Why this sub exists

Hey, I wanted to give a bit of the story behind this community.

My name is Nikita. I'm a producer at Mellow, and the other mod (Sasha) runs our community on Telegram.

Between the two of us, we spend a lot of time around freelance/remote work conversations. We keep seeing the same stuff come up over and over: unstable income, icky client situations, burnout, admin, pricing, boundaries, isolation, trying to stay sane while basically running yourself as a business.

For me this is also personal. I’ve freelanced myself — translation, copywriting, project management — and I’ve also been on the hiring side as a producer at a design agency, bringing freelancers onto projects, sometimes urgently, sometimes bringing people back again and again. So I’ve seen this from both angles: being the person trying to make freelance work, and being the person hiring for it.

These are the big reasons we wanted a space like this. Somewhere people can talk honestly about freelance, carving out your independent path, and how to make it less chaotic and more sustainable.

The other reason is, the communities we've seen are quite fragmented, they are either too narrow or over-specific. You have subs for designers, groups for devs, newsletters for marketers. That's nice but it feels like there's no one space to get a consolidated view of what professional freelance entails. The general principles remain. The best practices for freelancer-client relationships stay true regardless of your industry. Everyone uses invoices, everyone faces payment issues, etc. So we wanted a single space for it all.

And we’re not here to spam, DM people, or turn discussions into product talks. Mostly, this is just me and Sasha — and you, hopefully! — making the kind of space we’d personally want to read: useful, honest, practical, and not too polished.

If you’re here early, thank you!
And we'd love for you to share: what would make this sub worth checking regularly for you?