Unlocking Freelance Community ft. Julie Sturgeon (s1 E9)
This is the last episode of season one of the Freelance Success podcast, and I wanted to close it out with the person who made the whole thing possible: Julie Sturgeon, my co-host and the administrator of Freelance Success.
Julie's been part of this community since 2002 and took over running it in 2021. In this episode, we get into what actually makes a community different from a social media feed, why private beats public when you're figuring out your freelance career, and how FLX has changed over more than two decades.
If you've ever felt alone in freelancing, or wondered why LinkedIn never quite scratches that itch, this conversation is for you.
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Freelance Success is a community built for freelancers at every stage—with expert sessions, curated resources, and daily conversations with people who get it. Try it free for one month at JoinFreelanceSuccess.com.
Episode Transcript
Liam: Well, we've made it. This is the last episode of the first season of the Freelance Success podcast. We've covered a lot of ground in these first few episodes.
I started out talking about fear and the role it plays in freelancing, both in my own life and in the lives of the freelancers I coach and work with at Freelance Success. Then I brought in a whole range of guests. We had people talking about what it's like to take emergency medical leave while running a freelance business. We had folks talking about how they used AI to make their work better, and folks who talked about how they want nothing to do with AI and how they're living a life without it.
We talked to freelancers who are in the early stages of their business and seeing success right out of the gate, and we talked to freelancers who are six, seven, eight years into this whole thing and thinking about making major career changes. We talked to financial experts, experts about LinkedIn, and that was all just season one.
I hope you found these conversations useful, and if you missed any of them, they're not going anywhere. You can bookmark and follow this podcast and go back and listen to them anytime. For the final episode, I wanted to bring in someone who's really special to me, because if it wasn't for her, this podcast would never have happened, and I would have nothing to do with Freelance Success.
My guest today is Julie Sturgeon. She's my co-host at Freelance Success, and she's the woman who has been running our community for many, many years now.
I'll let Julie introduce herself more in the coming episode, but during this final episode, we wanted to talk about our favorite subject: community. How do freelancers who so frequently work in isolation find community? And what happens when they connect with other freelancers who are going through the same issues?
We're going to talk about all of that and more on this episode.
But before we bring on Julie, I wanted to mention that there's a good chance there will be a season two of the Freelance Success podcast. It will be even more likely if you give us a good rating, or just reach out and let us know that you like listening to this podcast. If you or someone you know would make a good guest, we'd love to hear from you too.
You can reach out to us anytime at editor@freelancesuccess.com, or just go to joinfreelancesuccess.com and use the contact form. All right, now here's my conversation with my co-host and friend, Julie Sturgeon.
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You'll gain access to every resource we've ever created, and to the ongoing conversations happening in the private forums at Freelance Success. You can sample it all for one month, free. Just go to joinfreelancesuccess.com and start your free trial today. I hope to see you in the community.
Liam: All right, Julie, welcome to the Freelance Success podcast.
Julie: I'm a big fan of this.
Liam: It feels weird inviting you to it.
Julie: I was going to say, there's a sense of awkwardness, but that's okay.
Liam: For people listening who maybe don't know you by name, why don't you explain a little bit about who you are, and why it's funny to welcome you to this podcast, since you're such a big part of it.
Julie: My official title around here is administrator of FLX, so I was the person who invited Liam Carnahan to come join us at Freelance Success. Freelance Success has actually been around as a community since 1999, so it's one of the oldest ones out there that you can join.
I came in around 2002, so that tells you how long ago that was. It's been a huge part of my writing career, so when I had the opportunity to take over from the previous owner in 2021, I definitely jumped on it.
Liam: Wow, yeah. That's why it's so odd that I'm the one asking you the questions here. You've been here longer than me, and honestly, you know more about the community than I do in a lot of ways. Anyway, welcome. I'm glad to chat with you. We also talk a few times a month, but I think what I always find so interesting is that when I first joined and started looking into the website, finding out it was registered in 1999 blew my mind. I didn't even know the internet was around that much in 1999.
So you joined in 2002, when it was only a few years old. Was it almost two decades later that you became part owner?
