My income (and life) through the years
Come live 10 years as a solopreneur in 10 minutes.
Disclaimer: This post is ridiculously long and maybe a tad too honest.
In 2012, I shared an apartment on Brick Lane, London, with 3 roommates. I was single and didn’t have many friends besides my colleagues, so I spent most of my time working.
That’s when I realized that if I was going to spend so much time working, I should probably work something I like.
There wasn’t something particularly bad about my job. It was like one of those relationships when you get used to being together, but the thought of getting married gives you the jitters. Just wasn’t it, you know?
That’s when I started to look for “ways to make money online.” I didn’t have the confidence to call it “start a business” yet.
My research brought me to coaching. I loved the idea. I started researching certification programs, and then, in mid 2012, I met a boy — and all professional problems flew out the window.
That boy — now my husband — refused to even consider living in London, so I talked to my boss and he allowed me to go back to the Bulgarian office. That’s how I returned home.
It took about a year for our relationship to go from wild new love to calmer, familiar love, and I refocused on my professional struggles. At the time, Viktor was a Junior Marketing Assistant and made minimum wage, so if I was going to pursue solopreneurship, I had to figure it out on my own.
I started saving up, got my Coaching Certificate, and at the beginning of 2014, I quit. That’s when this crazy journey begins.
I created a website and profiles on a few coaching platforms. I also created a coaching gig on Fiverr (which attracted zero clients)/
My former boss suggested I coach his employees and partners, and I gladly took him up on that offer.
The website got me just one client that year.
The coaching platforms did get me a few.
Overall, I made very little money — about $7K for the entire year, which was insufficient even for Bulgaria.
Not everything was bad, though. That was the year Viktor proposed and we got married. My problems were now his problems (brave man), and he had a way of solving them. We moved to Sofia (Bulgaria’s capital) where he started a new job with better pay.
2014 Income sources:
Business coaching — 60%
Personal coaching — 40%
In 2015, I stopped doing business coaching. Not sure why. Partly because we moved cities, but mostly because I was trying to prove to myself that I could make money without falling back on my good relationship with my former boss. Looking back, it was probably stupid that I walked away from that opportunity, but we live and learn.
I kept working with one-on-one clients, but I didn’t know how to get them to commit or how to raise my prices. I didn’t know how to design a proper coaching program.
At that time, I was desperately looking for ways to increase my income. I found an opportunity with a personal development website called Wisdom Times, where I wrote articles on personal development and relationships. They paid me $25 per article.
This new revenue stream allowed me to invest in a Marketing for Coaches course that cost about $200.
Part of that course was about copywriting. I used the advice to rewrite my profile descriptions on coaching platforms, and my website, and I did see an uptick in coaching requests.
But what’s more important, I liked the process of copywriting so much, I decided to create a new gig on Fiverr for writing About Pages.
My idea was to upsell business coaching to everyone who hired me for about pages. I did a few coaching sessions that way, but the plan changed when this Fiverr gig exploded.
The first few buyers left amazing reviews. They said they were shocked at the quality they’d gotten for $5. That’s how much I charged.
I coached and wrote for a while, but when I started getting 10–20 writing orders per day, something had to give. I gave up coaching and went full-on with Fiverr, still charging as little as possible, as I was afraid I’d lose work.
Who’d pay me more to write as a non-native speaker?
Notice the confidence problem again?
That year, I made just a bit more money — about $9K.
2015 Income sources:
Personal coaching — 40%
Wisdom Times — 30%
Fiverr copywriting — 30%
2016 was a good year professionally. Now that I was focused on writing, I gained experience & confidence. With confidence came a bit higher prices ($20-$30), and more opportunities.
I also started working through Upwork. I went on a lot of interviews and I got a couple of big clients. It was the first time I got $1000+ from just one client (though it was for A LOT of work), so I was excited.
I also started telling people that I’m a copywriter now. Since my husband worked in a startup, a lot of our friends were entrepreneurs. I quickly got recommendations and direct requests and started working with regular clients. Through friends in agencies, I even got to work on campaigns for MasterCard and IKEA for the Bulgarian market.
In 2016, I made about $25K. The Bulgarian average for the time was about $12K per year, so I was beyond happy with my income.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies. We were trying to get pregnant for 2 years already. I was borderline depressed and worked as much as possible so I wouldn’t think about it.
That was also the year I lost my dad. He never got to meet his grandchildren. It’s funny I write this today. It’s his birthday. He was supposed to turn 60.
