Having spent a long time in the comfort zone as an employee, my perspective became closed off to various possibilities and things outside of stability. I felt it was enough to be like this—working, creating, and coding, which I also enjoy.
So, after resigning from my permanent job yesterday, the first thing I did was, of course, look for another job. I expected to find work that was more comfortable and paid better.
As a programmer, my definition of a dream job is: working from home (remote), a work environment that supports growth, a good team, challenging tasks, and of course, a good income.
To achieve that dream, I made several efforts, such as creating daily learning packages to upskill, buying courses to prepare for interviews (greatfrontend), and staying updated with the current job market.
About a month of job searching and learning, I got several opportunities for interviews, all for remote positions from companies abroad, because that was my target application. Alhamdulillah, I had the chance to do one live technical interview, got some take-home tests, but often it stopped at the exploratory call 😅.
Can I only expect sustenance from this path?
For the past week, I have stopped actively applying for new jobs. Not because I gave up, but because I wanted to reflect more on my inner voice that kept asking, "Can I only expect sustenance from this path?"
Learning digital marketing
A long time ago, I remember a college friend teaching me about Facebook ads (now Meta), how we can sell anything from home and get very decent results.
I thought about trying it, even though I was initially afraid because I had to allocate time to learn other than frontend. This was quite disturbing, because I thought it would take longer to get a job if I didn’t study enough. Briefly, my wife and two children crossed my mind.
Bismillah, I finally decided to continue learning about Facebook ads and digital marketing. I watched YouTube videos from Fahmi Auditya and along the way, I asked my friend, who is also involved in this field, questions about things I was confused about.
Learning marketing means having a product to sell. My friend’s advice to start creating digital assets kept ringing in my ears. So, the product I chose to advertise was Notion templates.
This idea came from the ease of creating free websites with Notion Page. A few clicks and Notion pages can be opened by anyone from a browser. For the first product, I made 5 easily editable CV and Portfolio templates, plus guides and image or icon assets to beautify the CV page.
My motivation for making CV templates is to help job seekers out there get more attention, as they have a landing page to showcase their skills and achievements. I also included some guide articles and additional assets to facilitate the template editing process, because not all job seekers may understand web technology and Notion itself.
The next step was to create a landing page to display information about the product. And it turned out to be a chance to learn frontend too, because I got a use case to use Astro.js to make my landing page light and fast to access. Astro with its island architecture only adds JavaScript if we create an interactive island. The result is a web page with minimal JavaScript or even entirely static HTML.
The landing page can be seen here. There are still some things that need improvement, especially related to images and fonts. But that's a story for another day because the focus this time is to advertise as soon as possible. I targeted a 2-week iteration for making 1 product, plus 1 week of advertising and evaluation to quickly create other products.
Oh yes, for the landing page, I used v0, which designs and gets the HTML code that can be copied and pasted as a base. Next, a little further prompting to make the page neater, then editing the source code that is not quite right, filling in the content, and the landing page was done.
Now some things are ready: the product, the landing page, and accounts for advertising (Facebook Page, Instagram account, Meta Ads Manager). It’s time to create image content to be displayed as ads on the feed or other positions in the Facebook and Instagram apps.
To create ad content, I asked my friend for help again (Alhamdulillah, I am surrounded by good people 😭). I made some other content myself from CV template screenshots, then edited them with Figma.
Done, everything was ready, it was time to advertise. I created several ad sets with different target audiences. Since the product being sold is a CV website, my ad target is people looking for jobs. So I included targets like people interested in job interviews, careers, unemployed, and other related things.
I was very confident that my ads would be successful 🤣, because the product and target audience seemed closely related. Five ads were published, each with slight modifications in target audience, set to run for 2 days with a maximum daily ad cost of X.
Alhamdulillah, as a result, I turned off 3 ads at the end of the first day and the rest before the second day ended. For some reason, the ad performance was poor. The cost per click was more than half the price of the product I was selling (50,000).
There were no closings, only a few buyer chats that ended with two blue ticks. Did I give up? Of course not, but I need to step back a bit to evaluate and make a new strategy. I contacted my friend, who is a specialist in SEO and branding.
From a brief discussion with my friend, I was bombarded with many things to consider when creating ad content. From copywriting, using video content (for product education), to book recommendations like Hook Point that discusses digital content.
Finally, after some evaluation, I will try to update my ad content, create videos, and improve copywriting. This is another step away from the comfort zone. But I do not leave just like that. I am building a shortcut to return, by developing my own web application, keeping up with web development updates, and helping friends who are building apps for their startups.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
That's a bit of my journey over the past few weeks trying to get out of the comfort zone. I will end with a quote from a poem I sometimes remember when debugging, "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."