👀 Behind the scenes

👋 Good evening!
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This week has been kind of a rough one on my side.

A client dropped me. Two people asked for a course refund. Two others canceled their portfolio subscription. 😔

At the same time, I see so many ppl on LinkedIn claiming that if you are still an employee, you have wasted your life. That freelancing is the only path to freedom.

Putting those two things together makes me want to write about the less visible side of being a dataviz freelancer.

I am not complaining. I love my professional life, and I am very happy I left my full time job two years ago. But freelancing also comes with real downsides, and in my opinion, it is clearly not for everyone.
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What I'm doing

My work is split into two parts.

The first one is education around data visualization. I run six websites on the topic, write this newsletter, post almost daily on LinkedIn, and sell three online courses about R, Matplotlib, and ggplot2.

The second one is consulting. For instance I help startups build dashboards with React and D3.js. I work with governments on systems that generate clean, automated Quarto reports. Or I collaborate with research labs to create interactive stories that accompany their publications. Basically if you have data, I can help.
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It works well! But today, let's focus on what's hard and what you should do to prepare if you're tempted.

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​Struggle 1: finding clients

That's the obvious one.

I'm not going to lie here: I'm not looking too much for clients. With a medium size audience, I've got enough requests coming on their own so I don't need to search for prospects.
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Yet, even with 25k followers on LK, and websites visited about 400k times per month, I'm not flowed by requests at all!
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So that's definitely the first thing you must keep in mind before starting a freelance career. How are you going to find people that trust you? Better create a canal before starting, and find some first customer before leaving your current activity.
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Struggle 2: Ghosted

Someone reaches out with a dataviz project. After a few messages, the need is clear. I can solve the problem. We agree on budget and timing.

One or two meetings follow.

Then nothing.

It is frustrating to invest time, sometimes block calendar slots, and then get ghosted with zero feedback. You stay completely in the dark, not knowing what went wrong, or if anything went wrong at all.

I am slowly realizing that this is actually very common. 😔

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Struggle 3: Swiss knife

The skill set required to freelance in dataviz is pretty wild.

Of course, you need strong technical skills and a way to prove them. But you also need to be a salesperson. You have to communicate clearly, run meetings, convince people. And I am not even talking about the administrative load, which is quite heavy in France.

On the technical side, the scope is just as wide. Some clients want pure frontend work with React and D3.js. Others need data analysis with R, Quarto, some statistics, and a lot of data wrangling. Recently, I have even been asked to do pure design work.

This one hurt a bit.

I rely heavily on Excalidraw to sketch future outcomes. It is perfect for thinking through structure, hierarchy, and which information goes where. But it does not look like a polished end product.
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A client was recently disappointed by this, expecting something closer to a Figma file that looks production ready.

Being asked to be both a real designer and a real developer is pretty intense. If you are freelancing, be ready to spend a lot of time outside your comfort zone.
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Struggle 4: Time frame

For five years, I worked in a big tech company where everything moved fast. A project could go from idea to production in four weeks. We had daily meetings. Decisions were made on the fly.

In December 2023, I signed a contract with a government. The goal was to build a pipeline that lets them generate Quarto reports in minutes when an environmental threat occurs.

A very exciting project, initially planned to end in March. We are still working on it today, after a roughly six month pause! No one is at fault, neither them nor me.

But it is a good reminder that, as a freelancer, timeline management can quickly become a real headache.

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Struggle 5: Mental load

I probably work fewer hours than when I was a full time employee. But the mental load is not comparable.

As a freelancer, you are always thinking about the next contract, the post that could attract interest, the student who needs access to a course.

It is your business. You are fully responsible for it. And if you do not take care of it, no one else will.
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I am not an anxious person by nature. But it is clear to me that this lifestyle is not well suited for people who need visibility and reassurance about what tomorrow will look like.

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The bottom line

Again, I am not complaining.

My day to day work is genuinely exciting! I spend most of my time doing what I love. I get to talk with smart, diverse, inspiring people. I feel like I am playing a game with no real limits. I also feel useful: student feedback on the courses is incredibly rewarding. And most importantly, I am in control of my time. Being able to go surfing at 3 pm on a Tuesday, then work until midnight if I want to, is a way of life I never want to give up.

That said, this path is clearly not for everyone. Take the time to think honestly about what works for you. Do not blindly buy into the LinkedIn narrative claiming you are wasting your life if you are an employee. Especially when it usually ends with someone trying to sell you a course.

One last thought. It is striking how our brains give far more weight to what goes wrong than to what goes well. Last week, I had two disappointments. But I also received many great testimonials from 170 recent students and signed a new freelance contract.

So if you had a bad week too, let us try to focus on what is going right.
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That's it for tonight,

Yan

PS: Sorry for drifting away from pure dataviz content today. That is simply what was on my mind tonight 🤷‍♂️
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Interested in behind-the-scene / personal content like this? Yes Not really

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