Julie: Close to two decades later, yeah. When this community first started, honestly, the site was the only place we had to communicate among the members. Facebook wasn't around. X, Blue Sky, Instagram, LinkedIn, none of those existed. So this was the earliest form of social media for the group of us.
Liam: Move over, Mark Zuckerberg. I think that's incredible. Do you think it was out of necessity? Because there was nowhere else for people to communicate, is that what made this community happen in the first place?
Julie: Yes, very definitely. Because the one thing that has stayed constant among creative freelancers is that need to be with other people who also get it.
I knew other people who were self-employed, but they didn't have a creative service. They had a product. They had a completely different approach to selling to their audience. A lot of folks didn't understand how much time it takes to create something, or how the pricing can be so different across the board. A lot of folks didn't get the self-doubt that can come into play when you're freelancing in a creative space. So yes, we definitely banded together, because we desperately needed each other.
Liam: That really speaks to me, this idea of people who get it. Even today, my friends and family still don't quite get all the nuances if they're not also freelancers. Something else you and I have talked about is why Freelance Success is still different, even though LinkedIn and Facebook exist, because it's private. You know what I mean?
Julie: Oh, definitely. I always describe it to potential members this way: there's absolutely great value in every one of the social media channels out there. But LinkedIn, by itself, because the entire world is on it, is a little more performative. When you go to post something, you know you're on stage. You want to impress your audience. You have a certain image you're trying to project, a brand image of your business and yourself.
When you go over to a Facebook group, those are very large. They don't always have a lot of coherence among the different members, so you tend to get the same questions over and over. People treat a Facebook group more like a 411. There's a sense of detachment there. Your job is just to answer a question somebody doesn't have an answer to. I find it's a lot harder to make friends in those circumstances. You can certainly make connections, but networking is really about friendships, and those are difficult to maintain in a wide-open space where you don't feel like you can just be yourself, where you're always worried about the world looking at what you're saying.
When you come into a private community, you have the freedom to say, "This isn't going well. What would you do?" And the people who answer you in a smaller group are more likely to follow up with you. You're more likely to come back to them and say, "Oh my gosh, your idea worked, thank you so much." That's a step that tends to get lost in a 4,000-member Facebook group, where half the members may not even be seeing it in their algorithm feed.
Liam: The algorithm, too, that's a huge part of it. There is no algorithm with ours. Everything is seen by everybody, right?
Julie: Exactly. There's no nebulous third party controlling what does or doesn't get bumped to the top.
Liam: I think of it like the difference between standing on a stage versus being at a house party. On LinkedIn, you're on stage, trying to show everybody how smart you are. At a house party, you can walk around, talk to anybody you want about whatever you want, and they'll get it. There's no performance. I like what you said about it being performative.
Julie: When you say you can talk about anything you want, I think that's an ingredient missing from a lot of other social media groups. How do you form a friendship? It's not always just by talking about, "Hey, I write about this," or, "I like to create websites." What you do for a business isn't what you form a friendship on.
Back in 2009, we had a cruise for FLXers.
Liam: What?
Julie: Oh, yeah. I formed more friendships because we were daring each other to get up and sing karaoke.
Liam: Oh my God. Did you sing?
Julie: I did not. I did not get dared. Michelle Rojekowski did.
Liam: I bet she did.
Julie: She got up and did it, man. She was awesome. Those are the kinds of things you bond over.
One of the greatest turns in my career, when I switched from writing business-to-business magazine articles to doing fiction development, happened because of a woman named Jennifer Lawler, who was at FLX. We became friends because she was an agent, and I told her I was never going to bug her to sell my book, because I was not going to write a fiction book. We ended up sharing a table at that FLX cruise. I recommended a hotel to her in Florida that she stayed at a couple of times, and she asked me, "Where do you get groceries down here?" I said, "Oh, you've got to go down to the G Market on the boardwalk." Those are the conversations that actually form the friendships that last.
And that's true networking. When somebody says to me, "I really need a development editor," who do you think I'm going to think of? A random resume I saw posted somewhere, or somebody I had a conversation with, who I share all these other things in common with? Somebody I actually met up with in LA and went to lunch with? That's the strong component of community that people are overlooking in today's world, because so much of everything we do is online, and it's just words on a screen. What we really need to do is connect with the people behind those keyboards.
