[00:00:00.00] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.14] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:10.16] - Jake
Hi.

[00:00:11.13] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:13.26] - Taylor
I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:15.26] - Jake
And I am Jake from jakewoods.io.

[00:00:19.01] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And thank you so much for joining us. As you can see, we have a slightly different view of everything today. And that's why, Taylor, why have we got a different view?

[00:00:39.11] - Taylor
I am in Northern Ireland. I am visiting Jake. So I came over for a couple of days to explore Northern Ireland and just spend some time, really.

[00:00:48.20] - Gordon
Yeah, and Jake is a WordPress professional. He's a web developer. And what we're going to do today is we're going to talk to him about his business, how he prefers to work, any problems he's come up against, any solutions he's found, and just general business things that are of interest to other self-employed and small businesses. So, Taylor is the person who knows Jake the best. So I think what we'll do is, we'll let Taylor lead the questions and we'll let Jake answer. But first of all, Jake, do you want to just give us an overview of what it is you do and how long you've been in business, what sort of customers you have, that sort of thing?

[00:01:35.08] - Jake
Yeah, certainly. So I have been working with WordPress since 2017. I'm currently a freelancer, mostly white-label clients, and I do also have some work with... I do a lot of design, website design, and also I do a lot of work with Shopify as well. So I'm not WordPress only, although I prefer WordPress. WordPress is my platform of choice, WordPress or death. But yeah, unfortunately, sometimes you have to pay the bills, and Shopify helps me do that so yeah. I worked at an agency before I went freelance. I worked at an agency where we did a lot of Shopify. I joined the agency in 2020 in the pandemic, and everyone all of a sudden needed an online store very quickly, so I very quickly had to get good at Shopify. And as a result of that, I still offer it today. Not something I advertise, not something I particularly seek out, but something I still have to do.

[00:02:26.16] - Gordon
So just out of interest, can you tell us what it is that you prefer about WordPress or don't like about Shopify?

[00:02:33.23] - Jake
Yeah, it's purely the open source nature of WordPress. I like that in theory, anything is possible with WordPress. With Shopify, everything's a little bit more locked down. Everything's a bit more Shopify's way or no way. I hate the constraints sometimes. They make it quite difficult to do some really what seem or should be simple e-commerce functions. Things like bundles are actually really difficult, or you have to pay an app developer a monthly fee. Everything seems locked down. WordPress, by comparison, there's a lot more knowledge out there. I mean, PHP versus Liquid is a whole discussion. Liquid is a proprietary language that Shopify uses, that WordPress is obviously written on PHP. The amount of support, documentation, and even just people who can help you out there, because Shopify, it's just a locked out ecosystem, probably, isn't it? It's just not as well documented or supported, and it could take you a lot longer to find the right help that you may need to get a problem solved for a client.

[00:03:36.02] - Taylor
You're also at the mercy of the people that are building it. If they decide to remove a feature that your business relies on, then that's tough luck, basically.

[00:03:46.20] - Jake
Yeah, essentially, you're tying your horse to the whims of a corporate entity, really, aren't you? It's like social media influencers who are maybe only huge on one platform. What happens if Instagram changes the algorithm? And just like that overnight, your viewership or your reach is slashed, decimated, essentially. And it's the same with Shopify. Shopify could change something tomorrow that could sink you, essentially. They're probably not going to do that, but in theory, it's possible, right?

[00:04:17.00] - Gordon
Sorry, Taylor. I was just going to say, if any of our viewers were thinking of opening an e-commerce store, would you recommend that they go the Shopify route or the WooCommerce route or another solution maybe?

[00:04:35.25] - Jake
It honestly depends to me completely on what they are selling. If you're just slinging T-shirts; I play in a band on the side and we would regularly have merch drops. I use Shopify for that because all we're doing is selling T-shirts. Easy. Simple e-commerce. I have a T-shirt, you have money, give me your money, I give you T-shirt. Boom. Awesome, right? But if you have something a bit more complex, things like, let me think of an example. So we have a client, I have a client who is... They rely very much on old style magazine discount codes. What that discount code allows you to do is then once you enter the discount code from the magazine, you'll get a free hat or a free neck warmer, a free pair of gloves, whatever. Shopify make that extremely hard to do. We got it going eventually, but that's something that WooCommerce would probably accommodate much more easily. It does depends on what you're selling, it depends on your offering, and it depends on the structure of your business. If you have something that perhaps requires... Because Shopify only really allows three variants on a product.