2016 Income Sources:
Fiverr — 40%
Upwork — 20%
Wisdom Times articles — 10%
Clients from recommendations — 30%
At the beginning of 2017, Wisdom Times decided to create a membership platform with video courses on different topics. Since they had noticed that my relationship articles performed well, they wanted me to record video courses about relationships.
They paid me $1000 per video course, and I recorded three. They’re still on their platform. I’m not sure how they’re doing, but for WT’s sake, I hope they’re making money. They were very decent people to work with.
I was still working on Fiverr and Upwork, continuing to raise my prices as slowly as possible, still afraid I’d lose work.
I also had my regular clients, occasional new clients from recommendations, and wrote articles for Wisdom Times.
That was the first year I started feeling tired. I was free to work whenever, so I did work whenever. I didn’t create any schedule, didn’t set any boundaries. Sometimes I took a day off and then worked in the evenings.
I felt strangely disconnected from it all. Some months were good, some weren’t. Generally, we were okay with money, but we were never certain what was coming. I was starting to wonder if the stress was worth it.
I still didn’t have a personal brand. I was an online nobody. I only counted on platforms to get me work, and on a few friends with relevant businesses.
I was also really confused niche-wise. I wrote about relationships, where I presented myself as a relationship coach. Well, I had done relationship coaching.
But I also talked to people who hired me as a copywriter.
Who was I?
That was the year when I started and failed another business. For years, I’ve been writing novels, preferring to draft them by hand. Then, inspiration struck: a journal with a built-in 3-act structure and prompts to steer the story.
I invested about $1500 in designing and printing 50 journals. We sold 10 and stopped. Truth be told, we didn’t put a lot of effort into selling them. I still think this could’ve worked — I just didn’t have the capacity to focus on it.
Why did I start it then?
Solopreneurs do these things. We’re easily distracted, always attracted to new ideas. It’s our strength and weakness.
We still couldn’t get pregnant so that was taking a toll. Plus, I was still processing the death of my father.
In 2017, I made about $35K.
Income sources:
Fiverr — 30%
Upwork — 20%
Wisdom Times — 20%
Clients from recommendations — 30%
In January 2018, I had agreed on getting a minor surgery which would hopefully fix what was in the way of me getting pregnant.
I was sick and tired of thinking about babies without having a baby, so Viktor and I decided to do a road trip around Europe. We booked a hotel in Venice and a beautiful house in a French village near Paris. Everything else would be spur-of-the-moment decisions.
At the time, Viktor was working part-time and building his first business, so he was also flexible. The plan was to work in the mornings and explore in the afternoons.
That’s when I also found the confidence to make a few key decisions business-wise.
First, I paused my Upwork account. The process of getting jobs on Upwork was too much for me. Interviews are the norm there. I didn’t like that, especially not with the time difference.
Second, for the first time ever, I dared to raise my prices to get to about $100. This had the effect I wanted: I worked with fewer but better clients.
I also told my business friends I had enough regular clients and didn’t want to take on new work for a while.
For the first time in a long time, I felt excited. I had more control over work, I had done the medical thing I had been pondering for months, and I had booked a vacation that would be great.
Then, in March 2018, I found out I was pregnant.
We wondered if we should cancel our trip, but my doctor said I was pregnant, not sick.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t as fun as we’d hoped. I couldn’t drink wine. I couldn’t eat seafood. I couldn’t eat cheese. Not the best time to visit Italy and France.
Plus, a few days in, I started to feel sick a lot.
I was constantly in a bad mood. My clients annoyed me. Viktor annoyed me. I walked like a snail around Paris, worried that if I walked too fast for too long, I may lose the baby.
On top of that, the village in Paris was a nightmare. It was precisely the smell of grass that made me nauseous, and I was in a village in spring.
That trip could’ve been an inconsequential part of my life, except it was the moment when I decided I was done with solopreneurship. It was after a meeting when a regular client pissed me off so much, I couldn’t take it.
I briefly discussed it with Viktor, but he couldn’t stop me. Before we returned to Bulgaria, I had paused my Fiverr account, told Wisdom Times I wouldn’t be writing for them anymore, and cancelled all my regular contracts.
Viktor gave me a month, but I refused to go back to work. It’s worth noting that we had some savings, Bulgaria offers 2 years of paid maternity leave which kicks in after the 5th month of pregnancy, and Viktor was making okay money, so I knew we could afford it. We wouldn’t be great financially, but we could afford it.
That’s when Viktor said, okay, I’m stepping in. If you’re willing to help me for an hour or two every day, I’ll turn this into an agency.
And boy, did he. He hired writers, raised the prices on Fiverr, and set up boundaries: no work during the weekend, no meetings for projects under $1000, no orders under $100.