Liam: I so agree, especially in freelancing. Listening to you talk, I was thinking about the line between friendship and network, friendship building and network building, and how in freelancing, your personal life and your work life merge in a way. We talk a lot about personal brand, but 20 minutes before this call I was out on a walk talking to a friend, then I sat back down at my desk and did an email. It's similar, I think. Friendship and networking go hand in hand, and they actually work best when they do, and that's the kind of thing we're fostering in Freelance Success.
Julie: Most definitely.
Liam: Can you tell me more about some of the ways you've seen people make those kinds of connections within the community?
Julie: A lot of it starts with something relatively easy: encouraging people. When I first came in, I was intimidated. I had my own career, but there were people in there making more money than I was, Liam, and I wanted to be one of them. I didn't feel comfortable just going, "Hey, share your secrets with me, I've got this, what would you do to improve it?" So instead, I started going out and, when people posted something, I'd say, "That's a great idea, I never thought of that." Encouraging people.
Everybody loves hearing, "That's a good idea," or, "I really like how you approach that, you're really funny, I would love to sit down and have a coffee with you in person." Those kinds of comments cement people together. At one point, and I think if we go back in the archives we can still find it, someone made a post like a high school yearbook, the "most likely to succeed" kind of thing. They voted me head cheerleader at FLX.
Liam: That's very fitting.
Julie: I know. But I thought it was great, because that's exactly where I got comfortable with people. I stopped feeling like an imposter coming in and going, "Oh, look, I wrote this, where would you send this to, what recommendations do you have for improving it?" Because these were no longer just people I admired. They were my friends who I admired.
I really think that's where a lot of us started out. We didn't have Facebook, so we were willing to come in and say, "I had a really crummy weekend, this went wrong, how am I supposed to get my mindset into doing this work today?" And someone would say, "Hey, I had that issue too, here's what I did." That sense of being able to be personal with folks, sharing all the parts of your life you felt comfortable sharing, that's why we have channels for both sides of this. We have our main channel, where people ask questions and share what they're working on and reading. And then we have Off The Clock, run by Wojo, our happiness counselor. She posts questions that have nothing to do with work, and they're so much fun. It's a hangout space, which I don't think anybody's doing willingly on LinkedIn, but here it's such a good place for that.
I also see opportunity with DM'ing people, because you can do that on our platform too. I don't know, maybe you agree with me, but I think people don't use that to their advantage as much as they could.
Liam: I agree.
Julie: That's why in the weekly newsletter, when somebody new comes in, I'm always putting up their profile link and saying, "Go in there, hit the chat button, introduce yourself." Because that's an excellent way in. Even if you just say, "Hey, welcome," you've stepped out of your comfort space and started to make a contact. It's like a house party where you walk in and don't know 75% of the room. You will by the time you leave, because you've got a drink in your hand and there are conversations going on.
Liam: Exactly. I'd love to see especially newcomers as they come in. It is intimidating, but that extended analogy is so good. At some point you've got to go over to the snack table, fill up your plate, and introduce yourself. We try to make it easy for you to do that when you come in.
Julie: Exactly.
Liam: Freelancing has changed a lot over the last 20, 30 years, and especially, I'd say, over the last five to ten. How has Freelance Success as a community evolved over that time?
Julie: We started out putting a lot of emphasis on, here's what magazine editors are looking for. That was our idea of how to help people build their careers. Over time, I don't think it's so much about what a specific business is looking for anymore, because that information is out there already. I think it's more about how to deal with the overwhelm. To make it today, just dabbling isn't going to get you anywhere. If you don't take a full business mindset, "I have a business, I have to pay taxes, I have to worry about time management, I need a marketing plan," your chances of success are a lot slimmer than they might have been if you were a little more haphazard about it 20 years ago. You've got to be more well-rounded. These days, FLX puts a lot of emphasis on how to run a creative business, which is a much wider avenue than just, "Hey, this magazine looks for this in a query."
Liam: Helpful at one time, but not anymore.
Julie: Right, that's become a very narrow slice of what most creative writers, and even journalists, report on now. It's a much bigger market that you have to be prepared to handle. Content creation changed it all, starting around 2010, and now we're going through another shift with AI coming in. The tools you have to know how to use, and what your clients are looking for from you, run much deeper than they used to.