[00:05:43.01] - Jake
So, if you're selling something that's a bit more complex or a bit more configurable, a bit more customizable, WooCommerce is probably the better shout in that instance. Short answer depends on what you're selling and the structure of your business.

[00:05:54.28] - Taylor
Nice. So, one thing that, my dad and I, we both finished school and went self-employed. You've taken a slightly different journey to get here.

[00:06:10.16] - Jake
Yeah. I am in my late 30s, so I'm a little bit older than Taylor. 13 years we worked out. So I essentially I left school and I worked in hospitality for a long time, for about 10 years, various bars, various hotels. And around 2015, I started deciding that I really didn't want to be in hospitality anymore. And I thought, what is something I can do that, A) I'd be good at, B) I'd enjoy, and C) would allow me to get away from the bars and the hotels. I've always been fascinated with the internet. I can remember the first time I went on the internet, probably unlike Taylor, who's always had it around him. I remember the first time actively logging on to the internet. Gordon knows where I'm coming from here. And I remember even at six or seven or eight years old, however old I was, my mind just blew with the possibilities. It changed my life that moment. Honestly, it changed everybody's life. But I remember just being like the possibilities here are endless. So I've always been fascinated by the internet and the content available and the ability to share knowledge and information.

[00:07:18.25] - Jake
So I kind of settled I'd probably like to learn to code. I enjoy a creative challenge and I enjoy a technical challenge, maybe less so, but I still enjoy it. And coding and web design and web development seem to be the perfect mesh of that. So I started to teach myself some basic HTML and some basic CSS. And as I was working, I was working for Premier Inn at the time, and there was a graduate scheme where there was a graduate came to our site, and part of the graduate scheme at Premier Inn at that time was they had to develop a project. This girl, her name was Azora. Her idea for the project was to essentially build a "Premier Inn recommends" app. It's like a companion app, when a guest checked in to Premier Inn that had local restaurants, directions to local places, local services. And I essentially prototyped it for her. She knew that I was interested in this. It was the most basic. It was awful. Absolutely awful. But it was enough to get the attention of head office Whitbread who owned Premier Inn, or still own Premier Inn. So yeah, and that got me into it.

[00:08:23.16] - Jake
I fell in love. I was just fascinated developing something, and I was obsessed. I remember to build a prototype, I sat up on weekend from basically 6 o'clock o'clock on Friday evening until about 6am on Monday morning. I slept in my office on the sofa behind my desk, and that was me. And I was just hooked from that point on. From there, I started building just whatever I could. If somebody needed something, friends. I just built it. I built landing pages for friends' band's album releases. You name it. I built, maybe shouldn't say this publicly, but I built a left wing blog for a friend who was trying to start a left wing political party. I got hooked on it, just obsessed. That led me then to go into marketing somehow. I was willing to take any job to get out of hospitality, so I ended up working for a telecoms distributor as a website admin as a marketer, essentially just uploading products and cropping product images.

[00:09:18.27] - Taylor
Grunt work.

[00:09:19.18] - Jake
Yeah essentially, yeah, absolutely. But then because of that, I started working with WordPress because all of a sudden that company needed a sister site. I thought, I've heard this WordPress is class. I have a friend who is a great WordPress developer, a guy called Christam, and I messaged him like, "Can you give me the basics of this?" He did, and the rest is history. So then I moved home in 2020. I worked for Trust for two and a bit years, a telecoms distributor. Moved home in 2020, right before the pandemic started. Got a job at the agency as a WordPress developer, and the rest is history. Well, not really. I went freelance in 2022 then, and I've been freelancing for three years.

