I’ve been working on my internet community consultancy for about a month. I’ve been applying to full-time jobs too. In terms of getting paid, I haven’t had any luck at all. My outlay has been $64 total for a fictitious name. Thankfully, between Joy’s excellent benefits, my severance and unemployment, I have some runway, as we in the startup biz say.
By the way, I think under the rules of accounting my Civitas brand is worth $64 today, but will be reduced to over the next 5 years. At that point I’ll need to decide whether to renew it and pay the county another fee which will be the new value of the brand. Probably should add in the $9.73 I paid to renew https://buildcivitas.com/ this year. The actual value of the brand is, of course, $0. 
I’ve had some solid leads so far. For the most part, the reason I don’t have clients is budget. Some have budgets for community projects that will open up in January. I’m keeping track of them right here on this site:
- I created a group for Civitas employees. (Just me so far!)
- I created a private category for the Civitas group.
- I set up incoming email so that I can just forward emails here to get a new topic created for each lead that includes contact details.
- I used bookmarks with timers to remind myself to contact these leads next month when their budgets are free to (hopefully) hire me.
I’ve also been applying for jobs that I find on LinkedIn, Indeed and Upwork. It’s definitely going to hurt my offer rate. If I get an offer at some point, I’d let them know I still want to run my business. That’s because I’m tired of depending on one company for my livelihood.
I’ve also been contributing to Discourse, which is my favorite community platform, and Codidact, a promising Q&A platform. My goal is to:
- Find leads if possible and
- Help improve the software I’d like to use professionally.
Overall it’s not a fast start, but a hopeful one.