Liam: I agree. I've only seen the tail end of this within FLX, since I only joined as a full-time co-host about a year ago, this very night. But I've obviously been a member of the community longer, and I think that's why we're bringing in so many of these resources and designing programs around it. We just did the Pivot Program because of AI. So many freelancers were saying, "I've got to change how I'm doing things, and I don't know how, I need to pivot." So we made a whole program about pivoting. I think you're totally right. If you're going to do this, you've got to be serious about having a business, about making it a recognizable, findable business. That's what we're trying to bring with resources and advice.
Julie: Yeah, the emphasis has always been, let's figure out how to be successful together, so you're not floundering on your own. But what it takes to be successful these days has greatly expanded over what it took 20 years ago.
Liam: One of the things I love about our community is the diversity of people we have in there. We have people like you and me who've been doing this for a decade or longer. We also have people at the beginning of their freelance journey, who've only started their business seriously in the last year, and they're all exchanging ideas with each other. Could you speak to the people further along in their careers? There's a lot of information out there for beginner freelancers, in our community and in the general public. What about people who've been freelancing for three or more years? How does a community like Freelance Success help someone in that later stage?
Julie: I don't know if you've run into this, but I certainly have on my own path: you always tend to think that once you get through the learning process, everything's going to be smooth. Some things are, but change is inevitable. It's always going to be happening. Unless you're really good at changing, having a community around you is always a gut check on whether it's a good time to change. Is this a fad? Is this not a fad? Getting other people's experiences and input, it's like a big science lab for you at all times.
It's also a great place to experiment, because once you've conquered something, some people are like, "Okay, what's next?" They want to take a risk, but they're also afraid to, because their entire income is wrapped up in it. That needs encouragement.
In a community, everybody contributes, and there comes a point where, once you have more experience than other people in the group, it's amazing how self-satisfying it is to be useful. To be able to step forward and say, "Oh my gosh, I had that experience, and I can help you." It grows your own confidence, going from "I'm a newbie" to "I'm experienced." I really think people need to enjoy that experience too, because I guarantee you, your spouse, your parents, your siblings, your best friend are not going to understand this world like you do. Coming at them with, "Oh, look what I've learned," you're going to get a big "who cares."
Liam: Blank stares. Absolutely.
Julie: "Oh, that's great. Did you get a promotion?" "No." "Are you making more money?" "No, it's just totally different." They won't get it.
Liam: Yeah. And I think you're right, it does feel so good to be useful. That's part of why I do mentoring at all. I'm not making a ton of money as a mentor, I just really love seeing people flourish, and I've got all this stuff I'm sitting on that isn't doing me any good, things I made years ago. Being able to pass it on is such a gift, and I think people will find that if they join the community and ask a question, the veterans are the ones who hop into the comments the fastest, because they're the ones with the information. It's such a good place to come for feedback too. If you've rewritten your LinkedIn profile but haven't posted it yet, it's really good to bring that into the community and say, "Hey everybody, I rewrote my LinkedIn profile, what's wrong with it, what can I improve?" People will tell you the good and the bad, which you're not going to get anywhere else.
Julie: The About Me section on your website, an outreach letter for a cold pitch, how do you position a service you're going to offer? Say you've decided to package website audits. How do you package that? How do you tell people you're going to use AI as part of your work? It's a lot better to bounce that off other people behind closed doors first, than to go out there and let the public tell you that you screwed it up.
Liam: Which I've done before I found FLX, and it's definitely preferable to get a gut check from people who get it. My friend calls it the kitchen cabinet, going to your most valuable people and asking them before you ask the world. That's really good advice.
Julie: Exactly.
Liam: One other question. There are a lot of freelancers out there who aren't part of Freelance Success, who don't know about it or just haven't joined yet. What do you wish people outside the community understood about what's going on behind closed doors?
Julie: It keeps coming back to, what does community actually feel like? There are a lot of people starting their careers right now who have never felt this kind of community. Their experience is just having a LinkedIn page and reading the big public scroll that comes up in front of their eyeballs every day. This is a new experience for so many people. You've got to try it to understand the difference.
Liam: Exactly. That's why we make it easy to try. You can get a free subscription, right?