[00:09:56.13] - Taylor
Tell us a bit about... You've obviously done lots of different things, learned a lot through the years, but obviously, you worked at an agency, so you were just employed. What was that like to take the jump to be self-employed? Because I've only ever really been self-employed, so it's not like I didn't have to worry, "can I afford to take that plunge?" Because that was the first step. There was no taking the plunge. If it didn't work, I wasn't going to be homeless and things like that because I was still living at home. For you, that's obviously different.

[00:10:33.22] - Jake
Yeah. It was probably the scariest thing I've ever done. I don't come from a family who are self. I might be the first. My mum ran a business for a brief time a couple of years ago, but we're not a family of entrepreneurs. My parents are teachers. My aunts and uncles are civil servants, all public sector, very safe, very stable, very secure. It was scary. I tried to go self-employed about six months before I did. I went to quit my job and I phoned my boss and I just lost my nerve and I didn't do it. I didn't pull the trigger. I'm actually glad I didn't because I don't think it would have went as well for me at that point because I didn't really have the clients lined up. I knew this was something that I wanted to do, something that I had to do, I guess. I didn't pull the trigger at that point. I thought the time isn't right. I felt, do you know what it was? I took the Christmas break and all I thought about was, "Is this the right move?" I could never convince myself that it was. I don't know what it was.

[00:11:37.13] - Jake
It didn't feel right. I ended up just... I bailed out, essentially. Then I went, I did that, but I then started seeking out freelance opportunities on the side. I'd be working at the agency during the day and then freelancing at night. Eventually, that snowballed to the point where I had a decision to make. I had too much freelance and I had too much agency, and I went, "Well, this has been your dream. The freelance has been your dream. This is why one of the reasons you picked web development." And I went, "Damn, let's just go. Let's do it." And I did. That was three years ago. I think it was the 31st of July 2022 was my last day at the agency.

[00:12:15.23] - Taylor
Wow. What did your family and your partner think about it? Were they-

[00:12:19.25] - Jake
They were super supportive because I think they believed in me. This sounds really lame, but they believed in me more than I did. I wasn't sure I could do it, but they all knew I could. They figured, if it goes wrong, I have a good partner with a good job. We're solid. We knew that we would probably be okay. We wouldn't starve. My family live 10 minutes away. We were never going to be homeless. We were never going to be starving or destitute. And I would have just gotten another job. So, that was fine. Also, Emily and I were quite smart about it. Emily is my partner, and we were quite smart about it in that we waited until we got our mortgage before I went freelance because we knew that being self-employed would make it like, infinitely harder to get that mortgage nailed down.

[00:13:04.14] - Taylor
As I found out.

[00:13:05.12] - Jake
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, exactly. So we made some good choices in the run up to it as well, putting money behind us and giving just basically structuring everything to give me the best chance of success, which success is a strong word, but things are not crap.

[00:13:22.16] - Gordon
How did you find moving from an agency to working for yourself? Because in an agency, I'm guessing as a developer, you get given tasks to do and you just get on with them. And then when you finish that task, you get given the next task and so on. But then you became self-employed, and all of a sudden, you've now got to quote for the work; you've got to get the work in; you've got to find the customers. You've got to deal with the customers. You've got to create the work that they want. You've got to hand it off. You've got all these extra jobs. You've got all your finances to organise, invoicing, etc.

[00:13:58.11] - Taylor
Sit down that first day and you're like, "so now what? What's this freelancer thing?"

[00:14:05.04] - Jake
I'll never forget that first Monday when you wake up and you go and sit at your desk and you go, "oh, my God!" It's amazing freedom. When you pass your driving test and it hits you, you can go anywhere in the world. The world opens up to you. And the same thing happened when I sat down on my desk and go, "Now what? Where do I start?" And luckily, I had some work lined up, so I was able to just straight go, just go right away. But yeah, it was terrifying. And you're absolutely right. It's overwhelming at the start. There's no question because at the agency, I showed up at the office or I showed up at my desk at 9:30 in the morning, and I knew exactly what I had to get through that day. I knew exactly what I had on that day. I didn't work for a particularly well-managed agency, and that's no slight against my former employer. He's a lovely, great guy, but it was a chaotic... Agencies are, right? They're fast paced. Everything's moving. Everything's dynamic. You're interfacing with several different teams, different stakeholders. It's a lot. So in many ways, being self-employed is more manageable because I have some level of control. Some.

