Issue #13

🎒 Business update

Over the past few months, I’ve seen a downturn in the number of leads coming in, but in the past couple of weeks I’ve had a bunch of high budget projects land in my inbox 🤯.

I’ve been posting relatively consistently on LinkedIn for the past couple of months, which may or may not be paying off.

I see this as a bit of a long game, I’ve started approaching many things with the expectation that something isn’t just going to happen overnight and that I’ll need to stick with it consistenly before I see results.

Back in May, I mentioned I was planning on repositioning my business to focus on working with sustainable companies.

Well, I’ve been working towards that…

🖥 New website WIP

I’ve been working on a new website to reflect this new reposition.

I ended up hiring a copywriter to write content for some key pages on my website.

I’ve also finished the design of it and after 2 years of freelancing, I’ve finally put some case studies together.

I’m also getting a video created which is being worked on as we speak, so other than that I just need to build it.

I’ve been using Sanity a lot over the past year and a half, with other teams, but I’m yet to do a complete project from start to end by myself – so I’m thinknig about using it myself to fill in some knowledge gaps.

I’m also thinking of giving Astro a try, for one I want to see what it’s like and mostly it has no JavaScript runtime overhead.

🏔 Put yourself out there

This leads me to a bit of advice.

For years I hid inside my comfort zone, shying away from anything that made me feel uncomfortable.

But leaving that comfort zone allowed me to become a freelancer. And things that used to fill me with fear are now a walk in the park.

In the past month alone I’ve done a lot more fear-inducing activities:

• 🎙 Took part in Prismic’s live meetup last month
• 🎤 Began attending a sustainable meetup and might end up working with the organiser
• 🎫 Got free tickets to Blue Earth Summit (from one of my clients) and made new business connections off the back of that
• ♻️ Becoming known online for web sustainability because of the content I’ve consistently started sharing on LinkedIn

The old me would’ve put all of this off until my website was done, but I’ve learnt everything doesn’t need to be perfect before you get started.

You have to go out there and make it happen for yourself.

👨‍🍳 Stryve updates

I’m not entirely sure what is new to Stryve since my last update.

I’ve been adding content and designing new features (which I need to build).

But something I’ve been really excited about, which I’ve just launched this week is carbon rating badges on recipes – this is all thanks to MyEmissions.

If you visit a recipe now it’ll show you how it scores on a scale from A-E (A being the best), and the approximate emissions produce from that meal.

Thankfully all of the meals score either an A or B (you’d find many meat-based meals scoring a D or E).

I’ve also had a couple of prospective clients reach out to me and tell me that they really like Stryve and use it quite often which is great to hear.

📹 Learning videography

After years of admiring people who can make videos, I’ve decided to finally make some effort to learn and create videos so I can start putting out more engaging content.

For the first time since I started freelancing, I have some chunky gaps in my schedule.

I have some warm leads I need to hit up and 2 potential clients in the pipeline who I’d be very interested in working with.

There’s a ton of stuff I need to do for my business, like build my website for one, that I need to do.

But I’ll be spending some time trying to sign some work from the clients I want to work with otherwise I might have to fall back on some projects I’m not super excited about but we’ll see how it goes.

I’m actually having to work a little bit now to get interesting projects.

Vivobarefoot shoes

Earlier this year I bought a pair of Vivobarefoot shoes. I love them so much that I bought another pair. But for good reason. My first pair are great for dry conditions but now we’re coming up to colder months, I need a pair that would be great in the wet and for all the forest walks I seem to be doing.

Sustainable web design by Tom Greenwood

I first read this book around a year and a half ago, but it feels like a good time to revisit it now that web sustainability is a core part of my business.