Week #6: Freelancing vs. Selling Themes

This week I was working on submitting the 1.1.0 version of my Coffee World theme. What I managed to get done:

✅ Better hero section
✅ Contact page section fixes
✅ Overall packaging fixes
✅ Performance improvements

Last week I wrote two more items that I missed this week: an introduction video and the fix requirements from ThemeForest. Unfortunately I haven't heard back from ThemeForest yet, so I will have to delay these fixes for next week (hopefully).

Deep dive into web performance

Interestingly enough, throughout my 10 years of corporate web development journey, I've never had to learn about Web Vitals. Performance questions were always answered with "feels slow" and "feels faster," and it seems to be enough.

Now that I've been working on submitting themes to digital marketplaces, I've noticed that great performance is a requirement always everywhere. Therefore, I read upon the subject, and that's how I stumbled upon Web Vitals. After learning about the core principles, I have to say, I like the subject very much.

I like the idea of quantifying user experience and making it measurable. Having 2-3 primary numbers to work on makes your work super focused, which makes it easy to achieve deep work.

This week I've targeted optimizing LCP. Not going to lie, it was painful in the beginning. But after some dumb realizations, I've managed to improve the performance of my theme dramatically, and it feels good to know why it's faster.

Freelancing vs. Selling Themes

The end goal of my Shopify journey is to make money by building SaaS applications. In order to achieve this, first I'd like to embed myself in the Shopify community and ecosystem as a Shopify expert.

Originally, I wrote two stepping stones: becoming a freelancer and digital maker - by which I mostly meant selling themes.

It wasn't 100% clear to me; in which order should I do freelancing and selling themes? I wasn't sure either about the order or priority, because both seemed very attractive.

Focusing on building themes only and making money by selling them "passively" sounds very attractive. It presents an opportunity to become an expert in a niche subject (building Shopify themes), and my products can sell themselves on digital marketplaces while I sleep.

However, I had to realize that this strategy does not serve my end goal as well as freelancing. The whole purpose of freelancing is to meet people. To meet real-world problems and to build a network.

In order to stay focused and not to stretch myself too thin, I will therefore ditch the idea of becoming a digital maker for now. Maybe later, down the road, I will come back to it, but for now, my goal will be to become a freelancer so I can build a clientele and maybe even switch away from my 9-5.

Following your fears pays

Here's a funny little story. My current mantra is this:

"Ship fast. Fail fast. Follow your fears."

The idea behind this mantra is that many times entrepreneurs procrastinate because of perfectionism. This perfectionism, however, is only a camouflaged reason to hide the real reason, which is fear. Fear of getting negative feedback, fear of shame.

I want to overcome this fear because it's only practical. The sooner you get real-world feedback, the sooner you can work on fixing your errors. Many times you realize that what you've been working so hard on doesn't really matter at all.

I followed this principle this week when I invited my friends to follow my Facebook page. At first, I didn't want to. I had the following voices in my head:

"It's not ready yet."
"I'll miss an opportunity to great first impression."
"I'll fail to attract people who'd be interested in Shopify development by showing them a half-baked Facebook page."
"People will think, "Ah, really? A new project again?"

But I knew it was only fear talking in my head, so I invited everyone anyway. I am experienced enough to know: people don't care about my stuff as much as I do.

To my biggest surprise, many people started following my page, but what's even better is that someone even contacted me with a potential Shopify freelancing opportunity. Apparently simply talking about my goals and endeavors is sometimes enough to attract the right people.

Also, now my mind can free up space for other tasks. I don't have to think about when it's the right time to share my page publicly. It's done. One more item checked.

Bonus: achieving deep work

These weeks I am reading Deep Work by Cal Newport, which is a great work about how to achieve deep work. Here are some of my favorite ideas from the book:

You have only so much focus energy a day. Spend it wisely on deep work in the beginning of your day.
Deep work is achievable when supplemented with deep relaxation. Think of physical workouts - your body needs recovery, and so does your brain.
Social media is fast food for your brain. Quick, but not nutritious. It's shallow entertainment, which blocks both deep work and deep relaxation.
Substitute activities for shallow entertainment (like social media) only gain space when you have no better alternative. Plan for quality entertainment and relaxation and learn how to enjoy silence and boredom.
Resisting shallow entertainment is a skill - which trains the same part of your brain that's responsible for sticking to solving a complicated problem.
Your mind gravitates towards easy tasks to save energy. Your task is to design your workflow so that it doesn't seem overwhelming.
Developing routines and habits can make room for both deep work and deep relaxation
Embrace rituals to start and shut down deep work. This helps to resist distractions and to avoid the Zeigarnik effect - which causes your mind to deal with an unfinished problem, even when you are "done" working, resulting in quality relaxation.