A ledger of how I got here

Chilli Fruit, 2020

My working life opened its doors at Chilli Fruit in 2020, in a post my brother secured for me. It was the first job I ever held anywhere, and it arrived on the heels of the most turbulent season I had yet weathered, so it landed less like an opportunity and more like clemency. I threw myself into HARO pitches and content written for a global, English-speaking readership, and enrolled, almost as an afterthought, in a degree in English philology.

A classroom, conscripted

My boss at the time had an idea born less of ambition than of arithmetic: student employees came with favorable tax breaks, for him as the employer and for them as hires. So I recruited three of my own classmates into the company, apprenticed each of them in content, link building, the tools we ran on, and the reasoning behind every decision we made. What I knew, they came to know too.

Three years, then the door

I stayed three years before I left. A brief stint at Linkhouse followed and never quite found its footing, so I went out on my own.

A head start named Surfer

Freelancing began in earnest through a stroke of family fortune: my two brothers are the original co-founders of Surfer, and their network handed me my first clients before I had a portfolio of my own worth showing anyone.

Eighteen thousand złoty and a workshop of my own

When the tax break that had subsidized my earlier employment ran out, I registered a company, filed as unemployed, and applied for a government grant. Eighteen thousand złoty came through, and I spent it on hardware sturdy enough to make the work faster and the days shorter. A couple of domains followed. Then I simply got to it.

What runs today

Everything gathered along the way, link building, content, website work, SEO, and a working knowledge of the software behind all of it, now funds a practice built on two channels: a network cultivated over years of doing this by hand, and leads that arrive through the site you're reading and through LinkedIn.