Quick-start freelance services

As someone who is both an employee (for contract gigs) and a small business owner who wants to help people find alternatives to full-time work, I felt inclined to write down a list of ‘things I’d hire for’ to give job-seekers an idea of what they might be able to do to bridge the gap between careers (or find a new one).

Not all of these are glamorous, but I’ve chosen to list services here that meet a few requirements:

  • You can perform them with a laptop and an internet connection (I’ll pay the Zoom bill if we need to connect)

  • They don’t require a degree or any special certification (I don’t care where you went to school, nor where you worked, nor that you know how to open Microsoft Word),

  • I’d pay at least $40 USD per hour for someone to take these things off my plate, and I’m not rich.

Another note before I jump in: please don’t bother contacting me saying that you’ll be happy to do these things. This isn’t a job posting.

Here’s how I roll: I hand-select my own collaborators based on their their web presence, which shows me that they’re willing to go above and beyond ‘replying to a job post’ or ‘sending me a résumé or cover letter that I have no interest in reading.’

Working with people who need their gigs spoon-fed to them is a non-starter for me. I’ve worked with those kinds of people many times before, and it usually ends up fizzling out. They just don’t have the energy I need, and they rarely take initiative: they’re trying to do the least amount of work possible to get paid.

If that stings, I’m sorry, but I’m pretty sure other entrepreneurs feel similarly, so use that as a reality check if you’re looking for work. You need to make yourself desirable to get my business. Show me something.

Ok, let’s jump in.

1. Focus buddy

This one tops my list, and it’s something that you’ll never see advertised as a job. Anywhere.

I have ADHD (can you tell by reading this?). I have an overactive brain, teeming with ideas. They’re good ideas, but I suffer from the same things that slow a lot of entrepreneurs down: fear of rejection, impostor syndrome, procrastination, the usual suspects.

So I struggle to finish projects, market myself, and do the ‘grunt work’ tasks that I don’t enjoy doing. Accounting, marketing, social media promotion, content creation (like this article), it’s a long list of shit that’s way less fun than designing, coding, ideating, and inventing.

People like me can make money (I got skillz) – and it’s well worth an investment to pay someone else to make sure I eat my vegetables, so to speak.

I define a focus buddy as someone who can show up to an hour-long call with an agreed-upon agenda (e.g. we’re going to delete 150 emails from my inbox, come hell or high water) and be there with me while I complete the task.

That’s actually it. You’re just…there.

It’s surprising, I know.

But just like a personal trainer forces you to do those Bulgarian split-squats that make your ass hurt for two days, I need a personal trainer for productivity. I need someone to hold me accountable, with a combination of their encouraging words, their presence, and the fact that I’m paying them for the session.

So, if you’re someone with a pulse and you can help a creative schmuck complete their boring administrative tasks, you can get paid.

Let’s keep going.

2. Social media assistant

I’m a designer/developer with strong opinions, useful insights, over a decade of experience, and I charge $150 USD per hour for my time.

But I’m also 42 years old, and I have the social media presence of a grizzled boomer.

TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, X, Facebook, BlueSky, and all the others…they’re surfaces that I should have a presence on. And I just don’t.

What usually happens: I get roped in to the eyeball/emotional traps in all these platforms and tend to just get angry at all the wonderfully happy people posting photos of themselves (or their meals, or their earnings, whatever). I seethe, I weigh in with a snarky comment here and there, and I close the tab.

What a waste.

I’d much rather work with a spry millennial (or whatever, I assume younger people are better at this stuff) to:

  1. Force me to sign up for all these things under a single brand,

  2. Get a publishing schedule in place. Once a week, for starters,

  3. Help me produce insightful, bite-size chunks of text/media content to disseminate across the platforms,

  4. Help me pull the trigger and post the damn things,

  5. Point out any useful connections I should make after doing so (a smart comment/reply, someone worth following, a smart feature request or FAQ, etc),

  6. Do all of this with me (see above, Focus Buddy) as I’m not super keen on handing the keys to my social accounts over to anyone else, and logging in is a pain with all the 2FA involved.

I’m sure that the revenue brought in by this kind of assistance would easily cover the expense for me.

But whenever I look for a social media assistant, I’m either confronted with a 4-figure bill from a marketing agency (pass) or I have no way to vet the work of a freelancer who does this. They say they do it, but I need more proof. Show me a video, show me your methods.

