Freelancing sounds like a dream to many people. Those stuck in traditional workplaces often dream about breaking free and working for themselves. Then, once they actually do it, they sometimes discover that life on their own isn't nearly as easy as they imagined—and that they might have been doing just fine in a regular job after all.
In a way, it's the classic "grass is always greener" situation. People on the outside want in, while people on the inside want out. We envy what the other side seems to have, without really knowing the story behind it.
I didn't seriously consider working for myself until around 2017. By then, I had already spent nearly ten years in the workplace, so you could say I was a little late to the idea.
But I had actually tried it once before, back in 2014.
To be honest, that first attempt was pretty unrealistic. The project was to take professional portraits for elderly people living in rural areas. Why I thought that was a viable business is a story for another time...
After that, I completely gave up on the idea of working for myself.
I stayed in traditional employment until 2017. I wasn't exactly thriving, but compared with most people around me, I was doing fine. I had a stable life, and because of that, I didn't really understand the importance of money.
Sometimes, you have to hit a wall yourself.
And I did.
Looking back, it was probably a good thing.
By the winter of 2019, I knew something serious was coming.
Around the end of 2019, heading into the 2020 New Year, I warned my family to be especially careful. There was something happening that reminded me of the SARS outbreak in the winter of 2002, and I had a feeling this could be even more serious.
I didn't know the full picture at the time. I simply knew something was happening, so I wanted my family to be prepared.
Then came 2020.
And, as we all know, the things I had anticipated actually happened.
So I made a decision: I resigned from my job and went back to the mountains.
That was, in many ways, the first real stage of my departure from the traditional workplace.
Because of everything that happened in those years, and the various policies and restrictions everyone experienced, I spent most of 2020 living quietly in the mountains.
As 2021 approached, I knew the situation wasn't over. But a former colleague invited me to join a new company, and I decided to return to the workplace for another year.
I was fortunate to have the opportunity.
So in 2021, I spent another year working in a company, this time in cross-border e-commerce.
Cross-border e-commerce and domestic platform-based e-commerce may look similar from the outside, and some of the actual work can be quite similar, but they are fundamentally different industries.
By 2022, I found it increasingly difficult to stay in the city.
I also had a strong feeling that the restrictions and policies surrounding the pandemic would become increasingly strict. It felt like the right time to leave.
To be honest, very few people understood what was happening at the time.
There were also many things happening around vaccines and public health that I had strong personal opinions about. I won't go into those topics here. Perhaps I'll write about them separately someday.
By 2022, I had moved back to a much smaller place, far away from the major cities.
Even then, part of me was still holding onto the idea of building a career within the traditional workplace.
I also had what I now jokingly call a "big-head syndrome"—the mindset of believing that because I had worked at a major tech company, I was somehow better than the people around me.
That turned out to be another disaster.
Because in the same environment, everyone is essentially equal.
The only real way to prove that you're "good" is through ROI and actual results.
Everything else is just talk.
So I went through another hard lesson in a small-city workplace.
And somehow, even that still wasn't enough to completely wake me up.
Then came 2023.
After realizing that I couldn't really build the kind of career I wanted within the local job market, I started working on my own business ideas.
By then, short-form video platforms in China had been growing rapidly since around 2019, and more and more businesses were trying to get onto them.
So I decided to start a business around video content and social media.
The full story is too complicated to explain in just a few sentences, so I'll skip straight to the conclusion.
If you want to make money from a social media platform, you first have to create value for the platform itself. Only then can you talk about your own returns.
Don't get that logic backwards.
For businesses entering a platform, the platform gets its share first. Only after that can you start talking about mutual benefit.
At the time, I was working as a third-party service provider for businesses. My services mainly included video content strategy, filming and editing, and helping businesses define the positioning of their accounts.
There were several fatal problems with this business model.
First, filming and production are heavily constrained by geography. Different clients are located in different places, which makes it extremely difficult to scale the service efficiently.
Second, every business wants its social media account to succeed, but that outcome depends on many different factors. Creating good videos doesn't necessarily mean you can successfully operate an account.
The two things are not directly equivalent.
Third, the service itself was difficult to standardize, and the results were even harder to define objectively.
That inevitably created problems around delivery, expectations, and whether clients felt they were getting enough value.
Eventually, maintaining healthy client relationships became difficult.
All of these factors convinced me that the business model simply wasn't viable.
Then, toward the end of 2023, I unexpectedly received an order to build a website.
So I started experimenting with it.
At the time, my mother was in the hospital, and I was still working on the client's project late at night from her hospital room.
Somehow, I felt like I had rediscovered the drive I had back in 2008—the willingness to take a risk, figure things out, and just keep moving forward.
As 2024 approached, I finally made up my mind to start working remotely and build my own path.
Because, as I jokingly put it:
"Going back to a regular job? That's never happening again."
That winter, in late 2023, just before the 2024 Chinese New Year, I launched TITSTUDIO.COM.
And that was the beginning of another chapter.
—— 依然少年
March 11, 2025