Men are better at making confident decisions like that. Or is it just that confident people are better at making confident decisions? I learned a lot from the way Viktor changed my business.
In December 2018, Adrian was born. His birth led to a few things that made the first half of 2019 a blur.
But we’ll get to that.
In 2018, we made $40K. It should’ve been more, but it took a while for my Fiverr profile to get back on track, and for people to start recommending us again.
2018 Income sources:
Fiverr-60%
Clients from recommendations-40%
So, 2019. First, we decided to move to Burgas. If anyone’s counting, that’s 3 moves in 5 years. Burgas is my hometown, a mid-size town by the beach, and a much better place to raise children than the busy capital.
We also bought a 3-bed condo with a private garden by the beach. Yay us.
I barely worked during the first half of the year, but Viktor worked tirelessly to grow our agency and his other business. I mostly trained the writers. Sometimes, I did sales calls.
When Adrian was 5 months old, we got a babysitter. I started to learn from Joanna Wiebe about the copywriting process of the big copywriters — research, testing, optimization— and we started to pitch high-priced services to bigger clients.
That’s when we started selling website copy for $5K, $7K, $12K. It was going well.
I also applied to get Pro Rated on Fiverr and got it, which brought in more work.
That was the year we got an office and hired proper staff on top of the freelancers we worked with. Somehow, my solopreneurship had turned into a full-blown business that supported our family.
To mentally escape from that madness, in the end of that year, I started reading and later writing for a website I had just discovered — Medium. It was just for fun.
In 2019, we made about $60K.
Fiverr — 30%
Agency clients — 70%
Early 2020, I got pregnant with my second. Queue more nausea, exhaustion and weird moods, only now, we also had a 1-year-old.
Then Covid came. Good thing we bought our condo on time so Adrian could run around in the yard.
Our employees worked from home, but Viktor and I went to the office every day when the nanny arrived. It was only us in the office, and we lived together anyway. I’m not sure what we were doing was legal, considering the lockdown, but we knew we weren’t doing anything wrong, and it was the only way we could keep working. No way we could do online meetings and write with a 1-year-old in the house.
It was a horrible time but our business actually grew. I think because online-based businesses grew, and they needed more content than ever.
At the same time, we were always in meetings with our big clients, changing strategies and campaigns to fit the new situation.
I think by mid-2020, one year in, both Viktor and I realized agency work wasn’t for us. We are perfectionists. I’m not saying that proudly. Perfectionism is a big problem in business because no business is ever perfect, least of all a service business. And the more it grows, the more messes there are to fix.
We couldn’t handle it. We slowly closed shop. First, we stopped offering long-term services like writing blogs or newsletters. This meant when we were done writing and setting up a campaign, we were done with the client. Then, when clients got fewer and fewer, we started letting staff go, including freelancers.
Also, surprisingly for me, in 2020 I started making some money on Medium — around $4K that first year, and I was writing on and off.
That’s when I started to understand that I was made to be a solopreneur. I liked my business while it was solo with a little freelance help. An agency? Not so much.
In October 2020, Alek was born. He stopped breathing 10 minutes later. They had to intubate him and he spent 3 days in an incubator. Because of that, his blood tests were all over the place. It took a month until we understood everything was okay.
It was the scariest moment of my life. It makes you appreciate things like never before.
In 2020, we made around $80K. I should probably mention that that’s when Viktor sold his half of the business he’d been developing alongside our business, for $100K.
Income streams:
Fiverr — 50%
Agency work — 45%
Medium — 5%
2021 was about raising two babies. We worked on Fiverr with a couple of freelancers and myself. I also wrote on Medium, on and off.
We were calm about money because of Viktor’s deal, so we didn’t push it. We were just trying to survive as parents.
The only thing I remember about that year was I barely slept. And there were a few more lockdowns, of course.
Somehow, we made $45K.
2021 Income streams:
Fiverr — 90%
Medium — 10%
It was mid-2022 and I was slowly becoming myself again. I started missing work so I went back to Fiverr, wondering if I could optimize it so it brings in more clients.
Not sure why I was always going back to Fiverr. Was it because I knew it would work? My profile already had over 1000 reviews. Unless Fiverr goes bankrupt, I’ll probably always be able to fall back on this.
Looking at the profiles of other writers for inspiration, I noticed Georgia Austin. She looked successful and had more reviews than me. I researched her more and discovered she was making about $20-$30K per month on Fiverr alone.
Shocked, I started looking at other writers. No one had quite her results, but I did discover a few more who were earning over $10K per month.
