Aarti Shinde has a 3 year old son and lives in Mumbai with her family. She worked in marketing and client servicing for 7 years, but then had to take a career break of 6 years in 2017 to devote time to her family.
In August 2023, she started learning some skills to perform remote work, and started pitching to clients simultaneously.
Within a month of starting her course, she got her first project from a US business owner. She had to conduct some online research and find suitable vendors – simple work that can be done on the internet.
She earned a mere USD 10 for that project – but the client left her a glowing testimonial on Upwork.
She also secured repeat assignments from that client later.
This helped her to secure her second assignment. Her second client is from Australia, and gave her some research, document compilation and presentation creation work for a product launch.
She earned USD 240 in 2 weeks from this assignment by working on a part-time basis.
Like the US client, the Australian client also gave her repeat work!
Securing projects can take time initially, but work quickly flows in as you build your track record and have testimonials on your profile.
However, during this phase, you cannot stop sending proposals, or get bogged down by rejections or lack of response.
Aarti has sent over 100 proposals till date.
She has worked on 12 projects with about 7-8 clients now, and earned around over 900 dollars in 3 months, and is on the way to reaching her first 1000 dollars.
Once a foreign client realises that he/she can trust you, you can get many more assignments and introductions to new clients.
Why?
It is much more expensive for foreign early stage startup founders, SME owners and professionals to hire equivalent resources in their home country, and you have a massive cost advantage if you are working from India or another developing country.
For anyone who is considering remote work, you do not have to be limited by the kind of work that you performed in your job earlier.
Like Aarti, most of our learners who perform remote work do work that is very different from the tasks that they performed in their full-time jobs.
Typically, most of these remote work assignments fall in 3 critical domains – virtual assistant, startup generalist and in content-creation related roles.
Depending on your interest, you can select one of these roles and develop initial skills in a matter of 2-3 months, and then stack up more additional skills over time so that you can continue to add more value to your clients.
The good news is that in 2023 the AI revolution has made it much easier for us to pick up and learn high-demand skill sets, pitch more effectively and deliver superior quality work, without having decades of functional expertise in one area.
Of course, it still takes effort on our side – AI cannot divine and intuitively understand what we expect it to do.
But the results are incredible once we put in the effort.
It is also not a problem if you just have 3-4 hours per day available for work – remote work is very flexible and it is possible to find assignments that suit your availability.
For example, Aarti works only for 2-3 hours per day.
Here is her Upwork profile:
