I Was Proud of the Wrong Things
The client logos I chased turned out to matter least. The boring blog I almost stopped keeping turned out to matter most. Here's what I'd undo.
In 2008 I thought the scoreboard was the logos.
Get the big names onto the client list, and you’ve made it. That was the whole plan, if you can call a sixteen-year-old’s wishlist a plan. I was teaching myself WordPress in cyber cafes in 2008 at 10-20 rupees an hour - 3 to 4 hours a day, seven years before I’d finish the M.Sc. in Mathematics in 2015 and take it to a blackboard, teaching competitive-exam and NDA students how to take a problem apart. Back then I just wanted the names.
Eighteen years later, I have the names. The list does what lists do.1
And I’ll tell you the uncomfortable part. I almost never think about them.
What I think about is a post I wrote in 2011, on a free WordPress theme, that still gets read every single day. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t optimize it. I wrote it because a student asked me the same question three times and I got tired of repeating myself. That post has outlived contracts worth a hundred times more than it ever earned.
So this is a letting-the-numbers-down kind of essay. Eighteen years in, the things I’m proud of aren’t the things I lined up to be proud of. And the regrets aren’t the dramatic ones. Nobody warns you about the quiet ones.
The reality, with the receipts
Here’s roughly where the count lands. Around 850 clients. More than 2,000 projects. Something north of 2,100 published articles. Plugins running on 10,000-plus sites. A company, Gatilab, that I actually like running.2
For years I read those numbers as the win. More clients meant more safety. More articles meant more reach. More projects meant I was real.
Then I tracked my own expenses properly, the way I’d nag a client to, and found out I’d spent a stretch of those early years quietly subsidizing my business with savings. The volume I was so proud of was partly the problem. I was running fast on a treadmill and calling the sweat progress.
That was a rough spreadsheet to look at.
I built for everyone except myself
The first thing I’d undo is the order I built things in.
I poured the best years of my attention into other people’s assets. Other people’s sites, other people’s funnels, other people’s launches. Good work, paid work, work I’d still defend. But I treated my own blog, my own audience, my own list as the thing I’d get to after the client work was done.
The client work is never done. So “after” never came for almost a decade.
The asset that compounds is the one you own. I knew that. I told clients that. I just didn’t act like I believed it about myself until embarrassingly late. The post from 2011 isn’t special because it’s well-written. It’s special because it’s mine, and it kept working while I was busy building things I handed away.
If you’re doing client work right now and your own site is a graveyard of three half-finished drafts... I’m not judging. I’m describing my own 2014. But I’d move that order around if I could.
I thought volume was safety
The second thing I’d undo is the pricing.
I underpriced myself for years on purpose. It felt like insurance. A full pipeline of cheap-ish work felt safer than a thin pipeline of expensive work, even though the cheap work was the thing burning me out and feeding the savings-subsidy problem above.
When I finally raised rates, I raised them about 40% in one go. I lost two clients inside a month. I braced for the worst.3
I gained three new ones at the higher number within the quarter. More revenue. Fewer headaches. Clients who actually valued the work instead of haggling over it. The math I’d been avoiding was the easiest math I’d ever done, and I’d been a math teacher.
Volume wasn’t safety. Volume was fear wearing a productivity costume.
I treated writing as output
The third one is the one that stings, because it’s about the part of the work I love most.
For a long time I counted articles. Two thousand and counting felt like an achievement, and in a way it is. But somewhere in the counting I started treating writing as output. A thing to produce. A box to fill. A number to grow.
Writing isn’t output. It’s a body of work, or it’s nothing.
The pieces I’m proud of now are not the fast ones I shipped to hit a cadence. They’re the slow ones where I sat with a hard idea until I could explain it to one confused person, the way I used to at the blackboard. Those took three times as long and there are far fewer of them. They’re also the only ones strangers still email me about.
I’d trade a thousand of the fast ones for a hundred more of the slow ones. I can’t. But I’d write differently from here knowing it.
The teacher never actually left
Here’s what I didn’t expect to be proud of: the explaining.
I spent years thinking I’d traded the blackboard for a laptop and left teaching behind. I hadn’t. Every system I’ve built since is just me, still, trying to make something clear to one person who’s stuck exactly where I was once stuck. The plugin docs. The 2011 post. The way I structure a tutorial so nobody gets left behind on the obvious step, because what’s obvious to you after eighteen years isn’t obvious to someone seeing it for the first time.
The logos were the goal I announced. The teaching was the thing that was actually mine the whole time, and I almost didn’t notice because nobody hands you a contract for it.
What I’d do differently, concretely
Not maxims. The actual list, if I were starting 2008 again with what I know now:
Build my own assets in the first hour of the week, not the last. Treat the client work as the thing I do after I’ve fed my own ground, not before.
Price on the value of the outcome, not the comfort of a full calendar. And fire the wrong-fit client a year sooner than feels polite. The relief is always bigger than the fear.
Write fewer pieces, deeper. Let a hard idea cost me a week if it needs a week. Stop counting.
And keep the teacher in the room. Every time I’ve made something genuinely useful, it’s because I was explaining, not performing. The performing aged badly. The explaining kept working.
What I’m carrying into the next eighteen
I have better tools now than I could have imagined at the blackboard. Whole systems that draft, audit, and ship in a fraction of the old time. It’s tempting to think the leverage is the point.
It isn’t. The leverage just means the explaining can reach further. The thing I’d undo, across all eighteen years, comes down to one sentence: I spent too long proud of the work I gave away and not enough on the work that was mine.
The scoreboard was never the logos. It was the one student, the one reader, the one person who got unstuck because I sat down and made it clear.
I knew that the first time I watched the confusion clear off a student’s face. Then I spent most of eighteen years chasing a scoreboard anyway. It took me this long, and a few thousand articles, to believe what I already knew.
Footnotes:
I’m being deliberately vague about the names here, which after eighteen years of putting them in every bio feels weirdly like taking off a tie.
“Roughly” is doing real work in that paragraph. I am a math postgraduate who has made genuine peace with the fact that the count is always a little out of date by the time I say it out loud.
Bracing for the worst is, I’ve learned, about 90% of the actual cost of raising your rates. The other 10% is sending the email.