How was your first experience as a freelancer?

[Anonymous]

I could speak 3 languages, and I'm trying to work as a freelancer but I feel so nervous and I'm afraid that I might make a mistake, sometimes I find difficult jobs that require experience and sometimes I find normal jobs but I feel like I'm gonna mess everything up... Anyone here worked as a freelancer could tell me how his/her first day as a freelancer was and how to overcome this kind of fear

[Telekinetic-Potato]

My first job as a freelancer, I fucked up BIG. Someone hired me to edit together a wedding video. I was maybe 16 and he gave me all the footage so I put all the footage together to the requested song. It wasn't very good, I worked so hard to meet the deadline and I turned it in feeling ashamed of my work.

This was only a milestone deadline, not the real one so I was waiting to hear back from him. Two weeks go by, I'm still working on making it better, 3 weeks go by I send him the version I was more proud of, couple more weeks later, I still never heard back from him.

So I'm thinking I wasn't hearing from him because I sucked. Another month later he gives me a call and tells me that he liked the videos and he got caught up doing something else. He wanted to pay me at 16 to edit the entire wedding only at this point I didn't have the footage anymore because I got pissed he ghosted me and never paid so I used the cards for something else. (I was broke and this was very expensive to store cinema camera footage.) that was when he told me that one of the cards he gave me was an origional that hadn't been backed up yet.

All in all, he was understanding but I had never been so ashamed of myself in my life. It was footage from the B-cam so I guess it could have been worse, but I wish I learned this lesson on something other than a wedding.

Became better for it though, never had any of those things happen to me again. I think about that first project a lot.

[Asker]

Oh that's so rude from him to ghost you without even paying, don't be ashamed of it you did a great job though and learned a lot of things, you should be proud.. thanks for sharing your experience 😊

[Guy13]

So good I stayed one.