So, there’s another option = help aging creatives get the word out about their shit.

3. Website auditor and onboarding tester

This one’s for guys like me who make websites and make software.

For example, I built this web platform, Yoursellf, which I’m keen on launching and growing.

But I can’t shake the idea that my sales pitch (on the homepage), the resources, and the onboarding flow could be improved, which is part of the reason I’m writing this article in the first place (content!).

I’m challenging two huge, die-on-this-hill paradigms with Yoursellf:

  1. I’m saying that websites don’t need to be decorative to be effective (gasp), and

  2. I’m telling people to stop praying for full-time jobs and pursue a freelance lifestyle instead (double gasp).

So it’s gonna take an air-tight pitch to convince people that this way of doing branding and business works.

What I need is someone to record themselves using my website, buying something, getting the email receipts—everything that I would want an ideal customer to do. I want to hear their thoughts every step of the way (e.g. ‘this is confusing, this resonates with me, I have no idea what this does, this email looks unprofessional, etc.’).

You can do screen recordings with Quicktime, and upload them to a Basecamp account with some side notes.

An easy two hours of work there (half a workday) and I’d pay a hundred bucks for a job well done on that front, without hesitation.

Ok, one more for now before I wrap v1 of this article.

4. Video editor and chopper-upper

I’ve been pulling a content-generation move recently that I think is genius. I’m biased, of course, but it actually works. Don’t tell anybody, it’s my own little secret for now (sike, go ahead, just tell ’em Dave Bloom sent ya).

Here’s what I do: I record myself talking about anything business related, transcribe it (I use SuperWhisper), then feed the transcription into Claude AI to extract gems: key points, a summary, whatever I need to extract into a blog post or a piece of website content.

Talking comes naturally to everyone. Writing doesn’t, and I often find myself ‘trying to be a fancy-shmancy writer’ when I have a blinking cursor in front of me. And I can never get things to sound just right.

(the amount of stuff I’ve written and not published could fill several books, it’s kinda sad)

Contrast that with you (or me, or an AI agent) asking me to wax philosophical on a subject I’m nerdy about. Much like this post, I can talk forever, and talk intelligently. I can make good metaphors, and I talk in ‘plain language.’ The ideas make sense. There be gems.

Put that all together, and I could forge mountains of shareable, insightful content just by prompting myself with some subjects to talk about. This could be anything: from WordPress, to employment, to design, to The Beatles or what daily life is like as a redhead. Whatever.

But nobody wants to listen to me blabbing for an hour, off the cuff.

Instead, I need someone to chop up my ramblings (AI can extract the gems) and post those in short-form across all of the major social media outlets I listed above (that I avoid at my own peril). Post and ghost, but make sure the point is clear, there’s context, and there’s a clear call to action to subscribe to me, buy my products or my time, etc.

Man, my kingdom for someone who knows their way around audio/video editing software and can stay awake long enough to get that done.

That’s something I’d pay even more for – in the $75-100 hourly range.

Ok, you made it this far. Hopefully this gave you a few ideas.

The point of this article wasn’t just to say ‘here, do this instead of getting a full time job.’ That’s apples and oranges, but the premise is the same: there is plenty of work out there, it’s just not as centralized to a single client (aka a job) as it used to be.

If this pisses you off or you’re thinking “I call bullshit:” that’s understandable. Grieve for the death of the entry-level full-time job as long as you need to. Light a candle, say a little prayer, then dust yourself off and get fucking real.

Employers aren’t stupid: we know that we can pick and pop a few engagements with energetic, get-shit-done consultants and move the needle for our businesses (or pull up and stop doing something if it isn’t working for us, or if the employee turns out to be lazy, or a dick, or otherwise doesn’t mesh with us for whatever reason).

We don’t want to pay salary. I like money.

We don’t want to pay benefits. Sorry, it’s true. I’ve hired people, but I’ve never paid a ‘benefit.’

We don’t want to be shackled to you and pay you for taking a vacation or a mental health day.

We want to pay you to help us increase our revenues, reduce our costs, and help us play whack-a-mole with our lives.

AI is coming for that work, but it’s not as close as you think it is. You have some time to sneak in the margins.

We are the new employers, and we have cash to invest in ourselves, and in you.

Come get it.

Thanks for reading. DB.

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