Author: Dr. Mike
Mikko J. Rissanen, Ph.D., a.k.a. Dr. Mike, is an accomplished solopreneur living in a tropical paradise, inventing cool tech and coding from his beach office... and eating coconuts all day, every day. He has been running his one-man show in Penang, Malaysia, since 2014 until he moved the business to the United States as I2 Network in 2021. He is one of the most highly paid freelancers on Upwork and he has been supporting hundreds of starting freelancers since 2017. Follow his latest tips on LinkedIn or seek his personal guidance by participating in the Freelance Like a Boss webinar course or become a member of the CoachLancer community!
This is the first, but perhaps not the last, article series on working with new freelancers from the client’s perspective. Over the years, I’ve hired a number of developers and designers to do parts of …
CTO-as-a-Service is something rather new and you could easily say it is a niche industry. In this article, I explain my perspective on what it is and how I manage to juggle such a tricky …
No matter how successful a freelancer you are, there are times when things go south; especially when you work online and are limited to mere chat lines as one major form of communication. Sometimes you …
As of this writing, I’m one month shy of my fifth anniversary of freelancing. I jumped off the hamster wheel in May 2014, and I jumped off for good. Some people seem to think that …
I’m a man of many hats. (Saying that always makes me think of a doctoral hat, which is part of the academic tradition in Finland — which I never got because I studied in Japan.) …
Despite the slight (or rather complete!) change in the title, this article is the last part of my series The Strangest Invitations I Ever Got via Online Freelancing Sites, Part 3: The Scammer. (Please take …
This is Part 2 of my attempt at revealing the funny and tragicomic side of online freelancing. Please take a look at the previous post about the categories of the strangest clients I have met …
I’ve worked for years on those online freelance sites. When I started, I was quite impressed with how professional some clients are and how quickly you can land a project when you can just explain …