[00:15:19.24] - Jake
It's not as free as everyone thinks it is though, right. Everyone thinks, "Oh, you're self-employed, you just do what you want." You do not. Because essentially I have eight or nine bosses and none of the others know the other ones exist. At least in the agency, the head of design knew... you know it's a bit more structured, I guess. But yeah, no, and it's a lot. Obviously, I have my partner who's an accountant, thankfully, so she helped me a lot with the invoicing side of things. Because I white label a lot, I wasn't pitching for a lot of work, so that took a lot. I wouldn't say there's an easy way to be self-employed, but certainly I feel like I made some choices early on that did make my life much easier in terms of the white labelling because that saved me having to interface with clients so much, saved me having to pitch for work so much. I'm happy to sit behind people and do the work. Some people don't want that, some guys do want to be the ones that go out and win all the work, and they want to be the face of the company, and they want to be the personality that drives it all.

[00:16:23.05] - Jake
I'm perfectly happy being sat in the back seat just chilling. It's just my nature. I'm happy to support, and I'm happy to work collaboratively with people. I don't really need credit. I don't need fanfare as a general rule.

[00:16:36.13] - Taylor
It can sometimes be quite lonely, especially...

[00:16:39.14] - Jake
Oh, massively.

[00:16:41.15] - Taylor
What have you done to try and-

[00:16:44.02] - Jake
Well, I must admit that the loneliness was probably the most surprising aspect of it, I would say, in terms of I didn't expect that. Because honestly, I find working in a team not annoying, but it's distracting, and I find it broke my flow regularly, whereas I don't think that, I didn't...

[00:17:04.24] - Jake
So, I was quite looking forward to being isolated and just being able to get my head down and do my thing. And then obviously, you don't realise that it is eight hours a day, minimum, five days a week, minimum. And it's just you. It's just you and your own brain. And because my clients are mostly overseas as well, there's no connection there. I really struggled with that surprisingly at the start. And then luckily, I met some good people through Generate Press, Kyle Van Dozen from The Admin Bar, and Taylor and I are in a bit of a group chat with a bunch of other really good Generate Press developers. And it was those guys, actually. That's when it started to turn around for me, I think, in terms of the isolation. I felt, all of a sudden I didn't feel so isolated anymore. All of a sudden I did have a support network because when you're at an agency or when you're in a team, there's always someone to bounce something off. "I'm stuck on problem A. Can you help me?" Whereas when you're by yourself, you are the bottleneck, right? The buck stops with you, everything goes through you. So if you can't solve something, then it's not getting solved, pretty much.

[00:18:11.14] - Taylor
It's also that where a lot... You're like, "I never thought about that. That's genius." I talk to my dad and I talk to people online. There's so many things that I'm like, "I never thought about doing it that way." And it's the most simplest thing. And I was six, seven steps ahead that actually complicated it more and actually caused me more issues. Sometimes you just can't get that when you're by yourself.

[00:18:42.08] - Jake
No, that's absolutely it. You're not exposed to new ideas or new ways of doing things. In that respect, meeting you guys and Christian, obviously as well, Christian is a big part of our friendship, I guess the remote support network. We all support each other and we lift each other up and we celebrate each other.

[00:19:03.16] - Gordon
It's a community, isn't it?

[00:19:04.11] - Jake
Yeah, absolutely.

[00:19:05.15] - Gordon
I think you need to have that, especially if you're self-employed, because you need to have people that not only are, you know are going to be in a similar situation to you, but they're the sort of people you can go to and just go, "What would you do in this situation?" And they'll give you their feedback and ideas. And as Taylor was saying, you suddenly go, "yeah, that's the one I want to do because that suits me and my style and what I want to do." But it's not necessarily something you would have come up with on your own.

