Hey hey!
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about finding your people. Not networking, or building your “personal brand”, more about finding other people in this crazy fucked up world of freelancing/running your own small business who just get it.
When you work for yourself, or work remotely, it’s easy to go entire days speaking to nobody except the person in Costa who makes your coffee on the rare occasion you venture out into the real world.
(This is the 17/03/2026 issue of my newsletter – subscribe here)
Weeks where your most meaningful professional conversation happens in a Facebook group at 9pm, or on WhatsApp at 1am (you know who you are!)
Months where you’re so deep in client work that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to just… talk to someone who understands what you do.
And then you find your people, and something shifts.
Not a room full of potential clients who you’re subtly auditioning for. Or a general networking event where you spend 40 minutes explaining what you do to someone who nods politely and immediately forgets. A room – virtual or physical – full of people living the same version of freelance life as you. Who nod when you mention the client who pays late, the project that scope-crept into oblivion, or the specific joy of finally nailing a process that used to eat your entire week.
It breaks the monotony. It reminds you that you’re not imagining it – the hard bits really are hard, and other people find them hard too. It gives you somewhere to put the things you can’t say to clients, can’t say on social media, and only usually get to say to the cat, who isn’t listening anyway.
I’ve been lucky enough to find a few of these spaces over the years and I’d like to share them with you.
Being Freelance – Steve Folland has built something truly special there. Whether you turn up in person or online, it’s a room full of freelancers who are funny, generous, and completely unbothered by the fact that you’re also a freelancer. People show up, talk about freelance life, co-work alongside each other, or sometimes just have a laugh. I can promise you you’ve never been to an online coworking session like it, and the IRL events are just as much fun.
The Female Copywriters’ Alliance and Copywriters Unite are the same energy for writers specifically. Copywriters are a particular breed – opinionated, funny, slightly obsessed with words in a way that would alarm most people – and being in a room full of them is its own kind of therapy.
And last week I spent time in Holly Christie’s Sparks group, a weekly Zoom call for web designers, developers, and the people who orbit that world. We talked marketing this week – decades of collective experience shared freely, nobody trying to sell anyone anything. Just people helping people.
There’s a version of networking that’s exhausting.
Performative.
Transactional.
And then there’s finding your people – the ones who already speak your language, who don’t need things explaining, who understand the shared experience of freelance life. Who’ll celebrate the wins, validate the frustrations, and tell you honestly if your pricing is too low or your contract has a gap in it. Sometimes they’ll even send work your way.
Go find your people. They’re out there, and they’re worth looking for.
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Worth your time this week
Enough of my waffling – here’s what’s worth your time this week. One read, one listen, one subscribe.
Read: Google Search Console has a new branded queries filter, and it’s more useful than it sounds. It tells you whether your SEO is actually reaching new people – or just helping existing contacts find their way back to you. Worth five minutes of your time.
Listen: Since we’re on the subject of freelance life – Steve Folland’s Being Freelance podcast has an awesome episode on finding your niche. Whether you’ve been freelance for three months or thirty years, it’s a really good listen. It’s here.
Subscribe: Not business. Not SEO. Just Lucy Sweet being very funny about the sewage pipe of capitalism – Lidl panzerotti, her mug cupboard, and things that make no sense. Sometimes that’s exactly what your inbox needs. The Lucyverse.
That’s it for this week, now go find your tribe!
Always non-wanky,
Nx
10 easy lessons, perfect on-page SEO. £200
P.S. I’ve opened up some monthly pay spaces on the non-wanky On-Page SEO Course – £20 a month, closes when I get around to closing it.
