Launch Letter
Posts
$500 In The Bank, Here's How I Did It

$500 In The Bank, Here's How I Did It

Exactly how I used my skills online to make money freelancing for a cleaning business.

Kirby Bach
June 22, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

Today marks a landmark in Launch Letter’s short history.

I successfully crossed off one of my two overarching goals for the summer, making $500 dollars from freelancing! But, the path to get here wasn’t anything like what I expected. In this week’s edition, I’ll go into the nitty gritty of what I did, how I did it, and what comes next.

I’m also going to shake up the structure of this week’s edition with a more narrative and free flowing style. The recurring sections each week had begun to feel a little repetitive and preachy to me. I want authenticity to be a defining trait of Launch Letter, and I hope this format hits that mark a little better.

Everything I’ve Done So Far.

The last month and a half of Launch Letter have been filled with references to various projects and odd jobs I’ve worked on, with client work for a cleaning company being my main focus. So here’s how I found this opportunity, and everything I’ve done so far.

I’ve been in a group chat with my older brother and a few of his friends for a few years now. It started as a gym accountability chat, but we’ve incorporated a bunch of our various goals into it.

One of our friends in the group chat, Kenny, runs a cleaning business and was generous enough to create an “internship” position for me to help with whatever he needed for the business and his other projects.

I took the opportunity, and even with my study abroad trip looming, dedicated myself to helping him as much as I could.

My First Project Kind of Sucked.

My first task from Kenny was to help him streamline his client texting flow. He felt that AI could do a lot of the work that he and his staff were doing to give client’s pricing estimates, service updates, or general communication stuff.

So I built this.

A Chrome Extension that could generate AI responses based on the entire prior conversation history with a client using the OpenPhone API. I thought it was pretty nifty and could help make the texting process a little more efficient.

But that isn’t quite how it worked out.

The context feature didn’t really function too great, the extension was clunky to use and implement, and it didn’t end up saving any time. It was a fun proof of concept and taught me a lot about coding, but it ultimately flopped and taught me a crucial lesson.

Solve The Problem, Not The “Cool” Problem.

Although the text extension didn’t work out how I wanted, it helped me realize what’s important when working for a real business. With personal projects, there were no real stakes. I could implement silly features and take as long as I wanted to do so.

When working for someone else, you have to provide solutions and value as fast as you can. Your productivity isn’t measured in fancy UI or how much you learned, its measured in how much it helps the business to function smoothly.

Kenny is a great boss and understands I’m learning. He’s given me a lot of leniency, and hasn’t given me any tasks that are critical to his business’s cashflow. But still, I don’t want to waste the valuable time and money of my friend whose given me this opportunity.

So my next project, which I just completed, was automating his Google Sheet of Facebook ad leads to update automatically based on his OpenPhone and Airtable data.

I used a Google Apps Script to cross reference the phone numbers from the sheet with both OpenPhone and Airtable. It uses OpenPhone to update the current status of our communication with them (currently texting, need to follow up, etc). It uses Airtable to mark the lead as booked if a match is found.

This project was much more practical, and is already put into place to run every day. It solved a real problem elegantly and quickly. It didn’t need to be flashy or ground breaking, just provide real value by solving a real problem.

What’s Next?

So, that’s how I got to where I’m at now. I have one week of study abroad left, and once I’m back I want to hit the ground running. My priority will be spending time with my loved ones, of course, but I think I’ll have a lot more free time to dedicate to projects.

I’ll keep working for Kenny and doing my best to provide as much value as I can. I also have some personal projects that I want to get rolling (the virtual home idea from last week).

I also need to start being critical of the content I’m producing online. This new format is a step towards that, but only the first one. My current social media strategy is not driving growth, so I need to figure out how to fix that. Let me know if you have any ideas.