[00:19:35.01] - Jake
Yeah, absolutely. I genuinely believe that was a turning point for me. I'm not entirely sure I would still be freelancing if I hadn't met these guys. And not because the business wasn't successful, just purely because of the isolation and the lack of collaboration. I really thrive on working with other people. I love it. But I do genuinely believe that without these guys, I'm probably not freelancing right now, genuinely.

[00:20:00.05] - Taylor
You get the validation where you know they're going to be honest. They're going to tell you "that's a terrible idea" or "I just wouldn't do that." But they're also going to be your biggest hype people. They're going to be like, "Awesome job." I hit one of my best ever months, and the first people I went to were you and Christian, for example, and the different group chats that I'm in. You get that congratulations stuff, whereas if you tell friends you went to school with or people that are outside of anything to do with freelancing and stuff, and you tell them, they go, "Cool." They just don't understand.

[00:20:37.29] - Gordon
They just don't get it.

[00:20:38.16] - Taylor
It's not that they are being rude. They just fully don't understand. I think Emily is probably one of the most understanding people that aren't self-employed. She does your, obviously, accounts and things like that. You talk to her very closely because you're self-employed. But there's a lot of people that just don't.

[00:20:57.26] - Jake
No, absolutely. It's funny that we've all had that moment, just going back to what Taylor was saying, if you try to loop your friends in and how work's going. We've all had that moment with the job we do where you're at a party and you say, "I'm a web developer," and you just see people's eyes just glaze over. They don't know, they don't care. And that's fair. Why should they? It's not their job to care. But that's why having people like this, it's so vital and valuable as well, because then you do have people who understand. "Actually, that was a really big deal that you solved that problem because you've been working on, like today we've been working on, I've been working on that for weeks." And when you finally get it and someone's excited for you, it just lifts you up and it boosts you. And it makes the whole thing worth it, frankly. It's awesome. It really is awesome. It's vital as well. It's vital.

[00:21:40.16] - Gordon
So as someone who works for themselves up until this point, 2019, did you say you started?

[00:21:47.11] - Jake
I started self-employed. Sorry, me or Taylor. Oh, yeah. I self-employed. Oh, well, there we go. There we go. I went 2022 self-employed. Started in the agency in 2020.

[00:21:58.29] - Gordon
Okay, so what was or is your best decision so far and what has been your worst decision so far? Because I think anyone who's in business can learn an awful lot from both of those questions.

[00:22:14.02] - Jake
Oh, right. Okay, that's a really tough question.

[00:22:17.02] - Taylor
It's also a different aspect. And so this is what I talked to you earlier about is that my dad and I, we obviously have done this podcast and always said what we found challenging, what we, what worked. But we've also come at it from the same angle as we just finished school and went into it. You've come at it from a different angle where you did have to take that leap of faith. You did have to figure it out.

[00:22:40.15] - Jake
Yeah, that's a great question. I wasn't ready for this. No, it's all good. No, it's great. It's going to be a real answer. It might be long and rambling, but it will be a real answer. I would say the best and worst decision are interlinked for me. At the start when you go self-employed, you're scared, and you take everything on, and you don't think about what you're taking on. You just take, take, take. You know, yes, yes, yes. Everything's yes. And that's a good thing, I think, for the most part. But what happens is eventually you will start to burn out. And that's what happened to me late last year. I hit a real low, no energy, no drive, no ambition. And instead of giving up, I was going to give up, frankly. And instead of giving up, I decided to, "I'm just going to say no more, and I'm going to just charge what I feel I'm worth and take less on. If I feel doing it that way, then I feel that's what it is. So it goes. I tried, I failed, move on." But actually, that would turn out to be probably the best decision I've made in a long time with my businesses, because I'm doing that, work is getting done on time, I'm getting paid more fairly for it, and it's getting done to, frankly, a better standard because I'm able to take my time, I'm able to think things through, and I'm able to relax more.

