Ryan Maloney sent 1,600 cold emails to art school classmates in 2005 and landed a graphic design job from one response. Seven years later, freelance work from a spouse's agency connection grew large enough to let him quit and start his own business in 2012.
Chapters
I started my solo creative business 10 years ago. That was 2012. To be able to start my own creative business, we need to go back to 2005. Just graduated from art school and moved to New York City. Then I realized the world doesn't throw job opportunities at you. I was like, wow, I gotta do something about this. The only thing I had after graduating? The alumni directory of my college. I emailed, no lie, 1,600, 1,700 people. Probably some of the most embarrassing emails I've ever written in my life. From those emails, one person tried to help me find a job and was unsuccessful, but I did connect with somebody else who gave me a full-time job as a graphic designer. So I worked full-time for about 7 years, but the one person who couldn't get me that job got in touch because his wife was going to work at a high position at an agency in New York City, and they started throwing me projects, more and more and more projects, until I had more income on the side than my full-time job. Then that client turned into another client and another client and another client, and it made it much easier to go from a full-time employee to self-employed. But the point of the story is that was 17 years ago that I sent all those emails. I don't think I've been that ambitious with putting up numbers since. Present moment, it feels weird and uncomfortable to put up numbers, whether it's in creating tons of different projects, reaching out to tons of different people. But I always think back and thank my younger self for being so dumb, so ambitious, and just putting up the numbers.
