Two Years In: What I've Learned, What I Pay For, and What Nobody Tells You
Nineteen months ago I made the decision to go out on my own. I had the skills, I had the experience, and I had a plan. What I did not have was a clear picture of what freelancing actually looked like in practice — the tools, the habits, the marketing, and the slow realization that being good at your craft is only one part of running an independent business.
The Lesson Nobody Prepares You For
I believed, genuinely, that if you had the skills people were looking for, they would find you. I was wrong.
The freelance market is a mountain of digital clutter. Talented people are buried in it every day. Having skills matters — but if no one can find you, the skills might as well not exist. Marketing and self-promotion turned out to be more important to my business than I ever anticipated, and it was something I had to learn entirely on my own.
That meant learning social media — not just posting, but understanding what kind of content builds an audience, what platforms are worth the time, and how to carve out a niche specific enough that the right people recognize themselves in what you're saying. It meant building a presence that represented me and my work accurately rather than generically.
It also meant learning skills I had previously relied on others to handle. At my last corporate position, I had a teammate who was a graphic designer — when I needed photo manipulation, video production, or audio work, she was the person I turned to. That resource disappeared the moment I went out on my own. Basic photo editing, video and audio production, and generative AI prompting all became part of my workflow out of necessity — because the alternative was paying someone else to do things I could learn to do myself, or producing content that didn't reflect the quality of the work I was actually delivering for clients.
Nineteen months in, those unplanned skills have become some of my most useful ones.
What I Actually Pay For
Here's what's currently in my subscription stack — in alphabetical order — and why each one earns its place.
Adobe Creative Cloud — This is the heavy lifter. Video production in Premiere Pro, audio production, photo editing in Photoshop, and job aid development. Adobe Firefly is also part of the suite, which has become increasingly useful for image generation. The interface is still the worst in the industry from an accessibility standpoint — small fonts, low contrast, a visual density that would make any WCAG auditor wince — but the capability is unmatched and I haven't found a reasonable alternative that does everything it does.
Anthropic Claude — Management assistant, script cleanup for videos, proofreading for blog posts. I use it daily. If you're reading this blog, you've already seen the output.
Articulate 360 — Do I really need to explain this one to an instructional design audience? Storyline 360 and Rise 360 are the core of my eLearning development work. As a freelancer, I also have access to Nova. I haven't gotten heavy into it yet, but I'm sure it will, for better or worse, become a vital tool in my toolbox.
Canva — Job aid development and image generation for social media content. I've built specific templates for my social media production that create a consistent message and look across everything I publish. My brand colors and logos are already built in — all I need to do is adjust the specific wording to reflect the product. That consistency doesn't happen by accident. It happens because the template does the heavy lifting so I don't have to start from scratch every time.
Clockify — Accurate time tracking for hourly contracts. When you're billing by the hour, you need records that are defensible. Clockify handles that cleanly without getting in the way.
Pixabay — Licensed stock photos and audio clips. Having a reliable source of legally usable media that doesn't require per-asset licensing has saved me more time than I can calculate.
Riverside — Social media video creation and editing. Beyond production quality, what makes Riverside particularly useful is the ability to quickly review the audio transcript and create social media-ready shorts that can be posted directly to YouTube, LinkedIn, or other platforms as part of my broader marketing efforts. The gap between raw footage and something ready to post is significantly smaller with Riverside in the workflow.
Substack — This has surprisingly become both one of my more enjoyable and important marketing tools I've found. In some ways, it has surpassed this blog. People have access to my Substack and can easily find it through a search of keywords within the Substack architecture. People have to know I have a website with a blog to find this. So for those of you who are reading this — thank you. It means more than you know.
TinyPNG — Batch image compression. One of the things I do, when I'm not generating learning content, is creating graphics that support diversity and disability representation — two areas that are majorly underrepresented in the L&D community. I maintain a library of images focused on these areas, and TinyPNG enables me to package over 100 images into an easily downloadable file for my customers. Every image on this site has also been through it, because page load speed matters for accessibility and SEO.
TinyURL — Social media URL creation. Long URLs are ugly and unwieldy in posts. This solves that in about five seconds.
And one non-subscription worth mentioning: I purchased a teleprompter license to support talking-head video recording. Reading from notes or trying to memorize scripts was producing inconsistent results. The teleprompter fixed that. It's a one-time cost that improved the quality of every video I've recorded since.
Nineteen Months Later
The skills I planned to sell are still the foundation of the business. But the skills I didn't plan on learning — the marketing, the content creation, the photo editing, the video production, the AI prompting — are what made the business visible enough to sustain itself.
If you're thinking about making the jump, go in with your eyes open. Being good at instructional design will make you a good freelancer. Knowing how to be found, how to show your work, and how to run the operational side of an independent business is what will make you a successful one.
The gap between those two things is where most people get surprised.