[00:23:57.09] - Jake
I'm one of these people I find inspiration and joy away from the desk as well as at the desk. So, by being able to spend more time making music or going on walks or spending time at the beach or whatever, I'm able to produce better quality work. Even as simple, not even away from the desk. I started doing a design course, a web design course, to try and level up that front. That's reinvigorated me creatively and professionally, I would say. Worst decision was saying yes to everything. It's an understandable worst decision, but it did. It literally did. It nearly ruined me. And the best decision was reversing that bad decision and starting to stand up for myself a little bit more and just say no and just take some control, because that's one of the best things about doing this, right? Is that we're freelancers. We are technically in control. So, why not exercise some of that control sometimes? And why not manage your life a little bit better and make work suit you, rather than you making yourself suit work? So to speak. Does that make sense.

[00:24:54.08] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:24:54.14] - Gordon
And those decisions that you make by saying yes to everything allows to you to then discover what it is you actually enjoy doing and what you're good at.

[00:25:05.20] - Jake
Sure.

[00:25:06.06] - Gordon
So without that step, you can't then put your prices up and specialise more because you don't yet know what it is that you enjoy doing. So it's a really important process to go through, even if it turns out to be a really bad decision at the end.

[00:25:26.28] - Taylor
You're just scared. You're like, "if I say no, they're not going to recommend work to me again. I'm never going to get work." And then you have the issue where you put your price up and you're like, "Okay, cool. I'm not going to get as much work. That's fine because I put the price up." You're like, "Oh, there's still the same amount of work is coming in and I'm getting paid even more for it."

[00:25:44.17] - Gordon
Yeah, that's another leap of faith, isn't it? Especially with existing customers, if you've got customers you've already done work for, and then all of a sudden they come back and your prices have doubled or they've gone up significantly, it's really difficult to justify with them why the price has gone up so high and you end up keeping them on a lower price, and then you've got two tiers of customers. And that's a really tricky thing to do as well.

[00:26:12.11] - Jake
Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. And it's nice. It's a good way to frame it, that it's a positive thing at certain points. Because you do have to say yes sometimes and take everything on. And it is a positive thing. I make it sound very negative, but that's not the case at all. Sometimes it's either essential or positive to do it that way.

[00:26:29.05] - Taylor
It's a learning experience.

[00:26:29.05] - Gordon
Necessarily evil, really.

[00:26:30.26] - Jake
Yeah, I would agree for sure.

[00:26:33.24] - Gordon
We've got a few more minutes to go. Taylor, do you want to ask a couple more questions? And then what we'll do is we'll wrap everything up and we'll summarise what we've spoken about.

[00:26:45.23] - Taylor
Just to round up, really, is if you had one piece of advice for people that are either thinking about quitting their job and going into doing something that they love, what would it be?

[00:27:02.14] - Jake
That is a tough question.

[00:27:07.08] - Taylor
One bit of advice that you wish you knew when you first started.

[00:27:11.14] - Jake
I don't feel like I'm successful enough to be giving that advice, uniquely qualified. I would say be prepared that it's not going to be as great as you think it is. And that sounds really pessimistic, and I'm sorry, but ultimately, it's not the easy route.

[00:27:28.07] - Gordon
You will end up working longer hours than if you work for an agency, for example...

[00:27:32.25] - Jake
100%.

[00:27:33.03] - Gordon
Because it's your business and you care. When you work for an agency, no matter how much you're invested in that agency, it's not your agency. And you can walk away from that at the end of the day and that's it. But you can't do that when it's your business.

[00:27:48.05] - Jake
Exactly. I am sorry that it is so pessimistic, but it's not all sipping lattes and posting on Instagram. It's bloody hard work.

[00:27:57.18] - Taylor
Well, it is for some, but they're not actually successful.

[00:28:00.11] - Jake
Exactly.

[00:28:00.28] - Taylor
And actually doing the work. They're just making themselves look like they're doing the work.

[00:28:04.17] - Jake
Exactly. And I guess the flip side of that is, yes, it's bloody hard work, but it's also bloody rewarding, right? That feeling when you land the big project or the big invoice is paid and you feel, I guess that's it. The highs are here, the lows are here. When you're an agency, it's a bit of a middle ground, isn't it?

