empresa me ha brindado la oportunidad de conocer muchos mundos. La palabra WordPress me ha dado mucho en la vida Como cuando una clienta me encontró en Google buscando a un desarrollador especialista en WordPress para garantizar que el sitio web de un festival de cine estuviera siempre en línea. Con WordPress pueden pasar cosas mágicas, como conocer Brasil gracias a este proyecto y si tienes continuidad, que te vuelvan a buscar para la siguiente edición y volver a ir presencialmente. Pero entonces aprendes de negocios. Puse la condición de que también le pagaran el boleto de avión a mi en ese entonces novia. Yo solté esa condición pensando que no lo harían, pero sí se logró. Y piensas: los presupuestos se deben de ejercer y la tranquilidad de tener a alguien presencial vale más
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My Journey From Freelancer To Product Maker
[ad_1] Like many others in our industry, my WordPress journey started a while ago. I built my first website using GeoCities when I was 14 years old, 21 years ago (boy am I getting old). At the time I was obsessed with skateboarding, the website was for friends I used to hang out and ride around with from school. I remember how excited I felt when I could see that my website was online and I would literally show it to everyone I could, even though looking back at it now it was extremely brightly coloured and scrappy! Back then, with my family’s 56k connection, whenever I connected to the internet it would take over the landline, so I was only allowed to go online for an hour per day. So I spent the days fiddling with Front Page, just waiting for my 1 hour to upload the code and share the updates with my MIRC friends (kinda like a Stone Age version of Slack). That’s about the time I also picked up a guitar for the first time…. Music, business and websites To start I borrowed a super cheap electric guitar from a friend to learn how to play, and impress a girl I liked. After playing all evening, I felt so inspired that the guitar ended up next to me while I slept in bed. It was love at first chord. Because I was so obsessed, I couldn’t stop practicing and quickly I became pretty good (for a kid). So much so that I formed a band with some friends and started performing wherever we could. For the next decade, I focused on becoming the best rock musician I could. I didn’t want to just play the guitar in a band that was performing at local events and school, I wanted us to go places and started treating it as a business. I began studying business by reading every book I could, which led me to take courses and become a certified business and digital consultant. During my studies, I learned WordPress and the entire Adobe suite. This was my first introduction to WordPress and it made me love designing and developing websites even more than I already did. I had fun during this time, but they were some tough years and despite all of my efforts, my band wasn’t doing very well. After everything I had put into it, I thought I’d have my own episode on MTV Cribs already! We decided the band needed a change. We rebranded, wrote new stuff, this time in English to maximise our reach, and did an online launch using everything I learned. Within a month of the launch, my local band from a small town in Israel was signed to release an album worldwide through a British label. We were stoked! We decided to drop everything, come to the UK and start touring Europe. And so we did! Starting from scratch, we began building our audience at small venues and pubs, while really pumping things up online, using WordPress to build our website and promote! We went from playing to sometimes less than 10 people to hundreds, then thousands. Playing with some of the artists we grew up listening to. It was pretty amazing, but I was still broke surprisingly! Luckily though, from my efforts in promoting the band using our website and designs on social media, my work began to get noticed and I started to attract clients. With little to no money in my bank account, I started freelancing out the back of our tour van and built clients websites while touring Europe. Free McDonalds WiFi became my best friend and no matter where we went, there was always one nearby. While I drew in more clients and started generating revenue for myself, unfortunately my band ended up splitting up. It was unavoidable and in the end, it was the best thing that could have happened to me (even though it was devastating at the time). I then thought, “you know what, I’m going to start taking this freelancing thing seriously.” I started building my own business, using my rediscovered passion for the web and WordPress in particular. As I got deeper into building websites, I began to insert myself more into the WordPress community, which filled the void of being “the band guy”. As my time now wasn’t being taken up by touring, I employed my first designer and this is where my agency took off. We managed to pull in 6 figures within the first year, and we kept growing! Within a few years, my agency grew to 12 employees. As I acquired more clients, I realized there was something holding me back. From Agency To Product Maker As we began dealing with more and more clients day-to-day, it became blindingly apparent that we simply did not have the correct tools to deal with the volume efficiently. So, I went on the hunt for a platform or tool that could help organize and deal with client requests quickly and easily. We already had a ticketing system in place, while using emails, phone calls and face to face meetings, but it was just all a mess. There are solutions to the problems of project management BUT I struggled to find a purely dedicated platform that was for a web design agency. I arranged a meeting with my team and we decided, let’s just build our own solution. We had the designers and developers to make it happen, so…we did! We developed a simple WordPress plugin that we could use to take requests from our clients across all of their websites, and after it was implemented, it worked like a dream. Being the person I am though, I didn’t stop there. I thought, “other people should be using this” and that’s where my product, Atarim, was born. I reached out to the WordPress community wherever I could and got a bunch of beta testers to try it
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