Julie: Exactly. Until you come in and see what it's like to jump into the Pivot Program, or the LinkedIn Growth Program we did last season, that was a really good one too. Until you come in and do some of these things with us, or attend one of the sessions where we have a speaker come in, rather than just watching a YouTube video, which, okay, we post those too, if you missed it, you can catch up. You'll get information. But when you attend live, you can ask a question. It's almost like a mini session between you and the expert, for your specific situation.
Liam: That's such a good point, because we have experts coming in every other week, and we handpick them. They're there to talk about freelancing. Look, we're drowning in webinars in this world. There are so many out there, but you have to sort through them to find the ones specifically for freelancers, and not promoting some product or service that doesn't relate to you. That's not what's happening here. We have people coming in only talking about freelancer things, from freelancer perspectives, and they're not selling anything. Maybe they're giving something away for free. So I think you're right, it does feel like a classroom, because it's you and five to ten other freelancers, whoever could join the call, and that expert.
Julie: Exactly. If you've ever looked for advice and thought, "I don't like their hourly rate," come to one of these sessions, because it's all covered under the membership. You don't pay extra to get one-on-one advice from the experts we bring in. And we do not bring people in to give you the first half, then make you pay for the second half, which is what a lot of advertisement webinars are about. We're strictly information, all the way through. You don't start the topic and end it somewhere else with us.
Liam: Exactly. And the same thing with our resource library. We have a huge library of resources, and I was thinking about this too, I really wish people knew how big it's getting. We add to it every month, and it's organized around all the questions you might have, about pricing, about packaging. You can just dive into that library, and one of my favorite things is when a new person says, "I'm trying to figure this out," and I get to say, "Don't you know we already have the perfect resource for that, and it's included, here it is."
Julie: And yet it's still interesting, because nothing is ever going to cover every situation. That's why I really like the chat forums. We had a member post about how to price a very specific situation, a temp agency contract with the government. We didn't have a template for that.
Liam: No, I've never done that.
Julie: But we still had people in the group saying, "Here's what I would do, I've worked with temp agencies before, maybe the government part doesn't matter." That kind of advice isn't what you're going to get on LinkedIn.
Liam: Hell no.
Julie: For one thing, they don't want the temp agency to see them asking about pricing, because the temp agency could see that on LinkedIn. At FLX, it's a private community. They're not there to spy on what you're trying to dig up in the background.
Liam: Yeah.
Julie: Come talk to them.
Liam: It's just a very different experience, and I hope people will listen to this conversation and decide it's finally time to come try it. Like you said, you really don't know until you dive in and see what's happening. So I hope people will come join us.
Julie: I do too. And if you do, the first person in your chat box will be me saying hi, and it will not be a robot. It's me, sitting there doing whatever else I was doing, dropping in and saying, "We're so glad to have you here."
Liam: That's it. Yeah, we do not have any AI agents, as evidenced by the typos I make all the time. If you're a member of the community already, or if you join, please say hello to me and Julie. Julie's going to say hi to you, but we love hearing from you too. You can DM us right there in the program, or contact both of us at editor@freelancesuccess.com.
All right, Julie, is there anything else you want to say before we wrap up?
Julie: I just want to tell everybody, welcome to FLX.
Liam: Welcome. We'll see you in the chat. Thanks, Julie.
Julie: No problem.
Liam: Thanks for listening to the Freelance Success podcast. If you've made it this far, you've made it to the end of the final episode of season one, but we're not done here.
A few short things before you go. First, as always, you can join Freelance Success for free and try out everything our community has to offer: all the resources, all the expert talks, anything you could need to start, continue, grow, or evolve your freelance operation. Just go to joinfreelancesuccess.com, and you'll get a one-month free subscription to try everything out.
We also have a free newsletter you can join, which will get you resources, tips, and advice every single week, no membership required. You can sign up on our website too, at joinfreelancesuccess.com.
We're also likely doing a season two of this podcast, so if you or someone you know has a message to share with freelancers, and you're not trying to sell a product the whole time, reach out to me at editor@freelancesuccess.com or use the website to get in touch.
I'm your host, Liam Carnahan, and thanks again for listening to this season of the Freelance Success podcast.
