How I Lost a Client, My Freelancer Account, and Found My Lesson

I thought freelancing would be easy: learn Python, make money.
Instead, I got errors, panic, scammers, and a blocked account.
Here’s what actually happened and what it taught me.

The time I chased freelancing before skills

At the beginning of 2025, around March, I decided I wanted to become a freelancer.
My dream was simple: earn money using my skills and call myself a data analyst.

So I started learning Python, and along the way I discovered an AI tool called ChatGPT.
It recommended freelancing as a way to get experience and earn at the same time, so I didn’t wait. I just jumped in.

Joining Freelancer with only Python 😅

I created an account on a platform called Freelancer.
It’s a place where clients and small firms post projects and hire freelancers for contracts.

When it asked for my skills, I proudly wrote just one thing: Python. Nothing else.
That was literally all I knew at that time.

From April onwards, I started applying to every possible project I saw.
I think I applied to more than 50 projects (or “project cards” as I used to call them).

But there was one big problem almost every fresher freelancer faces:
no experience, no ratings, no reviews.

For 2–3 months, I kept applying and hoping.
There is a feature on Freelancer where you can see how many people viewed your application.
In my case, that number stayed at zero for a very long time.

No views. No replies. No messages.

The first message: stock market analysis

After about a month, finally, a notification came.
I got a message from a client.

The project was about stock market analysis.
Since I wanted to be a data analyst (and Freelancer recommended it to me), I didn’t even properly read the skill requirements. I just applied.

That was my first big mistake.

We had a small chat. Then suddenly, he stopped replying.
He disappeared. No response.

That itself was a mini heartbreak.
In between, I also got messages from scammers and fraudsters asking for small payments to “activate” my freelancing or promising huge earnings if I paid them first.
I refused all of them, thankfully.

The client returns: “Hi Mayank”

One day, while I was chilling and enjoying time with my siblings, I got a message:
“Hi Mayank.”

I had almost forgotten about that client, but when I saw the chat, I remembered.

He asked me if I could still do that stock market work.
He asked whether I had experience with the stock market.

My answer will probably make you laugh:
I said, “Yeah, I know a bit. My father invests in the stock market, so I have some experience.”

In reality, I had 0.1% experience.
But he trusted me and said yes.

We started a one-week work journey together.
When he told me the amount he was ready to pay, I got super excited.

I had no idea what I was doing

The work sounded cool, but honestly, I didn’t understand most of it.
He was talking about things like candles, strategies, live data, etc.

Every time he sent something on chat, I copied it and pasted it into ChatGPT:
“Explain this.”
“What is this?”
“How do I do this?”

But even after explanations, I wasn’t really understanding.
In my mind, I kept thinking: “Somehow it will work. I’ll manage.”

The truth is: I was not focusing on the work.
I was only focusing on the money.

The night of endless errors 🌙

That night, I started working seriously.
I remember clearly: I was trying to use the Upstox API on VS Code.

At that time, I barely knew how to properly use VS Code.
Every time I ran the code, I got an error.

And what did I do?
Take every error, every screenshot, and throw it at ChatGPT:
“Hey ChatGPT, fix this.”

There is a limit in the free version of ChatGPT where you can only send a few images and a limited number of messages.
But that night felt like a miracle.

I kept sending image after image, error after error.
The chat became so long that even today, if I try to open it, my PC hangs.

I kept working like this till 2:30 am, fighting with errors, installing, uninstalling, trying again.
But nothing was working. I was completely exhausted.

Skipping school and still stuck

The next day, I even took a leave from school.
I woke up, opened my laptop around 11 am, and started again.

Guess what?
Still errors, errors, errors.

At that point, I was mentally drained and frustrated.
I didn’t know what I was doing wrong, and I didn’t understand half of what I was typing.

Then the client called me.
“Hey Mayank, how much work have you done?”

I started explaining some steps—basically whatever ChatGPT had told me to do.
Then I also told him about the errors I was facing.

The AnyDesk shock

He asked me to download AnyDesk so he could see my screen and help.
I agreed.

He took control of my system and ran the same code I had been struggling with for hours.
And on his system… it ran perfectly.

That was a big shock for me.

Then he explained clearly what he actually wanted:

• A dashboard

• An automated pipeline

• Handling hundreds of rows every second

This was a serious, high-performance stock market system.

And here I was:
a student who had just crammed some Python,
copy-pasting code from ChatGPT,
with no real understanding of stock market data or dashboards.

The breaking point

I told him that I would try to understand everything and learn by evening.
But inside, I was already fed up.

The pressure, the lack of skills, the errors, the confusion—it was too much.

After that, I prayed to my Krishna Bhagwan, took a deep breath, and simply disconnected.
He never called me again.
I never called him again.

That was the silent end of our “project”.

The final hit: account blocked

Since we had started the work through Freelancer, there was also a commission involved.
The client was going to pay me around ₹17,000.
Freelancer was asking for around ₹1,700 commission.

The funny part?
I didn’t even complete the work properly.
But the platform still showed that commission on my side.

As a student, I couldn’t pay that.
I tried contacting customer support multiple times but didn’t get any proper solution.

In the end, my Freelancer account got blocked.
Just like that.

What I learned from this failure 💔➡️ 💡

This whole experience was one big slap of reality for me.

Here’s what I learned:

I was running behind money, not behind skills.

I applied for projects I didn’t understand, just because they “looked cool” or paid well.

I was trying to impress the client instead of being honest about what I actually knew.

I depended too much on ChatGPT to do the thinking for me instead of learning the concepts myself.

My father told me something that day:
“You didn’t jump from a brick, you jumped from a mountain.”

He was right.
I tried to skip the learning phase and directly jump to big money projects.

What I did next

After this, I stopped randomly applying for anything and everything.
Instead, I went back to learning properly.

I focused on understanding Python, data analysis, and real projects step by step.
And later, that consistent learning helped me get an internship—which I’ve already written about in my earlier blog.​

This freelancing failure hurt me at that time, but today I’m actually grateful for it.
It taught me a lesson I will never forget:

First build the skill. Then chase the money. Not the other way around.