My Business Journey – 2020

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The following is a reverse-chronological timeline of my entrepreneurial endeavours in 2020.

October 2020 – March 2021: Freelance Copywriting

Here I spent a few months learning and practicing copywriting, taking up cheap freelance gigs on Fiverr to gain experience. Writing is something that comes naturally to me, and I wanted to learn how to sell online, so this seemed like a great fit. I learned a lot and now consider myself pretty good at copywriting.

September 2020 – March 2021: Win the morning, win the day

A minor pivot from The Growing Graduate, this was a site and business update where the niche was on morning routines and starting the day the right way. I wrote a few posts and created some online content, but never sold anything or made any money. I didn’t know how to market or sell a product, and I was building a product for an audience I didn’t have. I also realised that there are many established competitors in this niche, and to compete when starting from nothing was impractical.

Towards the end of this period, my year of self-employment was running out. I was on Universal Credit during this time and effectively living for free while playing around with online business. I wasn’t making any money from my business endeavours, and was certainly under the given government earnings threshold for self-employment.

So in January/February of 2021, the government were basically like “yo, we can’t pay you for self-employment anymore; you need to get a job”. I was given a work coach who helped me find employment. We were primarily looking for work in the marketing field, so that I could learn and solidify marketing skills which I’d then use to promote my online businesses in the future.

In short, this was how I found my job at Just Move In. Working for a startup was an incredible fit for me, as my skillset is very broad and you’re not forced into a specific set of tasks. Work is constantly changing and there are always new opportunities. I highly recommend it for polymaths and people who like wearing multiple hats.

May – July 2020: Amazon Ebooks

As part of my monetisation efforts for The Growing Graduate, I decided to write a few ebooks – both as a way to earn a little money, and as a way to drive traffic to the blog. Not going into too much detail, here’s a list of those books:

I’ve since updated the covers of those books and released a few more.

You can find all of my Amazon Ebooks on my author profile below:

https://www.amazon.com/author/jamesdramsden

February – October 2020: The Growing Graduate

Ahh… The Growing Graduate (TGG). My first proper attempt at an online business. This came off the back of my feelings of uncertainty from having no career. I followed the classic business advice to “solve your own problem” – and that’s exactly what TGG was about, helping graduates who felt lost after university to find their way and figure out what they wanted to do with their lives.

I believed in the idea. I became officially self-employed, creating a business plan and getting a loan for £500 to work on the business. That loan was spent on an annual subscription to a piece of software that I was “sold” on by an affiliate marketing course I took (which, I later learned, earned the referrer a commission) and a freelance designer to make the product I planned on selling.

You can get the pivoted version of that product completely free today, if you’re interested. Just head to this link:

Get Your Guide To A Better Life

The biggest mistake I made was creating a product with no interest for that product. I was solving a problem, sure, but nobody knew of my solution. I had no authority, no experience in marketing or sales, and no audience.

The business never took off, as you’d expect.

It didn’t help that I was building this during a global pandemic. But at the same time, this was perhaps the most ideal time to make this business. If it weren’t for the pandemic, the focus wouldn’t have been entirely digital, so I wouldn’t have a lot of the skills that I have, nor would I be equipped to run an online business and travel the world.

There was a lot of good that came out of this, though. I created a bunch of blog content, which you can find on this blog (just look for posts with dates that fit into this bracket). I learned so many skills from this, not limited to but including:

Digital entrepreneurship
Digital marketing
Copywriting
How to write and how to write well
How to write – and focus – for extended periods of time
Use of marketing software
Website design
Product design
Content research and planning
SEO
Email marketing
Affiliate marketing
And more

The skill and knowledge from TGG eventually got me the marketing job I have today (2022).

December 2019 – February 2020: App Development

The time after quitting the editing job was around my university graduation. So, while I previously could talk about how I’ve got this great editing job, I was now effectively unemployed.

I spent a month feeling completely lost, with no idea of what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go. My career plan had effectively been destroyed.

I knew that I wanted to travel, and that I wanted to be wealthy so I could make a positive difference in the world. So, my entrepreneurial side took over and I started thinking about app development. I quite enjoyed coding and found it easy to find Flow, and had a couple of cool ideas for apps. I also had no idea what else to do – it was something that I could focus and work on – and liked the slim possibility of an app taking off.

So, I spent a few months learning the programming language Swift for iOS to create iPhone apps. This was interesting because it was the first time I was learning an actual programming language, rather than the HTML and CSS (or Scratch) that I’d used in the past. A lot of my logical and basic programming knowledge comes from these few months.

After a few months I realised this wasn’t going anywhere (at least, not in the timeframe that I wanted), and that it would require a lot more resource to have a successful online app.