[00:28:22.29] - Gordon
Yeah, I totally agree. And working for yourself, especially as a web developer or any job where you're on your own, is not for everyone. There are some people who just are unable to do it, maybe because they just don't have the attention span to concentrate on their work and their business all the time. If you work from home, there's a tendency for either yourself or for other members of your family to say, "well seeing as you're at home, can you put the washing machine on and put the washing out and stuff?" "No, I'm working. This is my office. It happens to be at home or in this location, but I'm working. Those things need to be done outside of work." You need to have those restrictions in place to actually be able to focus on your business, right?

[00:29:19.28] - Jake
That is so true. Yeah, it's a huge problem. It is a huge problem, I think. People think you're working at home, you're not working, but you wouldn't message me at 11 in the morning I worked in an office in Belfast asking me to pick up or to pop round or to do anything. Luckily, we have good people around us, I think, and they mostly understand that, don't they? But yes, it's a huge problem. It really is.

[00:29:44.12] - Gordon
So do you want to summarise a little bit of where maybe you're looking to go? If you don't believe you're successful yet, what does success look like for you?

[00:29:55.26] - Jake
Well, okay, so it's a good question. I think that in terms of when I started out, my aim was to last six months, was to make it six months, and I did that, and then my aim was to make it a year, and I did that. And then I... So I guess by my own metrics, I'm successful. By the world's metrics, probably not so much, but with my own metrics, I am successful.

[00:30:16.11] - Taylor
That's all that matters, though.

[00:30:17.10] - Jake
Yeah, absolutely. I just want to make cool stuff. My reason for getting out of bed in the morning is just to make cool stuff. Is it a cool song? Is it a cool website? Is it a cool whatever? So, yeah, just keep making cool stuff, I guess. That's my aim. I would like to work. Eventually, I would love to work on something with some, not global significance, but I'd love to do some work with a company that everybody's heard of. I think that's ultimately my goal. I would love to contribute something that actually people interact with and use and enjoy. Ideally, that's my ultimate, my big... It's not a goal I ever say out loud very often because it's so pie in the sky. It probably won't ever happen. But yeah, that's the ultimate goal is to make something that matters, that people actually use.

[00:31:08.12] - Gordon
Well, there you go. If anybody is listening or watching and they work for a big company that everyone's heard of and they're looking for someone to do some work, how do they get in contact with you?

[00:31:19.20] - Jake
I have a website. It's a very bad website. As all web developers websites should be, it's terrible. And I have a contact form. My email address is jake@jakewoods.io and my web address is jakewoods.io. So just jakewoods.io, not jake@jakewoods.io for the email address.

[00:31:35.28] - Gordon
I'll put a link in the show notes so that people can find you easily. Any final thoughts?

[00:31:42.11] - Taylor
I don't think so. That's all from me.

[00:31:44.09] - Jake
No, thank you so much for having me. It's been really, really nice. Really nervous. I'm sweating a lot here, but like...

[00:31:51.01] - Gordon
We don't do this very often because we're a bit picky, really, as to who we have on as a guest. But thank you so much for joining us and for giving us your particular insights, which are, again, very different from both myself and Taylor's and all the other guests we've had, because they've all had their own roots and their own journeys, and that's what gets them where they are today. So thank you so much for joining us.

[00:32:18.05] - Jake
Thanks a million.

[00:32:19.13] - Gordon
As always, you can watch us on YouTube. Please like, share and subscribe.

[00:32:25.05] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes and anything we may have spoken about.

[00:32:32.04] - Gordon
And if you would prefer to listen to us, we're on all the major podcast platforms. Just do a search for "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." We also can be found on your smart speaker. Just ask your smart speaker to "play This Week With Taylor and Gordon," and you'll hear the latest episode. All being well, we'll be back with you next week at 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:32:56.19] - Taylor
I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:32:59.00] - Jake
And I'm Jake from jakewoods.io.

[00:33:29.15] - Gordon
We'll see you soon. Bye-bye.

[00:33:29.26] - Jake
Bye-bye.

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Show Notes