In 2017, I quit my job at an agency to start freelancing.
At that time I had no idea what I was doing, how to get started, or whether I wanted to freelance long term. I had so many questions.
My biggest fear in freelancing has always been community. If I don’t work at a company or organization, how will I ever find a sense of belonging? If I work alone every day, how will I ever feel part of a team?
I was lucky enough to get connected with a group of freelancers and we started coworking one afternoon/week. I remember sitting next to my friend Veronika and asking her endless questions:
- How much should I charge?
- How do you write a contract?
- What’s the difference between a proposal and an SOW?
- How should I respond to this email?
Her quick feedback and insight was invaluable. More friends started coming to co-work, we had happy hours, dinners, and it was exactly the group I needed to make it through my first year of freelancing.
I’ve learned so much since then, in a big part because of the community and camaraderie I found with fellow freelancers.
What started as a once/week coworking club quickly turned into the thing I was the most excited to belong to.
A little over a year ago I started meeting with Shannon—a brilliant freelance product designer—on a weekly basis. After talking through our biggest challenges, we discovered some common ground:
- How do you maintain consistent deal flow?
- How can you streamline or outsource repetitive work?
- How do you start offering new services? Packaged offerings?
Everything seemed to lead back to this one question… after freelancing for a while, how can you continue to grow?
Eventually, after hours of zoom calls, we decided to start something new— it’s called Common Sole.
In addition to community, Common Sole is focused on equipping freelancers with resources to build and sustain growth.
Inspired by our favorite business and design frameworks, and our combined 10+ years of freelance experience, we’re excited to finally get these tools out of our heads and into your hands.
The goal of these resources is not to help you get rich fast. We don’t believe in shortcuts. We are interested in guiding you through the process of making sustainable changes.
If it’s not your cup of tea, not a problem. We’ll keep this community small for now, we’re focused on getting feedback on our early resources.
If you join the community, you can expect to see:
- Curated links from our favorite business experts
- New tools that will improve your workflow
- Our favorite business frameworks, adapted specifically for freelancers
- Meredith