That. Was. That.
I had no idea Fiverr could even make this kind of money. I decided I had to make it work, too!
I optimized gigs, improved client communication, started writing more things myself and stopped outsourcing work to anyone but one freelancer who was doing great.
It worked. Fiverr started bringing in $7–8K per month.
I also kept writing on Medium, just because. I wrote all kinds of things: relationships, personal growth, writing, business.
We had a few clients from recommendations again for one-off campaign work. I even offered business coaching to a few of them, and this time, believe me, I didn’t charge pennies.
I wanted the money. What had made me so greedy? Was it having kids?
When you have kids, you start thinking differently about money.
Before that, it was always, Well, we have enough, it’s fine.
Then all of a sudden, we have two kids in a private preschool. I want us to travel. I want them to look nice. To have nice haircuts. I don’t want to worry about buying medicine when they’re sick, which, until recently, was all the damn time.
Anyway. 2022 was my first 6-figure year. I think I just got angry. Angry at how little I had achieved for all those years.
Notice that 8 years in, I hadn’t started an e-mail list, didn’t have any prominent social media profiles, and basically didn’t have a clue how to grow anything else but Fiverr.
I had one skill: writing. Turns out it was enough.
In 2022, we made $104K:
Fiverr — 50%
Copywriting clients — 35%
Medium — 5%
Business coaching — 10%
It was 2023 and I somehow knew it was time. I had spent enough time trying. Enough time learning. Enough time failing. I was ready to build my business. I was ready to create something that I wouldn’t give up.
In January 2023, Fiverr made $10K. That was my first ever $10K month on the platform.
But also, the problem with Fiverr became too obvious to ignore when we took two weeks off to travel to Barcelona with the kids and my mom.
A few clients needed urgent modifications, and while I tried to react as fast as possible, I was slower than usual. They left bad reviews, and the work started dropping.
It went to $7K in February. $5K in March. $4K in April.
Yes, we got it back up again, but that’s when I finally realized this wasn’t scalable. There was no way I’d ever live the life I wanted and make the money I wanted on Fiverr. It was one or the other.
Don’t get me wrong, I have two friends with super successful service businesses — agencies, in fact. It’s just not for me.
I needed a change. That’s when I got Marie Forleo’s B-School program. It inspired me and I started to create my actual business: I would be the person who would help others become solopreneurs, and develop the businesses they want.
Hopefully, I’d save them a few years of trial and error.
That’s when I started One-Person Business Success. It’s when I returned to Medium and started posting consistently. It’s when I started trying to get featured in Business Insider (and succeeded in the end).
I scaled back on copywriting and focused on building what I wanted to build. I still want to make money. Just not the kind of money that would take me away from the people I love.
Mom was diagnosed with cancer at the end of 2023. Luckily, Bulgaria’s healthcare system turned out to be amazing. She had surgery a week after her diagnosis, had all the treatment for free, and is doing much better already.
But I want to take her to Italy. I want to get her a new car. I want her to live her best life, you know. It was hard for her when I was little.
So yes, I’m building what I’m building for me. It’s selfish. If you want the why, it is selfish.
Doesn’t mean it’s not helpful. I have so many friends who want to learn how to do what I do. I have so many subscribers who want to learn. So many Medium readers. So many people.
Solopreneurhip is the future of work, I truly believe that. It’s already becoming evident how many corporations hire freelancers. It’s becoming evident how many companies prefer to advertise on intimate newsletters instead of huge, noisy social media platforms.
But solopreneurship is difficult to get used to. And I know I can help millions of people with this transition and with all the little things that surround it.
Oh, right, 2023. We made $65K. It’s okay to make less for a while to be able to build what I want.
Income streams:
Fiverr — 90%
Medium — 2%
Agency work — 8%
And here we are, 2024.
Even though we’re only in month five, I already have a lot to tell you.
But let’s leave it for another time.
So… Solopreneurship is ups and downs. It helps you get over the shitty days, and sometimes, it makes your days shitty.
But say what you will, it’s the most fun I’ve ever had.
The most free I’ve ever been.
And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Still up for it?
Loved reading this. Full of helpful advice x
Wow. What an insane story. I’m so happy for you, Viktor, and your two adorable little bundles of joy. You have worked so hard and achieved so much. I’m so jealous. My wife has leukemia, and due to complications, she had a hysterectomy two years ago. We can’t have children. What’s more, I have spent the last 15 years of my life working for “the man” and never found a way out. I wish I could make money writing. That’s what I enjoy doing the most. If my wife and I made $20K a year, we’d be more than golden.